Meanwhile I gave this game a try on Mame as well.
It's really not that bad and very easy to get into. And to be fair, many arcade titles from the era were that way, so I can't blame SNK for anything. In this regard and context it's a decent game.
But I still think that Prehistoric Isle in 1930, SAR - Search and Rescue or even Gang Wars are my favorite pre-Neo Geo games by SNK. These are really good titles, regardless of the time they came out.
By the way, I found another good interview, this time with Toshiyuki Nakai, a former designer and planner of SNK who also did some sound engineering in the early days. This is what he recalls from his work on Mad Crasher:
Actually, talking about the speech synthesis reminds me of another SNK game from 1983, “Mad Crasher”. It was a motorcycle game in a near-future setting. You know the engine sound for the bikes? I love motorcycles, and I actually recorded that myself from my own bike. I took my stereo cassette player out to my bike and took some recordings, then handed it to our music guy and had him convert it to sound in the game. I thought it came out really well! But then, during the final bug checking, the President of SNK heard it and said, “this doesn’t sound futuristic at all.” And in one word, my dreams were dashed… oh well, I satisfied myself as a motorcycle maniac. (laughs)
I love to read how unorganized and improvised the old days in the video game development industry seemed to be. I can't imagine a modern company in the size of SNK doing that nowadays, haha.
And still the games turned out good and memorable. This is also something I read out from many interviews with former staff, that within the eras with less management and controlling the staff's creativity seemed to have flourished.
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