Kemco

Kemco
Founded	1984
Headquarters	Kure, Hiroshima, Japan
Website	kemco-games.com
Other Names	Kemco▲Seika, Seika, Kotobuki System Co., Ltd.

Kemco (株式会社ケムコ Kabushikigaisha Kemuko = Kemco Ltd.) is a Japanese video game developer. The name was a shortening of their original name, Kotobuki Engineering and Manufacturing Company. They were originally a huge manufacturer of heavy equipment. The president of Kemco, Seichiro Okuhara enjoyed video games and was good friends with Hiroshi Yamauchi at Nintendo, so they started developing video games for Nintendo's consoles. The company's first game was a Famicom port of the Commodore 64 title Doughboy. They started off primarily porting computer games to the NES, but also made some of their own games as well. Some of the titles they developed were received poorly by critics, such as Superman and the Bugs Bunny games. However, they are best known for their NES adaptations for the ICOM Simulations games Deja Vu (NES), Shadowgate (NES), and Uninvited (NES).

The company is known for rarely putting credits in their games. According to one of the developers, this was due to there not being enough cartridge space. However, their second game, Electrician for the Famicom Disk System contains a staff roll after completing very arduous of tasks. Kiminari Sueda (graphics) and Hiroyuki Masuno (audio) worked on every single NES game they developed.

For their NES games, some of their games were based on Disney characters. Because of different copyright laws in the USA, and Capcom already having the US publishing rights for Disney, Kemco had to change their games to use alternate cartoons when publishing in the USA.

Games

• Games developed by Kemco.
• Games published by Kemco.

Music Development

NES

Hiroyuki Masuno programmed a sound driver in 6502 assembly. He wrote his music on a CMU-800 and CMU-APL, and then wrote a program to convert his files to the NES for playback. This video shows a demonstration of the CMU-800 running on an Apple II.

While Masuno also composed most of Kemco's games, sometimes there were other composers who created music that he had to arrange and implement into his sound driver.

SNES

Kemco used their own version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun sound driver. According to numerous SNES Kemco game credits, Hiroyuki Masuno, Emi Mawatari, and Akira Maeda were the ones who reprogrammed the sound driver. The instrument samples were provided by Sony, the manufacturers of the SNES's S-SMP sound chip. Drakkhen uses unique samples from the Roland S-50.

GBA

The composers at Kemco used Nintendo's MP2K engine.

Audio Personnel

This is a list of composers who worked at Kemco:

• Akira Maeda - Programmer of Kemco's SNES sound driver.
• Emi Mawatari - Programmer of Kemco's SNES sound driver.
• Hideki Suzuki
• Hiroyuki Masuno - Lead composer/sound driver programmer 1985-1996
• Kouji Nishikawa - Composer for Deja Vu I & II: The Casebooks of Ace Harding (GBC) and Batman: Dark Tomorrow (GC)/Batman: Dark Tomorrow (XBOX).
• M. Takenaka - Composer for Kid Klown in Night Mayor World (NES) and Dragon View (SNES).
• Mari Komatsu
• Masaomi Miura - Composer for Deja Vu I & II: The Casebooks of Ace Harding (GBC). Listed in Daikatana (GBC) as a special thanks mention.
• Musica Presto - Composers Shinichi Furuta and Yumiko Orishige composed Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (SNES).
• Ryu Hasegawa - Composer for Superman (NES).
• S. Yamaguchi - Composer for Phalanx (SNES).
• T. Sekido - Composer for Drakkhen (SNES).
• Y. Kawakami - Arranger for North and South (NES).)
• Yusuke Takahama

Picture Gallery

• 

  Kemco logo from 2000 to current.

• 

  Kemco logo from 1984-1999.

Links

• kemco-games.com - Official.
• mobygames.com/company/kotobuki-system-co-ltd - MobyGames.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemco - Wikipedia.