Technosoft

~ the obit ~

Technosoft opened in February 1980 as the Sasebo Microcomputer Center, a shop in a naval port town in Nagasaki prefecture, and incorporated under the Technosoft name in April 1982. Everything about the location is wrong for a software company of that era. The Japanese industry was in Tokyo and Osaka and the staff mostly came out of universities near them. Technosoft hired locally, put up its own building in Sasebo, and got a reputation among former employees as something that ran like a university club that had accidentally become a business.

The name is misspelled and that is not a stylization. When the trademark was registered the president wrote it as Tecno Soft, and the company shipped under that spelling for a decade before quietly starting to also use Technosoft around 1992. Both versions were in circulation at the same time. The early catalog was similarly unbothered by convention: alongside games there was a graphics tool set and a disassembler, and the games themselves shipped for machines nobody else bothered with, including the IBM JX and the cheap end of the PC-6001 line.

Thunder Force started in 1983 on Japanese home computers and became the thing the company was for. Thunder Force II reached the Mega Drive on 15 June 1989 and the series stayed there, getting faster and louder through the third and fourth entries, with a weapon selection system that let you carry everything at once and switch mid fight. In 1997 Thunder Force V went to the Saturn and then the PlayStation. Between those, in 1989, came Herzog Zwei, which put you in a transforming aircraft giving orders to units you could not directly control.

Sega hardware was on shelves in Turkey in the early nineties and I was the right age for it, but there was no way to find out who had made anything. The console name was on the front of the box in large type and the developer lived on the back in small type, and there was no forum yet to ask. What crossed the distance first, years later and in the wrong order, was the music. Technosoft thought it was in the shooting game business, and the export that traveled furthest was a set of soundtracks.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Herzog Zwei is the claim that gets repeated: the first real time strategy game, three years before Dune II. That is arguable and gets argued, but the specific thing it did is not in dispute. You flew a unit around a map yourself, and everything else on your side had to be bought and then dropped onto the map with a standing order already attached, because you could not select a unit and tell it what to do. Westwood's designers have said they knew the game. Almost nobody who played Command & Conquer knew who made it.

The other export was audio. Technosoft's shooters were built around FM synthesis on the Mega Drive sound chip and the soundtracks were treated as work worth signing, sometimes under staff pen names rather than real ones. Those pen names later turned up as registered trademarks, which is how you can tell the company understood what it had. The music was reissued on CD long after the games were out of print, and it is what kept the name alive through the two decades when there was nothing new to buy.

~ the cracks ~

By the late nineties the market had moved. Scrolling shooters had gone from a mainstream genre to a specialist one, and Technosoft had no second business to fall back on and no publisher underwriting it. In August 1999 a sales employee named Chikako Yamakura left with nine other staff and founded Ganbarion, which is still working today. In December the company gave up on development.

The last release was Neo Lude on 16 December 1999, a horror adventure rather than a shooter, and it is not what anyone remembers. Rumors of bankruptcy were circulating before it even shipped. By June 2000 the official site was listing the company's own equipment for sale. The copyrights went to Twenty-One, a local firm in the same building, and by 2001 Technosoft had stopped being anything at all.

~ the long tail ~

For fifteen years the library sat with a small company whose main business was renting property and processing information, licensing the odd re-release and selling reprinted merchandise. Fumio Ōzono, who had run Technosoft, died in September 2014. Before that he had told Arai, the former head of its development office, that he did not want the brand to lapse and that Sega was probably the only company that could carry it.

Arai made the call. On 17 September 2016 at the Tokyo Game Show, Sega announced it had acquired the intellectual property rights to everything Technosoft made, and Thunder Force III went into a 3D remaster collection later that year. Twenty one trademark registrations moved over at the same time, all of them held until then in the personal name of a former director rather than by any company. That is what a Japanese game studio looks like sixteen years after it stops existing: a folder of paperwork in someone's name, waiting for a phone call that a dead man arranged.

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