UEP Systems

» see uepsys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

UEP Systems was registered on 12 April 1985 at an address in Nishi-Shinjuku, and through its first decade nothing about it would have read as a games company to a western audience. The stated business was development and rental of applied electronic equipment, plus the running of amusement facilities. It owned arcades in Fujinomiya and Hakata and a few other towns, it built prize machines, and late in the nineties it was selling video capture cards for PCs.

Then in August 1996 it put out Cool Boarders for the PlayStation and became, for about three years, the company that defined what a snowboarding game was. Cool Boarders 2 arrived a year later and is the one the reviewers liked, early enough to count as a founding document for the whole action sports genre that Tony Hawk would take over wholesale in 1999.

The last thing it shipped was Cool Boarders Code Alien on the PlayStation 2, in December 2000, by which point the court filing had already been made.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

A snowboarding game is a strange export. Turkey has mountains and ski resorts, and by the late nineties it had plenty of PlayStations, most of them imported past the official distributor rather than through it. What it did not have in 1997 was a snowboard culture for the game to attach itself to. Cool Boarders arrived as an unusually good racing game that happened to take place on a board, while the American magazine machinery selling snowboarding to teenagers as an identity stopped several borders short of us.

Identity was what the genre sold, so the gap mattered to the balance sheet. Once Tony Hawk's Pro Skater arrived carrying real skaters and a licensed soundtrack, a Shinjuku studio with no athlete on the box had no answer available to it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The slide is visible in the release list. Five Cool Boarders games went out between 1998 and 2000 across four different machines, including a handheld version for the Neo Geo Pocket Color and a Dreamcast edition sold abroad as Rippin' Riders. Exactly one game in the company's whole catalog was not a sports title: Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman in 1999, a samurai cowboy hybrid that reviewed badly and is the only UEP product with a cult around it.

Civil rehabilitation was filed at the Tokyo District Court on 27 November 2000, which in Japan is the procedure a company uses when it still hopes to trade through. It did not. The bankruptcy declaration came on 9 July 2001, with 83 people on the books and the last reported revenue standing at 2.57 billion yen. SNK, which held a large block of the shares, was declared bankrupt itself on 30 October, so the same year closed both of them.

Some of the staff got out ahead of it. The Cool Boarders developers left in June 2001, a month before the declaration, and set up a small company of their own called Dear Soft. The Rising Zan people took longer and formed Studio Zan in 2004. Neither one got anywhere near the reach of the thing they had left, which is the usual arithmetic when a studio comes apart.

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