Ever since day one, Nincom has been defined by it’s dedication to uniqueness and the fervent ambition- traits which have found the company in hot water more then once, and most famously before they even got their first game out the door. Theirs is an attitude described by many as “weird”, fewer as “punk”, and by their dedicated fans as something that “sets them apart from everyone else in the game’s industry”. The company has recently celebrated their 32nd birthday with a release that has been rather aggressively marketed through various online channels; The Nincom N-Sides Collection, a compilation of some of the companies rarest and most obscure releases, each of them painstakingly emulated as accurately as possible using emulators programmed in-house. In honour of this momentous occasion, we’d like to cover what was perhaps the hardest Nincom game to find in any capacity and even harder to get emulated correctly; Schadenbergiana.
Though not technically the company’s first title, Schadenbergiana was the first game they managed to complete and release with the aid of Gesa North, a major player in the arcade scene and a company Nincom would frequently work with in their earlier years (usually to help produce a larger number of arcade machines for greater distribution). Like many firsts for games companies in the early years, it takes the form of a relatively simple space shooter with even simpler mechanics, but in what would quickly become a benchmark of the company, a stark and bleak horror theme that put it in sharp contrast with it’s more heroic and celebratory contemporaries. Upon walking up to the cabinet, players would have been greeted with the following text overlaying splash images correlating to the text, followed by a brief snippet of demo gameplay:
“YEAR 8300: Some “Thing” woke up at the heart of the universe, and now rampant hordes have swarmed galaxy after galaxy. They are MANY, They are SADIST, and They are HUNGRY! Dr. Yager, head scientist of the Space Defense Institute Antartica, has woken up after thermonuclear strike- the last hope Earth had against Them- to find desolation all around and a sky full of Beasts. He doesn’t know if any are left and his resources is limited, but with a heart full of anger he takes to the Mobile Missile Manoeuvre, the base’s only remaining weapon, with intent to BLAST INVADERS OUT OF SKY!”
The slightly wonky English does nothing to dampen the quite significant tone of the piece; it is heavily implied that most of earth has already fallen to these voracious invasive forces, and that the player character, Dr. Yager, is fighting a hopeless battle with only vengeance powering him. Complimenting this bleak tone is the game’s visual design- though not as remarkable as future Nincom titles, the static backdrop of blue and white ice contrasting with a burnt red and umber sky certainly paints a melancholy picture in of itself, and the enemy and boss designs have lived on in infamy long after the game was widely available for play; the roster of baddies you battle appear to be loosely based on various forms of flora, but twisted up and meshed with fleshy, grotesque body parts that veer hard on the side of body horror as the descend upon you from on high. That a great deal of them attack using viscera and beastly corruptions of nature only adds to their intense presence.
The gameplay experience is itself very meditative; the waves of enemies descend at a very slow rate that only barely increases as they get lower, and their differing patterns as they break off and reform into a collective hive-mind are easily telegraphed and readable. Though your interestingly named vehicle can fire missiles quite quickly, it can only shot up to three missiles at a time. This creates an experience directly opposite “frenetic”, and though the enemies grow stranger and the number grows larger with each stage, the speed never increases to unplayably fast degree. It is unknown whether this odd gameplay flow was a deliberate design decision or simply a matter of inexperience on behalf of the design team, but it makes for a sobering experience to play.
Note must be made here, too, of how well the audio sells the atmosphere; the music that plays during the main gameplay portions is a composition utterly at odds with itself, bouncing between simple melodies backed by glitchy + atonal FM synth sound programming and sections with more intricate melodies flourishes with a distinctly despairing tone. Composers Takayuki Mitsuyoshi and Fumie Saso claimed during an interview about the game that the aim was to create a song that “couldn’t decide if it was a Brian Eno meditation, or a Chopin-style funeral march.” Needless to say, it is not a song that inspires much heroic fervour.
Where Schadenbergiana does fall a bit flat, however, is in it’s use of Boss battles. Though they are all gorgeously (or perhaps ‘gore-geously’) designed and frankly quite terrifying abominations, the problem lies in the fact that they are programmed to move a bit faster, and thought their attack patterns are still easily readable the increased pace of action winds up creating a jarring shift when the game is actually played. You essentially have to continually swap between two methods of play depending on whether or not you’re playing a stage, or fighting a boss, which can be extremely difficult to adapt to without a significant amount of practice. It goes without saying, most player’s games will end when confronted with a boss they’re unfamiliar with. This change in pace is assumed to be intended on some level, as the music that plays during the boss battles- the only other piece of music in the game- is a much faster paced song with vague rock and dance flavours to it (though tonally it is still somewhat bleak sounding). Composers Shinji Namiki and Denji Koshiro commented in the same interview mentioned earlier that the song was composed before the stage music was, and was initially written with the understanding that the game as a whole would be a lot faster paced and more energetic the whole way through; due to the short development period and time constraints the team was under, the song was never re-composed.
Schadenbergiana was also fairly dated even at the time of it’s release in 1987. By then, arcade games had almost entirely moved on from single-screen, non-scrolling background affairs, with a greater degree of weapon variety and more intense action. Most infamously, the game also has no ending; it merely loops through it’s 25 stages infinitely until the player is unable to continue, leading to the equally infamous game over/'ending’ message displayed on a black screen before the attract mode begins again (“Dr. Yager is brave. Dr. Yager is stubborn. Dr. Yager is hope less. The Schadenbergiana descent upon him in droves until his rage is swallowed into abyss. REST IN PEACE”). In a way, the game can be seen as a stylistic throwback to the games of the very early 80s or the late 70s, long before ‘retro throwbacks’ were ever a thing and certainly long before such a thing would ever be appreciated. As a result, the game did modestly well but wasn’t as much of an attention grabber as the team’s later titles would be, and what success it saw was helped by the greater distribution opportunities Gesa North allowed the game, and the fact that it’s relative simplicity and use of well established tech made it a relatively cheap purchase. It wasn’t uncommon to see Schadenbergiana machines standing solitary in Fish & Chip shops out in the west for this very reason.
It is also commonly suspected that it’s very modest success is the reason Schadenbergiana wasn’t ported to anything at the time, and why it had been left off Nincom’s previous game compilations. To say it had a dedicated cult following that wished otherwise, however, was an understatement; the most die hard of the companies fans had lobbied for it to get some form of recognition for years, which resulted in the company more openly referencing Schadenbergiana and it’s enemies in a number of other titles for a period of time- it is even rumoured that ideas for a Schadenbergiana 2 were tossed around in the mid 90s, but were abandoned when it was decided by the director of the first game, Shichihachi Sato, that the story of the first game was best left self contained and complete, bleak turnout and all. Efforts to track down the source code throughout the years by both fans and Nincom themselves also turned up fruitless, as it was suspected that Gesa North had held onto it and a few other early Nincom titles until their closure in 1995 (at which point it was lost entirely). It’s inclusion in the N-Sides collection was one of a few major selling points for the compilation, and was possible at all due the recent discovery of a board containing the final beta version of the game by one of it’s artists, after it had languished in their attic for some years. It was briefly argued as to whether the board would work and how easy it would be to even dump the ROM image, let alone actually tweak it (though it closely resembles the final game, a few enemy types and three of the bosses did not yet have their behaviour implemented correctly), but if you’ve learned anything about Nincom by reading our coverage of their works over the years, it is that they are technical wizards to whom which little is impossible.
The jury is out on exactly how playable a game like Schadenbergiana is in the modern age, what with it’s simple flair and emphasis on style over deep gameplay. Indeed, more then a few people have argued as to whether it’s inclusion on the N-Sides collection is wholly necessary, and whether or not it would have been better for it to have stayed in the past. Given recent discussions about the state of games preservation and the effect such attitudes- as well as the practices of the time in which Schadenbergiana was made- have had on the culture, however, we think it is indeed vitally important that the game is represented and playable in some capacity. Forgetting for a moment the quality of the title itself, it is a vital part of the history of not just Nincom themselves- being the game that saved them from folding before they ever got off the ground- but it was also a launchpad for the careers of a great number of individuals both who stuck with the company and who left it to pursue other ventures. Ironically, Schadenbergiana is the start of many stories, a great deal still ongoing, and the ripple effect that it brought into effect with those stories is far reaching in ways and to degrees that cannot be understated. We argue that it’s preservation in a widely playable form, the wave of buzz generated by it’s focus in the marketing (and the various interviews/deep dives for archival material relating to it that said buzz generates) is not only a good thing; it is a necessary thing.
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~ Decon Theed (04/10/18)