Westone Bit Entertainment

» see westone.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 1989 I was five years old. The Dragon's Trap came out that year with Sega's name on the box, which is where the credit stopped for almost everybody who played it. Westone made it. The arrangement behind the series was built in a way that guaranteed nobody would know.

The company was founded in May 1986 in Mukojima, in Sumida ward, Tokyo, by two people who had been at Sega. Escape was the first name, dropped because it made the company sound unreliable, and the replacement came out of the founders' own: Nishi for west, Ishi for stone. Wonder Boy had already reached arcades on 21 April 1986, the month before the company that made it was formally incorporated.

Then came eight years of the series people still name. Wonder Boy in Monster Land in 1987, Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap in 1989, Wonder Boy in Monster World in 1991, Monster World IV in 1994. The design kept mutating between entries. Monster Land turned the scrolling run into an action RPG with a shop in it, and by Monster World IV the thing was closer to an adventure game, which is unusual behavior for a series whose publisher wanted more of the same.

~ the dossier ~

~ the trademark split ~

Sega held the Wonder Boy and Monster World trademarks. Westone held the copyright in the games themselves. That split is the reason the same work shipped under different titles on machines Sega did not make: Hudson Soft licensed the original from Westone and released it on the Famicom as Adventure Island, then built a whole series of sequels out of it without Westone involved at all. On the PC Engine, Monster Land became Bikkuriman World and The Dragon's Trap became Dragon's Curse. Monster World arrived there as The Dynastic Hero.

~ the long quiet ~

After 1994 the studio stopped being a Sega flagship and became a contractor. Dark Half and Wachenröder still had ambition in them. What followed mostly did not: graduation simulators, a fishing game, two Evangelion raising sims built around Rei Ayanami, a Di Gi Charat tie-in. The company renamed itself Westone Bit Entertainment in April 2000, fourteen years after the first name change.

Secret of Evangelion in 2006 is the last release anyone lists. After that there are eight years with almost nothing in them, and then Tokyo Shoko Research reporting a bankruptcy filing. Twenty-eight years of operation ended on 1 October 2014 with the liquidation process opening and westone.co.jp going dark.

~ what came after the file closed ~

LAT Corporation bought the intellectual property and now licenses it alongside Sega, and the revival started almost immediately. Lizardcube remade The Dragon's Trap in 2017 with hand-drawn art and a switch that flips the whole game back to the 1989 graphics mid-play. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom followed in December 2018 from Game Atelier, with Nishizawa consulting on it.

The strangest recovery is Clockwork Aquario. Westone built it in 1992 for Sega System 18 hardware, pushed the board as far as it would go, and canceled it after the 1993 location tests came back badly, because arcades wanted 3D and fighting games by then. Strictly Limited Games acquired the rights in 2017 and put the finished 1992 arcade game on sale in 2021, seven years after the studio that wrote it stopped existing.

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