Licorice wrote:
What happened to Tecnosoft?
I know Raizing, Compile Heart and Milestone are the successors to Compile.
But which companies succeeded Tecnosoft?
My apologies if this has been asked before.
Technosoft had a lot of turnover while they were around, so there are a few successors out there.
The creator of the original Thunder Force, Kotori Yoshimura, split off pretty quickly and formed Arsys Software, a studio that worked on a lot of pioneering 3D games like Wibarm and Star Cruiser, and later assisted on PS games like Omega Boost and the original Gran Turismo.
The team behind Thunder Force 2 and 3, Herzog Zwei and Elemental Master were largely poached by Hudson and became CA Production, which still exists to this day with a lot of those same members--they've done little but make Mario Party games for the last two decades but they made quite a few interesting games in their early years, including Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder, Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire, Hagane and Bulk Slash.
The team behind Thunder Force 4, Hyper Duel and others scattered all over the place--most notably, TF4's lead ended up becoming a big deal at Square, and their illustrator went on to design and direct the Hotel Dusk series. In terms of STG development, the Hyper Duel director ended up at Cave and covertly touched a lot of games, Ibara Kuro being his most noteworthy achievement. He's currently the director of Gomaotsu, their crazy-successful gacha STG.
The crew that stuck it out through Thunder Force 5 and beyond largely became Ganbarion, a studio known for its work with Nintendo, as well as above-average licensed anime games. The Wii game Pandora's Tower is their only original game IIRC.
Jonpachi wrote:
Ok I got one. Compile was acquired by Hudson if I'm not mistaken, and then Hudson was acquired by Konami. So, does that mean Konami owns the rights to Zanac, et al?
Compile's rights are held all over the place--they didn't sell everything to one buyer, nor did they own everything they made to begin with.
Compile didn't own Zanac outright--they owned the code but not the name, essentially, hence the creation of Aleste. I haven't checked on it in a while but from memory, Pony Canyon still owns the name while D4E owns the games themselves, so they have to cut a deal to do anything with them.