Some new back info on pirates

[Barver]

I found this website recently: http://bbs.17173.com/thread/97/223/20100724/4c4af1ec78e845013-1.html

It'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.

Waixing
Waixing 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 Dragon

They'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 Fame

Some 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 Electronics
Considered 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&E

Nothing new to report.

Sachen
They 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.

Gamtec
Gamtec 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

[Awesome Panda]

"Mr. Fu Zan?" Could that be the Fuzan Dayou that made Super Contra II? And I'm guessing the companies that pirated Waixing's games was Henggedianzi or whatever they were called. Did C&E, Chuanpu, Vast Fame, Gowin and Sintax supply their games to Gamtec? I'm guessing Carlton didn't produce an 8-bit pirate of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. :lol:

[SpaceNinja]

I think you meant Caltron. Thanks for the translation, Barver.
Guys, seems like this is official. Aladdin 2, SDK - Xiang Jiao Chuan and Super Contra X are... by... Waixing.

[taizou]

ah the irony of Waixing suing someone else for copyright infringement

but yeah interesting stuff! thanks for the translation.

[SpaceNinja]

Also, the company who stole from Waixing. That is Bensheng.

[taizou]

i'm not sure about that- those Bensheng multis cah4e3 dumped are pretty recent, and they all still have waixing copyright registration numbers. i think it was Henggedianzi personally.oh yeah, I knew I'd seen the name Yanshan somewhere before. theres a hack of some japanese shogi game called "Yanshan Chess" which I guess they made. and that Battle City hack, Tank A 1990 is by "Y.S", could be YanShan too. so if they mostly/only made hacks itd make a lot of sense if the "Fuzan" in Fuzan Dayou was the Yanshan guy.

[SpaceNinja]

Oh, I forgot Henggedianzi, that is it then.
YS' Battle City hack is BETTER than the original.

[codeman38]

Cheetahmen

Sep 6 2010, 08:32:41 PM

"Mr. Fu Zan?" Could that be the Fuzan Dayou that made Super Contra II?[/quote]I was thinking the same thing. He does have a phone number in Fuzhou, judging from the Super Contra II credits, so he'd be physically close to Waixing...

Barver

Sep 6 2010, 08:13:27 PM

Gowin, creators of Gua Gua Dragon

They'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.[/quote]Oh, interesting. The successors of SKOB? Does that mean SKOB existed before Gowin's monochrome games, which seem to have connections to Vast Fame?

Edit: Or maybe it's only referring to their GBC games, which had the dinosaur mascot; their monochrome games didn't. That'd make more sense - that the GBC Gowin was a new company unrelated to the old B&W one...

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Gamtec
Gamtec 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. [/quote]I'm wondering about the "suppliers" thing-- contract developers, perhaps? That would explain some of the similarities between Gamtec and Chuanpu titles, if Chuanpu actually developed for Gamtec...Oh, interesting, the part about Mars mentions the reuse of background music (e.g., Final Fantasy 5, Yuefei, and Titanic RPG) and the "less HP = less attack" thing that many of us detest. Also mentions the stolen graphics from Link's Awakening, heh.

[brightentayle]

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which translates to "eager for quick success and instant benefit'[/quote]
That can be translated easier... Cheap Profit Syndrome.

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They 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.[/quote]
Oooooh, wish to see their PC things, dead or alive.

[codeman38]

Ooh, something else interesting:

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根据可*消息他们BOSS之间是会交流及买卖手上的技术的而新特奇的数码暴龙GBA就是跟广誉交流制作的[/quote]
Which, if I'm interpreting Google's translation correctly, means that Sintax (新特奇) and Vast Fame (广誉) cooperated on a GBA Digimon (数码暴龙) game. (With the "digital tyrannosaur" translation of "Digimon" used in the HK dub, no less.) Possibly that weird platformer that I've seen screenshots of on Sky League?

That'd definitely explain the Crash Bandicoot pirate that uses the same engine, anyway... it looks and plays Sintax-y, but the music is unmistakably Vast Fame.

[Awesome Panda]

If they made that, then who made the SNES game based off it? :S

[taizou]

the SNES game probably came first - i guess it was made by some ex Chuanpu people who later formed V.fame?

the whole Sintax/Vast Fame collaboration thing explains a lot though. Maybe thats why that "Zook Hero 3" (or whatever) that Sky League dumped looked more Sintaxish to me, even though its V.Fame's series. and hell maybe that also explains those weird RPGs that run on VFame's engine.

though i wonder what that "FC9 Street Fighter" thing was supposed to refer to? i don't know of any actual ports made by V.Fame really.. in fact the whole graphics-from-screenshot thing and making a cutdown version of Street Fighter reminds me more of Hummer Team. hmm. Unless it really *was* V.Fame that made SNES Digimon, and theyre talking about some other SFC game they made (like that Street Fighter EX port, maybe?)

as for Gowin.. the mono game Fire Dragon is called something like Gua Gua Fire Dragon in Chinese, but the dragon in that game looks nothing like their mascot. but maybe their whole mono catalogue was just bought in from somewhere else when the company was founded - a lot of them have "Syntek" logos/copyrights in them (a semiconductor company) from around 1992-3, so maybe Syntek had abandoned its ambitions to get into the games industry (with games developed by someone related to V.Fame) and Gowin just picked them up several years later?

edit: actually Rainbow Prince (and possibly others) does have a Gowin logo screen featuring Gua Gua Dragon, and thats copyright.. 1994ish? (not 100% on this, im going from memory) so I guess the split must have happened fairly early on.

[codeman38]

taizou

Sep 8 2010, 06:57:43 AM

the SNES game probably came first - i guess it was made by some ex Chuanpu people who later formed V.fame?
[/quote]Could easily be! Pretty much all the SNES pirate originals are of games with Chuanpu connections on Mega Drive (e.g., the High Seas Havoc sound engine), so yeah...

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the whole Sintax/Vast Fame collaboration thing explains a lot though. Maybe thats why that "Zook Hero 3" (or whatever) that Sky League dumped looked more Sintaxish to me, even though its V.Fame's series. and hell maybe that also explains those weird RPGs that run on VFame's engine.[/quote]Ooh, yeah, could very well be. Particularly since the music was stolen from another game (Telefang).

Edit: And if I recall, Sky League did indeed confirm in a post somewhere on their forum that Zook 3 was credited to Sintax.

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though i wonder what that "FC9 Street Fighter" thing was supposed to refer to? i don't know of any actual ports made by V.Fame really.. in fact the whole graphics-from-screenshot thing and making a cutdown version of Street Fighter reminds me more of Hummer Team. hmm. Unless it really *was* V.Fame that made SNES Digimon, and theyre talking about some other SFC game they made (like that Street Fighter EX port, maybe?)[/quote]Ooh, I hadn't even thought of that, that it might've been a typo for SFC. That seems a much better description of the SFC pirates I've seen than the FC ones.

Only other thing I could think of that might have VFame connections was Super Game's Mortal Kombat port... but that had 10 player characters.

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edit: actually Rainbow Prince (and possibly others) does have a Gowin logo screen featuring Gua Gua Dragon, and thats copyright.. 1994ish? (not 100% on this, im going from memory) so I guess the split must have happened fairly early on. [/quote]I wish I knew what the production date was for Meng Huan Zhi Xing, SKOB's only monochrome GB game that I know of. Had to have been after the mono version of Last Bible was released in '92, for obvious reasons...

[Awesome Panda]

codeman38

Sep 8 2010, 08:55:47 AM

Edit: And if I recall, Sky League did indeed confirm in a post somewhere on their forum that Zook 3 was credited to Sintax.

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though i wonder what that "FC9 Street Fighter" thing was supposed to refer to? i don't know of any actual ports made by V.Fame really.. in fact the whole graphics-from-screenshot thing and making a cutdown version of Street Fighter reminds me more of Hummer Team. hmm. Unless it really *was* V.Fame that made SNES Digimon, and theyre talking about some other SFC game they made (like that Street Fighter EX port, maybe?)[/quote]Ooh, I hadn't even thought of that, that it might've been a typo for SFC. That seems a much better description of the SFC pirates I've seen than the FC ones.

Only other thing I could think of that might have VFame connections was Super Game's Mortal Kombat port... but that had 10 player characters. [/quote]So in other words, V.Fame might have done some Super Famicom titles as well? I'm assuming FC9 Street Fighter isn't that port of X-Men VS Street Fighter, but I could be wrong on that. Could use the same engine though, seeing as it's the same console.

[taizou]

its probably worth noting that there seem to be some inaccuracies in the original article though - eg it says that Sachen started developing famicom games in '92, which can't be right, their earliest releases are © 1989.. plus it describes Xi Tian Qu Jing (Journey to the West) as an RPG when its a platform game. Im sure that most of it is true though.