When Edge visited Climax Entertainment in 1996, it found about 20 people in a cramped office high in a skyscraper near Shinjuku station in Tokyo, and called the company “one of Japan’s unsung development heroes”. By Edge’s count Climax had “developed just three games”. The first, Landstalker for the Mega Drive, drew its world at 45 degrees from above, the angle the company called the “quarter view”, and Climax built its next games around it. “We pioneered the quarter view in Landstalker,” said Shinya Nishigaki, producer of its Saturn game Dark Savior, “and decided this should become our speciality.”
Fast facts
- Based in: Tokyo.
- Founded: April 1990, according to secondary sources.
- President: Kan Naito, who had worked at Enix on the Dragon Quest series.
- Publisher: mostly Sega.
- Games: Shining in the Darkness and Shining Force (with Sonic Co.), Landstalker, Lady Stalker, Dark Savior, Runabout and its sequels, Climax Landers (Time Stalkers).
- Offshoot: Climax Graphics, which made Blue Stinger for the Dreamcast.
Kan Naito
Naito did not come to games by a conventional route. He told Edge that he had often played truant from school: “I missed out on so much that I had to buy school books in order to catch up on things like maths and geometry — skills I later found I needed.” He went on to work at Enix on Dragon Quest, which Edge called “by far the most successful series of RPGs in Japan”. Edge traced Landstalker back to Naito’s “childhood fascination with miniature toys such as plastic models, trains and action men type figures”. He had experimented with radio-controlled toy figures and then run tests on his own computer, and those tests became the starting point for the game. Sega Saturn Magazine, reporting from a Sega show in Tokyo in its January 1996 issue, introduced him as the “producer of Shining Force, Landstalker and now Dark Savior”.
The Shining games
Climax worked with Sonic Co., the small Sega team led by Hiroyuki and Shugo Takahashi, on the dungeon game Shining in the Darkness (1991) and the tactical role-playing game Shining Force (1992); see Camelot Software Planning. Edge later counted Shining in the Darkness as “another Climax title”, and in 1998 Sega Saturn Magazine listed it with Landstalker and Dark Savior among Climax’s “RPG classics”.
Landstalker and the quarter view
Landstalker came out in Japan in October 1992 and in the West in 1993. Edge called it “Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s Zelda”, and its isometric world both made it famous and made its jumps notoriously hard to judge; the Landstalker entry tells that story. Climax followed it with Lady Stalker for the Super Famicom, sold only in Japan, which Edge described as “the curious SNES equivalent designed with female gamers in mind” and thought fell short of its predecessor.
Dark Savior
For the Saturn, Climax had to learn 3D. Work on Dark Savior started in December 1994. “To be honest, we weren’t at all familiar with the Saturn when we started,” Naito told Edge, “and that’s been one of the reasons this project has taken so long. Both Landstalker and Dragon Quest were essentially very flat worlds so we had to learn how to handle 3D camera work.” The team wrote the whole game in assembly language, which Naito thought the only way to keep it fast, and he had a view on the rival console: “The PlayStation may be better at managing polygons, but you can’t write in assembler, you can only use C and we just don’t know if Dark Savior could be done in C.”
The game kept the quarter view but let the player move the camera. Nishigaki said the camera system, which Climax called “Hyperion Perspective”, had taken the director six months to make, and the team then built more than 300 maps in 3D. Because, as Nishigaki put it, “it’s not interesting to play a game twice if the story is the same”, Dark Savior had three parallel stories. Climax could not afford Softimage workstations, so it used a lesser-known 3D package called Cyclone and its own tools, with freelance artists, composers and writers. The game came out in Japan in August 1996.
Runabout, Climax Graphics and Landers
Naito told Edge in 1996 that he did not want to make only RPGs: “I’d really like to do a racing game on the Saturn or PlayStation because I really like cars.” Climax did. Runabout (1997) for the PlayStation was a driving game in which almost anything in the streets could be smashed. Edge found its graphics rough but the game “bewilderingly addictive”, and gave it seven out of ten. ASCII Entertainment released it in America as Felony 11-79. Sequels followed: Runabout 2 for the PlayStation, and Super Runabout, set in San Francisco, for the Dreamcast in 2000, which Edge gave six out of ten.
After Dark Savior, people who had worked on it formed a separate company, Climax Graphics. Its first game, Blue Stinger, a Dreamcast action adventure compared at the time with Resident Evil, came out in Japan in 1999 and was published in the West by Activision. Sega Saturn Magazine put Climax Graphics’ staff at 18 in 1998.
Climax itself made Climax Landers (1999) for the Dreamcast, released in the West as Time Stalkers. “With Landers we wanted to make an RPG playable by everyone,” Climax told Edge, because it would come out close to the Dreamcast’s launch; its dungeons changed every time the player entered them, and characters from earlier Climax games, Landstalker’s hero among them, made appearances.
Later years
Climax remade the first Shining Force for the Game Boy Advance as Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon (2004). Secondary sources list later games for Sony’s PSP, the Nintendo DS and the 3DS, and say the company stopped trading around 2014–15 without an announcement.
The name causes confusion. The British developer Climax, later Climax Studios, which made games such as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, was a separate company, and some English-language magazines also called it “Climax Entertainment”.
Sources
- Edge issue 37, October 1996: Climax Entertainment and Dark Saviour feature (the office and staff, “unsung development heroes”, three games, Kan Naito and Dragon Quest, the truancy quotation, toys and radio-controlled figures, Landstalker as “Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s Zelda”, Ladystalker, the Saturn and assembly language, Nishigaki on the quarter view and “Hyperion Perspective”, 300 maps, three stories, Cyclone, freelance staff, December 1994 start, Naito on racing games).
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 3, January 1996: Toshimaen show report (Kan Naito, “producer of Shining Force, Landstalker and now Dark Savior”).
- Sega Saturn Magazine issue 37, November 1998: Blue Stinger feature (Climax’s “RPG classics”, Runabout, Climax Graphics and its 18 staff).
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998: Climax Landers preview and interview (“another Climax title”, “an RPG playable by everyone”, the changing dungeons).
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: Runabout preview. Edge issue 47, July 1997: Runabout review (Yanoman; seven out of ten).
- GamePro issue 108, September 1997: Felony 11-79 advertisement (“© 1997 Yanoman Games © 1997 Climax”, ASCII Entertainment).
- Edge issue 77, autumn 1999: Runabout 2 preview. Edge issue 86, July 2000: Super Runabout review (six out of ten).
- Computer and Video Games issue 205, December 1998: Blue Stinger, “the first game from Climax Graphics, a new group formed from people who previously worked on such Climax games as the Saturn action RPG Dark Savior”.
- Edge issues 64–66, November 1998 to Christmas 1998: Blue Stinger previews and release news (Climax Graphics; Japanese release moved to January 1999). Edge issue 71, May 1999: Blue Stinger review (out in Japan).
- Dreamcast Monthly issue 1, September 1999: Blue Stinger (Activision, Climax Graphics).
- PC Gamer issue 88, September 2000, and Hardcore Gamer volume 1 issue 3, August 2005: the British company referred to as “Climax Entertainment”.
- Sega Retro, “Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon” (database, secondary): developers Sega, Climax Entertainment and Amusement Vision.
- Wikipedia, “Climax Entertainment” (web, secondary): founding in April 1990; later games; closure around 2014–15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax_Entertainment
- For Landstalker’s release dates and reception, and Lady Stalker, Dark Savior and Time Stalkers, see the Landstalker entry; for the Shining games, Shining Force and Camelot Software Planning.