Climax Graphics

~ the goodbye ~

The Dreamcast was never really a machine you met in Turkey. Sony owned the console market here through that whole stretch, usually in modified form, and Sega's last console came and went in about two years without ever becoming the thing under anybody's television that I saw. Climax Graphics made two games for it and both are now collector objects.

Shinya Nishigaki founded the studio on 1 December 1996 in Shinjuku. He had come into games sideways out of advertising, by way of Enix, and had then produced and written for Climax Entertainment on Landstalker and Dark Savior. When Dark Savior shipped he took that company's computer graphics people and set up next door. The two firms shared a name while Nishigaki insisted his was an independent developer, a distinction that caused enough confusion to matter later.

Blue Stinger began as a Sega Saturn game. Sega asked for it on the Dreamcast instead, so production restarted in 1997 for hardware that did not exist yet. Eighteen people made it, with Robert Short brought over from American film work to design the monsters and Toshihiko Sahashi writing the score. It sold roughly half a million copies and did best in North America, where Activision had insisted on throwing out the fixed camera angles for a camera parked behind the player. Nishigaki disliked that version.

Illbleed took eighteen months from 1999 and is the game he is remembered for, a survival horror set in a haunted amusement park, built around a meter that tracked your character's heart rate and could kill him by fright alone. Sega had been going to publish it and dropped it over quality concerns, so the studio put it out itself in Japan and let AIA handle North America. In February 2001, a month before the Japanese release, the company renamed itself Crazy Games to stop being mistaken for Climax Entertainment. Illbleed then shipped into a console Sega had already stopped manufacturing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eighteen people ~

The company reached 23 employees in 2002, its final year, and Blue Stinger had been built by eighteen of them. That is the real scale of a Dreamcast-era console game from a studio nobody had heard of: fewer people than a modern game's audio department, shipping a full 3D action title into a hardware launch window on a schedule somebody else set.

Sega kept supporting the company after the Dreamcast was discontinued, through its own restructuring, which was a more generous thing than it sounds given what Sega was going through. Nishigaki wanted to do a horror title for arcades next, and Sega's arcade division agreed to help him build it.

~ the maze of the kings ~

The Maze of the Kings arrived on Sega's NAOMI boards in May 2002, co-developed with Hitmaker. It is a light gun shooter set in ancient Egypt, and it never left Japan or reached a console. Nothing else came out of the studio after it. In December 2002 Nishigaki closed the company, pointing at the state of the Japanese economy rather than at any single failure of his own.

Hisao Oguchi, who ran Hitmaker, recommended the whole staff to Cavia, and they moved there together with Nishigaki starting on something new. He died of a heart attack at his home in Saitama on 14 February 2004 and the project went with him. The journalist who had interviewed him confirmed the date with his family afterward, and the news took months to reach the English-language press at all. Coolnet Entertainment had been planning expanded Xbox versions of both Dreamcast games, and those were shelved after his death, with the Xbox's poor Japanese sales given as the reason. Crazygames.com today is a busy browser-game portal run by people with no link to Shinjuku, while crazygames.co.jp simply refuses connections.

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