Nazca Corporation

~ the obituary ~

In 1996 I was twelve and still two years away from my first modem. Nazca existed for about two and a half years in total, and the month it ended was October of that year, which puts the entire company inside a window I had no way of seeing from where I was.

The origin is a layoff. Irem shut down its video game division in 1994, and a group of roughly thirty people from the arcade side left rather than wait to be redeployed. They incorporated in May of that year in Suita, on the edge of Osaka, with Yoshihiko Kodo as president. Their Irem credits included R-Type II and Air Duel, and closer to what came next, In the Hunt and GunForce II, a two-player run and gun that reads now like a rough draft of the thing they were about to make.

Both Nazca games came out in 1996 on the Neo Geo MVS. Neo Turf Masters was a golf game that people who care about golf games still rank at the top. Metal Slug was the other one, and it did something the hardware had not really been asked to do before: every soldier and every vehicle drawn frame by frame, with enough animation budget spent on things that do not affect play at all.

SNK acquired the studio in October 1996, a few months after the game shipped. Nothing visible changed. Metal Slug 2 arrived in 1998 from the same people, now inside SNK, and Metal Slug X came a year after that as a corrected version of it. Metal Slug 3 in 2000 is the one most players still call the best in the series. A company had died in the middle of all that and you could not tell from the screen.

~ the case file ~

~ the thirty who walked ~

The Japanese arcade industry of the mid nineties produced this shape over and over. A publisher pulls back, a development floor of experienced people is suddenly available at once, and instead of scattering they move together and register a company. Nazca is a clean version of it because the whole graphical signature came with them. If you look at In the Hunt and then at Metal Slug, the sprite work is the same hand.

That continuity is also why the studio had no runway problem in the usual sense. It did not need years to find a style. It had one when it opened the door, and it spent its two years shipping instead of experimenting.

~ two games and a series ~

The MVS was a board you rented into a cabinet, and it rewarded games that could hold a player through a coin drop with sheer craft. Metal Slug is an expensive answer to that problem. The prisoners you free, the way the character eats and gets visibly fatter: none of it is required, and all of it is why the game outlived its cabinet by thirty years.

Neo Turf Masters got the other half of the studio's attention and none of the memory. It is still there in every Neo Geo collection, sitting next to the game that became a franchise, made by the same building in the same year.

~ the credit that kept moving ~

SNK filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and the team came apart with it. Most went freelance or to other studios, and one group ended up founding Granzella, which now owns what is left of Irem's game catalog. That loop is worth sitting with: staff leave Irem, get bought and then orphaned, and end up buying back the shelf they started on.

In 2023 five of the original staff surfaced again under the name Kodachi Studio and announced a spiritual successor called Black Finger JET. Twenty seven years after the company was dissolved, the credit is still the thing being carried around. The company was never the unit anyone was attached to.

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