Marionette

Marionette
Founded	September 1984
Headquarters
Other Names	Pinocchio, Pink Dragon

Marionette (マリオネット株式会社 Marionetto Kabushikigaisha) was a Japanese game developer. It was founded around September of 1984. Marionette housed some staff such as Yoshiaki Sakaguchi and Hironari Tadokoro. The company is now a part of Global A Entertainment.

The company also worked with a graphics corporation known as "S.R.S." which housed Seishi Yokota. It is currently unknown what the letters stand for, but it is likely that it was Seishi's company. While they were developing NES games with C-Dream, they went by the alias Pinocchio.

The company probably got its name from the similarity between a marionette puppet and a video game, both of which are controlled by a person.

Games

• Games developed by Marionette.
• Games published by Marionette.

Music Development

NES

Hironari Tadokoro programmed the sound driver in which the music was written in Music Macro Language. For the games where Tadokoro only served as a sound programmer, he would receive tangible versions of the composer's songs, usually on a cassette tape. Tadokoro transcribed the music by ear and implemented it into his sound driver. Seiji Toda used the driver himself for Pool of Radiance, and Yoshiyuki Ishii, credited as a music coder, most likely coded Toda's music into the game's code.

The company's Game Boy games used an identical approach.

SNES

The company used a sound driver programmed by Yoshiyuki Ishii, modified from Nintendo's Kankichi-kun sound driver. Both Ishii and Dota Ando did sound for Marionette's SNES games. However, it appears the two were working for Betop at the time, rather than Marionette.

Audio Personnel

• Hirofumi Ino
• Hironari Tadokoro
• Ponii Ichinen
• Seiji Toda
• Takeshi Yasuda
• Yoshiyuki Ishii

Image Gallery

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  Logo used in Japanese version of Phantom Fighter (NES).