I found this website recently:
http://bbs.17173.com/thread/97/223/20100724/4c4af1ec78e845013-1.htmlIt's basically some guy who's writing a little history on different Chinese companies and commenting on their work. Now I actually was translating the whole thing, but last night unfortunately ended up by accident deleting all my work, and I had a fair portion of all of it done too :angry: Since I can't be arsed to do it all over again I'm just going to try to paraphrase the main info that's new to us or seems interesting, which is a lot actually. I have no idea when this written btw, I'm guessing a few years ago.
WaixingWaixing was established in 1993 and was Taiwan owned apparently. Their predecessor was a joint venture company formed in the mainland by Hong Kong's Micro Genius group, called 成都台晶大东电脑公司(Cheng Du Tai Jing Da Dong Computer Company). 1993 is when they officially parted ways with Micro Genius and formed Waixing. Their earlier work is apparently held pretty high in quality(I beg to differ
) and they even invited big names in the industry to come and oversee certain game projects with them. One of these people is called Yan Shan's Mr. Fu Zan(煙山的傅瓚先生). I can't figure out who he is, but going by google he musta been involved with gaming somehow in China back then. Another name is veteran editor of a famous game magazine called 電軟, or Dian Ruan. Possibly an abbreviation of a longer name. His name was Huang Chang Xing(黃昌星), I guess nicknamed Te Gong Huang(特工黃).
Mr. Fu Zan worked on 英烈群俠傳, which apparently set a new standard for RPGs with lifelike graphics and crap. They went to court due to the someone else pirating this game from them.
One of Waixings most notable games is 西天取經, Xi Tian Qu Jing, which sold over 150,000 copies and is apparently the best selling original Chinese RPG.
As they continued to grow Waixing caught the bug of "急功近利", which translates to "eager for quick success and instant benefit', which i guess we all coulda guessed. This(whatever year it may be) is when they started porting games from other systems and doing Chinese translations, and stopped doing much original work.
Waixing ported a Japanese game called 提督之決斷, or Teitoku no Ketsudan, an game from Koei that was facing severe political pressure in Japan due to depictions of various countries during World War II. While Waixing was porting there were patriotic members of Koei that resigned because of the game, and it ended up getting media attention. They finished their port, but in order to avoid getting caught up all of this they took some precautions, which involved basically redoing the whole games story and changing the name to 決戰太平洋, or Decisive War of the Pacific.
Another notable game they did is Namco's 三國志- - 中原的霸者, Sankoushi - Chuuken no Hasha. They revamped the character selection screen so instead there's a psychological test or sorts that helps decide your character, changed the games name to 三國志中文版, Sankokushi Chinese version, and replace copyrights with theirs.
They blindly invested into PC game development, but only ever finished one game which took 2 years to make, called 俠義豪情傳-禁煙風云. It's apparently not too bad, but the sales were less than expected and was considered a flop.
Some pirate company towards the late ninties started pirating Waixing's games and altering them, also replacing copyrights with theirs, which hurt Waixing's interests and image. They went to court with this case which took 3 years to settle, ending towards the end of 2001. They won a compensation of 400,000 Yuan, but to this day they've apparently never gotten it.
Gowin, creators of Gua Gua DragonThey're the successors of SKOB. SKOB wanted a mascot and once they came up with Gua Gua Dragon, the company split and Gowin was formed.
Vast FameSome of their games are ports, but most are original works. Their ports were never full ports, but usually half since they couldn't reproduce everything onto a different platform. Instead of using original source code of the games or emulating the games, they instead depended on screenshots. An example is FC9人街霸(FC 9 peoples Street Fighter? Not too sure what this is and if it's implying its for Famicom..) The game is split into two parts or something, I get lost what the point it's making is after this.
Mars ElectronicsConsidered a veteran company, their predecessor is 深圳燕城企業公司, Shen Zhou Yan Cheng Enterprises. This companies "美猴王"(Mei Hou Wang) line of educational systems were popular during the mid ninties. Mars Electronics was the software branch of the company. As the educational system market diminished they ended up with overstock of their own software, so they stopped production of new products. They took this as a chance to separate themselves from Yan Cheng and become independent, porting games and making Chinese translations. They still held a good relationship with Yan Cheng, putting their games on the market mainly through them(publishers?)
C&ENothing new to report.
SachenThey started developing FC games in 1992. They were established in 1977 and in September of 1988 started investing in game software production. At first they made a few PC games, then moved to TV games in 92. They have games on GB, Mega Duck(an early handheld), Walk Game(an 8 bit handheld) and MD. Their main markets were South America, Europe and the Middle East. In the mid nineties they started officially releasing games in the mainland uder representation by Bejing's 虹島公司, Rainbow Island Company.
GamtecGamtec took the selling rights to games to help TV game companies. Simply
put, they're a sales agent. As the local game industries started closing
up, they took some of the best from them and formed their own team. C&E,
Chuan Pu, Vast Fame, Gowin and Sintax were downstream companies(下游公司
, also means suppliers?). They never had one unified logo.
The rest I'm not sure what he's going on about, but if I get it he's saying that pirate companies took their games and slapped Sintax's logo on it or something. I'm really lost what it says to be honest.
Hopefully some of this in interesting. Took forever to type up
I skipped a part about Carlton since I'm getting tired and I don't even know a thing about them anyways =p