Treasure was founded on a refusal to make sequels. Masato Maegawa had joined Konami as a programmer in 1989 and worked on Dracula Densetsu, the first Game Boy Castlevania. Edge reported that he “soon grew tired of the sequel mentality that began to colour his employer’s approach”, and in 1992 he left with a group of like-minded Konami staff to start his own company. Its mission statement was three words long: “Original Action Games”. The games that followed, beginning with Gunstar Heroes on the Mega Drive, sold modestly and were admired out of all proportion to their sales.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1992, in Tokyo, by Masato Maegawa and other former Konami staff.
- Size: about thirty developers in 2001, working in three teams.
- Known for: Gunstar Heroes (1993), Dynamite Headdy (1994), Alien Soldier (1995), Guardian Heroes (1996), Radiant Silvergun (1998), Sin and Punishment (2000), Ikaruga (2001).
- Worked for: Sega, Nintendo, ESP, Konami and others; occasionally published its own games.
Leaving Konami
Retro Gamer put the reason simply: the Konami staff who left early in 1992 “wanted to fully realise their own ideas, free from the restraints typically felt by individuals in large corporations”. Edge noted that some of Treasure’s developers had worked on the Super Famicom Castlevania, and Wireframe that several had worked on Konami’s Gradius. Maegawa explained the idea to Edge in 2001: “I built this small company based on the following idea: let’s make the original games we want to create … Our mission statement is ‘Original Action Games’.”
He also explained how Treasure kept that freedom. The company took finished proposals to publishers, not commissions from them: “We do not make games that we are asked to make.” Asked what would happen if a publisher ever told Treasure to cut something from a game, he said: “we would never work with them again”. Nor did he need a huge audience. For the kind of action and shooting game Treasure made, he reckoned the market at “something like 50,000 copies. That’s not bad at all.”
The Mega Drive years
Treasure’s first games were made for Sega’s Mega Drive. Gunstar Heroes came out in September 1993, a run-and-gun game in the mould of Konami’s Contra. Maegawa told Retro Gamer the team approached it “with the concept of ‘anything goes’”. It gave the heroes energy bars in place of one-hit deaths, let the player combine weapons into new ones, and built one level as a board game with dice. The “Heroes” in its title came from Sega of America, which thought the word the team had wanted, “Lunatic”, conveyed “a really bad image”. The Mega Drive’s colour limits troubled the artists. “At first we were drawing the backgrounds with a single palette of 16 colours,” Maegawa said, “but we thought the results looked too sad and desolate”, so the backgrounds were redrawn using two palettes and 32 colours.
Dynamite Headdy (1994) was a platform game whose puppet hero swapped heads for different powers. Alien Soldier (1995) stripped the run-and-gun game down to 31 boss battles; Wireframe noted that it was made largely by one artist and programmer, Hideyuki Suganami. The Mega Drive’s small following in Japan meant, as Wireframe put it, that Treasure’s first games were “doomed to remain in relative obscurity” there.
Saturn and Nintendo 64
Guardian Heroes (1996) brought role-playing elements and branching paths to the scrolling beat-’em-up on the Sega Saturn. Edge gave it eight out of ten for a game with up to six players and 45 playable characters. Radiant Silvergun (1998) began on Sega’s ST-V arcade board and was ported to the Saturn, published by ESP and released only in Japan. Edge called it “arguably the finest technical showcase the Saturn has ever played host to”, with polygon structures, rotating and zooming playfields and imaginative bosses, but warned that it was “frustratingly tough throughout”. It scored eight out of ten.
Sin and Punishment (2000), for the Nintendo 64, was Treasure’s first attempt at a 3D game, and it was hard to make. Wireframe recounted how the programmer struggled with the hardware for about a year with little progress, and how Nintendo’s supervisor, Hitoshi Yamagami, later called it “among my top three most difficult games to develop”. Asked what working with Treasure had been like, he said: “To put it bluntly, they were a weird company.”
Ikaruga
Ikaruga (2001) was a shooter built around one idea. A button switches the player’s ship between white and black: in white it absorbs white bullets and is destroyed by black ones, and the other way round in black. It began in the arcades and was converted for the Dreamcast and then the GameCube. Edge gave the Dreamcast version eight out of ten. Despite the game’s tagline, “Project RS2”, it judged it “more a ‘spiritual successor’ to the seminal Radiant Silvergun, than an outright sequel”.
Licences and sequels
In time Treasure took on other companies’ work, and made sequels of its own. It made Astro Boy: Omega Factor (2003) for the Game Boy Advance, a game Wireframe counted among the best on the machine, and Gradius V (2004) for the PlayStation 2, which Konami outsourced to it. Gunstar Super Heroes followed on the Game Boy Advance in 2005, and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor on the Wii in 2009.
Later history
Wireframe observed in 2018 that “since 2014, Treasure’s once prolific stream of games has run dry”. The company carried on re-releasing its old ones. Radiant Silvergun came to the Nintendo Switch in September 2022, and for its 30th anniversary that June Treasure said it was working on a “highly requested” game. Its own website still sells Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga for current systems.
Sources
- “Inside… Treasure”, Edge issue 96, April 2001, pp. 46–50: Maegawa’s career at Konami and Dracula Densetsu; the sequel mentality; staff who worked on the Super Famicom Castlevania; the company’s size and three teams; “Original Action Games”; its dealings with publishers; the 50,000-copy market; the softography.
- Jonti Davies, Gunstar Heroes feature and interview with Masato Maegawa, Retro Gamer issue 50, 2008, pp. 56–61: Treasure’s founding in early 1992; “anything goes”; the game’s features; the “Lunatic” title; the two palettes; the September 1993 release; Gunstar Super Heroes (2005).
- “Developer Profile: 25 Years of Treasure”, Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, pp. 50–53: the founding by Maegawa and other Konami staff; the Mega Drive games and Alien Soldier’s 31 bosses; the size of the company; Sin and Punishment and Yamagami’s remarks; Ikaruga; Astro Boy, Gradius V and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor; the end of new releases after 2014.
- Edge issue 31, April 1996, pp. 59–60: Guardian Heroes review (eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 63, October 1998, p. 76: Radiant Silvergun review (ESP; eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 100, August 2001: Ikaruga (coin-op) preview. Edge issue 116, November 2002: Ikaruga (Dreamcast) review (eight out of ten). Edge issue 123, May 2003: Ikaruga on Dreamcast and GameCube.
- Wikipedia, “Treasure (company)” (web, secondary), citing Jordan Middler, “Treasure says it’s working on a ‘highly requested’ game as it celebrates 30 years”, Video Games Chronicle, 19 June 2022, and Andy Robinson, “Radiant Silvergun is out on Nintendo Switch today”, Video Games Chronicle, 13 September 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_(company)
- Treasure Co., Ltd., official website (web, secondary): Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga on sale for current platforms, October 2026. https://www.treasure-inc.co.jp/