StarCraft Retrospective Interview

The folks at RPGCodex have interviewed Toshio Sato, an employee of the defunct publishing/development studio StarCraft. StarCraft was a Japanese company that ported the early Ultima games, Phantasie and The Magic Candle, among others. The company also developed the Japan-exclusive Phantasie IV: The Birth of Heroes, and coded Tunnels & Trolls: Crusardes of Khazan, which would later be ported for the West.

As you might understand, this makes the interview a treasure trove for those who are interested in the early history of role-playing videogames:

RPG Codex: StarCraft was the first company to import and localize Western CRPGs onto the Japanese market. What motivated this pursuit? What attracted you, and the company in general, to Western RPGs specifically?

Toshio Sato: StarCraft always had its eye on foreign software. That’s why the director and the staff often flew to America to study the current trends. As a matter of fact, when I went to the American West Coast with the director, we would go through the computer shops and bring the games that piqued our curiosity back to Japan to assess their value with the technical staff, and we would also try to get the latest news and information.

CRPGs were still a new thing back then, and we wondered how the pseudo-3D, bird’s eye or eagle eye display systems would work. We also had some technical interest in those games, of course.’‹

RPG Codex: You worked on two projects that should be of particular interest to our readers, the Japanese-only Phantasie IV and the Japanese version of Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan. We have a question about Phantasie IV first. In his interview with us, Douglas Wood said that StarCraft were the ones to contact him about doing a fourth game. What were the reasons why StarCraft decided to reach out to Douglas Wood to make a new game – and why the Phantasie series in particular?

Toshio Sato: In comparison to the Japanese RPGs of its time, the Phantasie series had plot, dungeon crawling, events, etc., that were miles better than what was being done then. It was also featured a lot in magazines, and thus its popularity was on the rise.

StarCraft ported the Phantasie series starting from the first game. Phantasie III especially got a Macintosh Plus-like interface with icons, mouse and windows which caught the eye of the users. I heard it also received praise from SSI.

With such potential, responding to the fans’ enthusiasm, the director made the decision to continue releasing sequels and thus, after the release of Phantasie III, I believe he went into negotiations with SSI and Doug.

RPG Codex: We also have a question about Crusaders of Khazan. It is known that, interestingly, the game was first programmed by Starcraft in Japan and only then ported over to the West. Do you know anything about the reasons why the Japanese version was created first – was it New World Computing’s decision? To your knowledge, did that influence the scope, design or any other features of the project in any way?

Toshio Sato: I think it was a request from New World Computing.

As New World Computing was quite successful with Might and Magic and as we were fans of Tunnels & Trolls, we were very interested. After some discussions, it was decided by New World Computing to let us do the porting of their game. Naturally, that helped to make PC development into our forte.’‹ ‘‹