With kind permission from John Szczepaniak, I can present you with an excerpt of his interview with T&E Soft’s Mitsuto Nagashima, developer of Red Alarm and 3-D Tetris, giving a deep insight into the development of Red Alarm. Other topics ranged from how T&E Soft became involved in the VB platform to development of 3-D Tetris and more.

The full interview can be found in his book The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2, which also contains an interview with Hifumi Kono, Masatoshi Mitori and Masaki Higuchi of Human Entertainment, talking about their unreleased games for Super Famicom and Virtual Boy, amongst many other things. The “Untold History” series consists of three books in total, as well as a Blu-Ray, all brimful of super interesting insights into the history of Japanese video games with over 80 developer interviews.

• The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 1 (2014)
• The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 2 (2015)
• The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 3 (2018)
• The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Blu-Ray (2019)

 

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[speedyink]

Nice, one of my favourite VB games! Will definitely be giving this a read.

Edit: Good read! Interesting to hear about the “black box” proto VBs. I didn’t realize the same dude developed ZAS as well..no wonder Red Alarm turned out so good

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by speedyink.

[koifish]

Awesome article. After reading this, I decided to play ZAS on an emulator before then trying it on a DMG, and the visual difference really is night and day. Also, not sure if anyone else got this vibe, but ZAS feels somewhat similar to me to Judgment Silversword on wonderswan color. Anyway, really enjoyed this article. It continues to cement T&E Soft as one of my favorite small-time developers.

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by koifish.