Yesterday, we reported on the news that the upcoming G'AIM'E light gun had already surpassed its Kickstarter funding target by quite a margin, despite the campaign having only been live for a couple of days.
To promote the project, Tassei Denki, the company behind the hardware side of G'AIM'E, has published an interview with Bandai Namco's Ryoichi Kaku (Innovation Strategy Department) and Shohei Nakanowatari (Innovation Strategy Department, XR Business Section) to discuss how the two firms had worked together to bring Time Crisis and other classic light gun shooters to the home via G'AIM'E.
During the interview, the pair were asked how difficult it was to ensure that new products like the G'AIM'E version of Time Crisis are as accurate as possible to the original releases.
Kaku replied:
Fortunately, Bandai Namco Research has been archiving development resources for years. We had to dig through old documents to find the “answers”. Many of the engineers from that era have now retired, so we had to rely solely on documentation or go examine original cabinets and footage. It was like solving a mystery, piece by piece.
That’s precisely the significance of developing software like this at our company. Normally, video, music, and experiences would be lost when the original hardware disappears. We want to preserve those things for future generations. We have materials archived, but our true goal is to preserve functioning versions. We also consider it valuable that these things can be made into commercial products like this, and that drives our efforts.
When asked if there are "many past masterpieces that haven’t yet been revived," Kaku adds:
Since the PlayStation 2 era, thanks to the efforts of home console platform developers, the differences between home and arcade hardware have narrowed, making it relatively easy to revive and preserve titles from that era.
However, titles from a bit earlier than that, used proprietary hardware for graphics and were never ported to home systems. We still have many such titles, and internally they are not well recognized and have not reached customers, effectively becoming forgotten to modern day gamers. One of our goals is to bring those titles back to life.
Bandai Namco is one of the key partners of Hamster's Arcade Archives series, and has recently made several of its previously-unported coin-ops available on modern systems.
You can back the G'AIM'E light gun here. We'll be reviewing the hardware the moment it becomes available.