Sunsoft | Code Like It's 198x

In the autumn of 1982 the small print of Atari’s club magazine carried a credit: “KANGAROO is manufactured by Atari under license from Sun Electronics Corp.” Kangaroo was an Atari arcade game in America, but it came from a Japanese electronics company in Kōnan, Aichi, for which games were only one of several businesses. Under the name Sunsoft it went on to make and publish games for Nintendo’s 8-bit console, from the tank-and-pilot adventure Blaster Master to a run of film and cartoon licences led by Batman.

Fast facts

Company: Sun Electronics Corporation (Sun Corporation), founded in April 1971 in Kōnan, Aichi, Japan. Sunsoft is its games brand.
Arcade games: from 1978, including Kangaroo (1982), which Atari made under licence.
American arm: Sun Corporation of America, set up in 1986 by buying an American arcade company, Kitkorp.
NES and Famicom games include: Blaster Master (1988), Batman (1989), Journey to Silius (1990) and Gimmick! (1992).

From arcades to the Famicom

Sun began making arcade games in 1978. In the West its best-known was Kangaroo, which Atari built under licence in 1982; Atari’s advertising in American magazines in 1983 still carried the credit to Sun Electronics.

From the mid-1980s Sun turned to Nintendo’s Famicom, and the Sunsoft name went on the boxes. Its early Famicom list mixed its own games with conversions of other companies’ arcade hits, including Sega’s Fantasy Zone (1987), and its name was on Western games too: the NES version of Ocean’s Platoon (1988) was a Sunsoft release. In 1986 it bought an American company, Kitkorp, which had sold Sega conversion kits to arcades, and made it Sun Corporation of America. That company later traded under the Sunsoft name.

The NES years

Blaster Master was on American shelves by the autumn of 1988. When Mean Machines reviewed it for British players in March 1992, it explained the two halves: “a four-way scrolling platform game in which you control the tank”, and sections in which the boy Jason leaves the tank to search the drains on foot for his escaped pet frog, grown huge on atomic waste. Its music was by Naoki Kodaka, whose name is in the music credits of many of Sunsoft’s NES games.

Then came the licences. Sunsoft won the rights to the 1989 Batman film. In May 1989, a month before the film opened, Nintendo Power told its readers to look for “a Batman video game by Sunsoft tentatively scheduled for release around October”. Mean Machines reviewed it in Britain in December 1990 and loved it – “If you own an NES you’d be bats to miss this” – giving the presentation 90 per cent: “brilliant throughout, with slinky animated sequences between levels”. The sound got 78 per cent and was “the only let-down in the game”. Sunsoft made different Batman games for the Game Boy, the Mega Drive and the PC Engine, and the PC Engine version’s sound got 94 per cent in Computer and Video Games.

The licences kept coming: Fester’s Quest from The Addams Family, Gremlins 2 (1990), and Batman: Return of the Joker (1991). In between came an original game, Journey to Silius (1990), which Nintendo Power previewed as “an action type game dealing with the quest of Jay, a young man of the future, for the truth behind the death of his father”. Kodaka shared its music credit.

Gimmick!

Gimmick! (1992), a Japanese platform game, was one of the few Famicom games with extra sound hardware in the cartridge. Sunsoft’s 5B chip, a version of its FME-7 cartridge chip, contained a three-channel sound generator compatible with Yamaha’s YM2149, and Gimmick! is the only game that used it, for three extra tone channels on top of the console’s own.

Myst, and the retreat

Sunsoft had a hand in one of the biggest computer games of the 1990s. Robyn Miller of Cyan remembered that after Activision had told the brothers to stick to children’s games, “it was Sunsoft who approached us asking us if we’d do a game for an older audience”. That game was Myst. Sunsoft kept rights to it: when ClickBOOM wanted to bring Myst to the Amiga in 1997, it was Sunsoft it signed with.

The American business did not last. In March 1995 Nintendo Power reported that Sunsoft, maker of Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage, Taz-Mania and Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally, had “dramatically scaled back” its American office, and that Justice League and Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday might be its last Super NES games. Sega Retro records that Acclaim took over distribution of its American releases that year.

Later history

Sun Corporation carried on as an electronics company, and Sunsoft went quiet. On 24 December 2021 it asked fans on Twitter which of its old games they would like remade. It has since published new games based on its old series, among them Ufouria: The Saga 2 in March 2024 and Gimmick! 2, made by Bitwave Games, in September 2024.

Sources

Atari Age volume 1 number 3, September–October 1982, p. 5: Kangaroo “manufactured by Atari under license from Sun Electronics Corp.”
Electronic Games, July 1983, p. 93, and Family Computing, October 1983, p. 6: Atari advertisements with the same credit.
Nintendo Power issue 2, September–October 1988, p. 88: Blaster Master among the games on sale.
Nintendo Power issue 6, May–June 1989, p. 95: the Batman film, and Sunsoft’s game “tentatively scheduled for release around October”.
Nintendo Power issue 11, March–April 1990, p. 93: preview of Journey to Silius.
Nintendo Power issue 12, May–June 1990, p. 46: Sunsoft’s Batman for the Game Boy.
Mean Machines issue 3, December 1990, pp. 78–79: review of Batman (NES).
Mean Machines issue 18, March 1992, pp. 94–96: review of Blaster Master.
Computer and Video Games issue 110, January 1991, p. 74: review of Sunsoft’s Batman for the PC Engine.
Nintendo Power issue 70, March 1995, p. 118: Sunsoft scales back its American office.
Amiga Format issue 97, May 1997, p. 34: ClickBOOM’s Myst licence from Sunsoft.
“The Making of Myst”, Retro Gamer Collection volume 5, 2011, p. 127: Robyn Miller on Activision and Sunsoft.
“List of NES music composers”, NESdev Wiki (web, secondary): Naoki Kodaka’s credits on Blaster Master, Batman, Journey to Silius and Gremlins 2; Gimmick!’s sound hardware; Fantasy Zone and Platoon as Sunsoft releases. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_NES_music_composers
“Sunsoft 5B audio”, NESdev Wiki (web, secondary): the 5B as the FME-7 with a YM2149-compatible sound generator; Gimmick! as the only game to use it, and only its tone channels. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Sunsoft_5B_audio
“Sunsoft” and “Sun Corporation of America”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): founding date; games from 1978; Sega arcade conversions; Batman for the Mega Drive (1990); Kitkorp bought in July 1986; the 1995 distribution deal with Acclaim. https://segaretro.org/Sunsoft, https://segaretro.org/Sun_Corporation_of_America
Wikipedia, “Sun Corporation” (web, secondary): founding in Kōnan; the 2021 appeal to fans; Ufouria: The Saga 2 and Gimmick! 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Corporation