In 1981 two men left their jobs at Data East and, with a third partner, set up a games company of their own. According to Retro Gamer, one story has Technos Japan starting in a single-room apartment, another in a small office with ten engineers. Within six years it had made two arcade games that changed the fighting game. Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, released in the West as Renegade, let a street fighter be surrounded, grabbed and kicked by a gang. Double Dragon put two players side by side and sent them through a city to rescue a kidnapped girlfriend. Both came from the same designer, Yoshihisa Kishimoto. Double Dragon’s success, Wireframe wrote, sparked “a wave of both obvious copycat titles” and brawlers that improved on it.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1981, in Japan, by Kunio Taki (president) and Takashi Hanya, both formerly of Data East, with Takeo Hagiwara.
- Known for: Renegade (Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, 1986), Double Dragon (1987), the Japanese Kunio-kun series including River City Ransom (1989), WWF Superstars (1989) and WWF WrestleFest (1991).
- American arm: American Technos, founded in 1987, closed at the end of 1999.
- Ended: filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and closed in 1997.
- Afterwards: the rights to its games passed to Million, a company joined by former Technos staff, and in 2015 to Arc System Works.
From Data East to Kunio-kun
Technos’s first game showed its origins. Minky Monkey (1982), in which the player climbed vines, grabbed fruit and dodged snakes, ran, Retro Gamer noted, on Data East hardware. Over the next three years Technos released nine more games, many of them licensed abroad through other companies. Data East sold its wrestling game Big Pro Wrestling in American arcades as Tag Team Wrestling. Taito America took Exciting Hour, another wrestling game, as Mat Mania in 1985; many of the staff were wrestling fans. Later accounts also credit Technos with Data East’s Karate Champ, known in Japan as Karate Dō, and the list of Technos games that Million confirmed to Retro Gamer in 2005 includes Karate Do — The Way of Karate.
Kishimoto came from Data East too. He had directed its laserdisc games Thunder Storm and Road Blaster before Technos offered him the chance to make action games in 1985. His first project there was Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (1986), a fighting game drawn, he told Retro Gamer, from his own teenage years fighting students from rival schools. The hero was named after the company’s president, Kunio Taki. “He also was a bad guy when he was young!” Kishimoto said.
Its fighters could be attacked from both sides, so Technos gave the cabinet one button to hit left and another to hit right. For America the game was redrawn with a new hero, new enemies and new backgrounds and released as Renegade, which reached the arcades there in 1986 and British home computers the following year. Kishimoto called the redesign “a very big waste of time and money”, and when Taki found him working on a Kunio-kun sequel he asked for a game that would sell everywhere. That game became Double Dragon.
Double Dragon and American Technos
Double Dragon came out in 1987, with Taito America handling its arcade distribution outside Japan. To handle its own games in North America, Technos set up American Technos that year under Keiichi Iwamoto, who had once supplied arcade parts to Data East and had set up Data East USA’s California offices. Greg Rice, a regional sales manager at Atari Games, joined late in 1988. He remembered his first visit to the Japanese offices, for the company party that November, with 200 staff, karaoke, and Kishimoto filling half a beer glass with tequila instead of taking shots. He also remembered developers sleeping at their desks to meet deadlines.
The home rights went in several directions. In Britain, Melbourne House, part of Mastertronic, signed exclusive worldwide home-computer rights to all Technos arcade games early in 1988, and CRASH reported that it was the first time a major Japanese coin-op maker had assigned computer rights to its future games. In America Tradewest, a start-up publisher from Texas, took the licence for several NES versions of Double Dragon and the merchandising rights that followed. Rice later called it the chance the company lost: “It was nothing for American Technos to receive a royalty check from Tradewest of $500,000 or $750,000 for units shipped. If American Technos had been shipping that product then I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.” Technos Japan, he explained, had wanted the guaranteed money, which paid for the Kunio-kun games at home.
American Technos took over arcade distribution of the Double Dragon sequels. Technos also licensed the World Wrestling Federation for two arcade games, WWF Superstars (1989) and WWF WrestleFest (1991). WrestleFest became American Technos’s best-selling arcade game; Rice watched operators empty the coin box more than once. American Technos’s first NES game in America was River City Ransom (1990), which Infogrames brought to Europe as Street Gangs.
Kunio at home
In Japan, Technos’s second office, in Niigata, was set up to work on the Kunio-kun series. On the Famicom, Kunio and his classmates became small, big-headed figures, and between 1991 and 1994 Technos put them into “possibly every NES/SNES sports style game it could try”, Retro Gamer wrote, from baseball, basketball and ice hockey to dodgeball. A few reached the West under other names. Super Dodge Ball came out on the NES in America through CSG Imagesoft, and Nintendo itself published the football game Nintendo World Cup, which could take four players with the NES adapter. River City Ransom, which mixed the street fighting of Renegade with shops and statistics, became the best known of them abroad.
Most of the series stayed in Japan. The Super Famicom Kunio games, including Shodai Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun, a sequel to Renegade, were never translated, because, Retro Gamer explained, their stories would have needed changing again for America.
The last years
Technos’s 16-bit brawler The Combatribes, about cyborg fighters hunting a gang leader through New York, reached the arcades in May 1990, months after Capcom’s Final Fight, and the Super NES version in 1993. Its sales were mediocre, and it was the last Nintendo game American Technos published. Technos Japan tried other licences, including Popeye, as its money ran short. Rice summed up the problem: “For every ten bad ones you might get a good one. We just went through a period where we didn’t have the good ones.”
Technos turned to SNK’s Neo Geo. A new Double Dragon and Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer came out on Neo Geo cartridges in 1995. The last release was a Kunio-style dodgeball game for the Neo Geo in 1996. That year Technos Japan filed for bankruptcy, and in 1997 it closed. American Technos tried to carry on with a Taiwanese investor and a partnership with the British publisher Elite, and was wound up at the end of 1999.
What happened to the games
Former Technos staff went to Million Corporation, which held the copyrights by 2005 and licensed new versions of the old games. Atlus published Super Dodge Ball Advance, Double Dragon Advance and River City Ransom EX for the Game Boy Advance. In June 2015 Arc System Works announced that it had taken over the rights to every Technos Japan game from Million, among them Double Dragon, Super Dodge Ball, River City Ransom and the Kunio-kun series. New games followed, from Double Dragon IV (2017) to River City Girls (2019).
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 20, 2005, pp. 68–73: “Company Profile: Technos” by John Anderson (founding by Taki, Hanya and Hagiwara; Minky Monkey on Data East hardware; the licensing deals with Data East and Taito America; Kunio-kun and Renegade; American Technos, Keiichi Iwamoto and Greg Rice’s recollections; Taito America’s arcade distribution; Tradewest; the WWF games; River City Ransom and Street Gangs; the Niigata office; the Super Famicom and Neo Geo years; the 1996 bankruptcy filing and the 1997 closure; American Technos’s end in 1999; Million and Atlus; the list of Technos games confirmed by Million).
- Retro Gamer issue 103, 2012, pp. 44–49: “The Making of Double Dragon” (Kishimoto on the export of Kunio-kun and his boss’s request).
- Retro Gamer issue 108, 2012: “The Making of Renegade” (Kishimoto at Data East and his move to Technos in 1985; the autobiographical Kunio-kun; the left and right attack buttons).
- Wireframe issue 65, August 2022, pp. 111–113: “Killer Feature: Double Dragon” (the wave of copycats; The Combatribes in arcades in May 1990).
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988, p. 8: “Melbourne’s Coin-op Coup” (worldwide home-computer rights to all Technos arcade games).
- Arc System Works, “Arc System Works Acquires Property Rights of ‘Double Dragon’, ‘Super Dodge Ball’, ‘Kunio-kun’ series from Million Co., Ltd”, 12 June 2015 (web): the transfer, effective 1 June 2015. https://www.arcsystemworks.com/arc-system-works-acquires-property-rights-of-double-dragon-super-dodge-ball-kunio-kun-series-from-million-co-ltd/
- Wikipedia, “Technōs Japan” (web, secondary): founding month; American Technos’s formation in 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techn%C5%8Ds_Japan
- Wikipedia, “Karate Champ” (web, secondary): the Japanese title Karate Dō. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ
- Wikipedia, “Double Dragon” and “River City Ransom” (web, secondary): Double Dragon IV (2017) and River City Girls (2019). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dragon