Climax Entertainment
Founded by two computer geeks, Kan Naito and Shinpei Harada, who share the unique distinction of simultaneously being sons of yakuza bosses, Climax Entertainment has occupied the fifth floor of the same Showa Era walk-up office building in Tokyo's Okubo city since April of 1990. Their first game was a graphical adventure called Shining in the Darkness, which adopted a queer first-person perspective because of Naito's love for the PC game The Bard's Tale. They later moved on to craft the seminal Megadrive strategy RPG Shining Force, and from then, Kan Naito freely admits, “It was all Vegas, all the time.”
In October of 1992 Climax turned out a game called Landstalker, an action-adventure RPG with an isometric perspective. Naito claims that the game was his effort to make an action RPG that, unlike Zelda, was “all about love, and respect.” The game's heavy concentration on narrative and character set it apart from Zelda on paper; in execution, its rough, dastardly jumping segments and mind-boggling puzzles make it virtually the only game of its kind.
Landstalker was both a brilliant jumping-off point (pun intended) for the company and its plummet into doom, for its genius was never fully acknowledged, and the only acclaim it has earned to date is of the cult variety. Climax Entertainment went on to make Ladystalker, a sequel of sorts, which, though a very intelligent game, didn't set the world on fire, and had an unfortunate title that made the game impossible to market in the West without upsetting its core audience – that is, the obsessed foreign gamer who shits a brick if anything, barring language, is changed in the non-Japanese release of a game.
Naito is a self-confessed compulsive gambler. The next few games Climax released, in addition to not making any sense when you line them up on a shelf all next to one another, reflect this. Climax Landers, called Time Stalkers in the West, is the toughest nut to crack: a randomly generated dungeon hack with characters from Landstalker and beyond, it is plagued by a retarded battle system and lack of real personality. It is generally considered one of the biggest failures in games.1)
Climax Entertainment lost much of its staff in 1996, following their bold, risky, sometimes life-changing epic action-RPG Dark Savior for Saturn. The game was admired, though not liked, by many critics and game developers alike; much of the staff went on to make other games, such as Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's wonderful little jumping-heavy action-adventure RPG Alundra. The company as Naito had formed it would not exist completely for several years, during which Climax Entertainment turned out Climax Landers, was laughed off the face of the earth, and went on to rather silently develop a series of racing games called Runabout, all the while meekly trying to do something bold every once in a while and failing to ignite any interest.
Then, in July of 2005, a miracle occurred, as Naito puts it. He got his Landstalker team back. The whole team of thirteen individuals is assembled again, and wanting to make games for the next generation. Naito, fresh off a few years of living in and out of Las Vegas, has decided to set about becoming a world-class game developer once and for all. He will begin his quest by launching a remake of Landstalker on the Sony PlayStation Portable, all the while cultivating ideas for Landstalker II and III for Sony PlayStation3. He is very serious. Very, very serious. So serious, in fact, that the flyer at their booth at Tokyo Game Show 2005 depicted him breathing fire in an imitation of a Eikichi Yazawa album cover.
Games
(from the official site)
- Tenchi no Mon (aka Gate of Heaven and Earth) published by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan for the Sony PlayStation Portable in 2005
- Landstalker (remake) to be published by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan or Sega for the Sony PlayStation Portable in 2006
Company Information
Staff
President: Kan Naito Vice President: Shinpei Harada
Number of employees: 24
Company Logo
The girl on the left side of the logo is Friday, a wood nymph, and the main character's assistant in Landstalker. This logo was adopted in 1992, with the release of that game. Before then, the company had no logo.
Company Address
169-0072 5F Sanshin Building 1-14-15 Okubo Shinjuku-ku Tokyo JAPAN
Trivia
The artist Climax's early games made famous (in style if not in name) is Tamaki Yoshitaka, who went on to do the character designs for all of Shining Force and such bizarre games as Yanoman's The Emblem of Justice. He is not to be confused with Tony Taka, artist of Shining Tears.
