Bassa-Bassa wrote:The point still stands. They simply released Blazing Lazers on the modern platforms for IP reasons. You can consider it much like the case of Rayforce/Layer Section if you will, but then the name change only applies to these versions.
But these versions are like, all of the versions. The 1989 TurboGrafx game was released within 4 months of the Japanese PC Engine one (which hit 2 months before the NA system launch for the Japanese Caravan), so the Blazing Lazers title is contemporaneous. If someone specifically calls the 1989 Japan release Gunhed that makes sense, it's the version I own so it's how I'd refer to it if I wanted to talk about it specifically. But I believe it's also the only time and place the game's ever been released under that name.
Blazing Lazers is the only name Konami have ever released it under, the only name they have rights to. The Gunhed title really was just a summer movie tie-in slapped on at the last minute, even the flimsy story - not mentioned at all in the Japanese instructions, only later printed on caravan flyers - is so unconnected it takes place 55 years after the movie. The reason you see the robot transform on the title screen is because the one in the movie can't even fly in space.
But if you want the definitive reason the mobsters running Konami will never spend a dime on licensing the Gunhed name, it's because it's not worth anything:
Box office returns were poor, and the film magazine Kinema Junpo criticized it as a "disastrous defeat" and a "planning failure." According to [lead actor] Masahiro Takashima, the movie was the lowest-selling work in 1989. It is said that he was made fun of by Toho's superiors.
This is a movie where the most powerful element in the universe is called "Tex-Mexium." TBH I'm wth the Toho superiors on this one.
