AV Artisan

[codeman38]

You might remember a company called "AV Artisan" that did a fair amount of development on Mega Drive and Super A'Can. They developed most of Realtec's Mega Drive stuff, including The Earth Defend and Mallet Legend.

Guess what? Turns out that, much like Gamtec, they still exist. Check out http://www.gamestation.com.tw/ and you might notice a... very familiar logo at the bottom. And the WHOIS info confirms it even further.

Is it any surprise they're headquartered in Taichung?

[Awesome Panda]

Interesting find. What I don't get though is that at the bottom of the page they were founded in 1998, even though Speedy Dragon (which they made) has a 1995 copyright. Hard to tell because I don't know any Chinese, but it seems to be one of those sites where you create an account and play some awful flash games or something.

[codeman38]

Cheetahmen

Feb 15 2011, 10:56:53 AM

Interesting find. What I don't get though is that at the bottom of the page they were founded in 1998, even though Speedy Dragon (which they made) has a 1995 copyright. Hard to tell because I don't know any Chinese, but it seems to be one of those sites where you create an account and play some awful flash games or something.[/quote]Yeah, that's what it looks like to me too... some sort of social gaming site.

And it doesn't say they were founded in '98, it just says the web site was started in '98. Big difference.Oh, yeah, I forgot... back in the Mega Drive era, they were literally one degree of separation from Gamtec. Yamin Hsu did music programming for both of 'em.

[taizou]

I always wondered what the connection was between them and Gamtec - in Link Dragon, even though its credited to "Jumbo Team" one of the levels is shaped like Gamtec's name in Chinese, but all the staff bar Hanmin Liao are people credited on AV Artisan's games. Interesting that they both ended up running similar looking websites too.