Marionette
| Marionette | |
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| Founded | April 1984 |
| Closed | ca. 2005 |
| Headquarters | |
| Other Names | Pinocchio, Pink Dragon |
Marionette (マリオネット株式会社 Marionetto Kabushikigaisha) was a Japanese game developer. The company is now a part of Global A Entertainment. The company originally developed business software, but entered the game industry around 1986. Their first game appears to be Koneko Monogatari for the Disk System. The company started out developing primarily for the Famicom and Famicom Disk System, but also worked on other platforms such as the MSX and Game Boy. In the west, the company is perhaps best known for their NES games Dr. Chaos, Phantom Fighter, as well as the NES conversion of Pool of Radiance.
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.
It appears the company's last game was in 2005 when it released Mushii: Machi no Konchuu Monogatari for the Nintendo DS.
Games
Audio 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 (Composer and programmer.)
- Hironari Tadokoro (Lead sound designer, composer, and programmer.)
- Kenji Kawai (Composer for Star Virgin (MSX).)
- Masataka Ozaki (Sound programmer for Mashou no Yakata Goblin (MSX).)
- Ponii Ichinen (Group of composers for Dr. Chaos.)
- Seiji Toda (Composer for PC-9801 and NES versions of Pool of Radiance; under contract from Pony Canyon.)
- Takeshi Yasuda (Composer from Pony Canyon.)
- Yoshiyuki Ishii (Sound programmer.)
Image Gallery
Logo used in Japanese version of Phantom Fighter (NES).
Links
- https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/マリオネット_(企業) - Wikipedia (Japanese).
