Born in December of 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Provence in the the Kingdom of France, Michel de Nostradame was an astrologer, apothecary, & physician who today is best known more for being an alleged seer who went by the Latinized mononym
Nostradamus. While he initially worked shortly in medicine to help deal with outbreaks of the plague, he eventually switched over to the occult & in 1550 published an almanac that sold extremely well for the time. The success of this almanac led to Nostradamus becoming recognized as a "psychic" advisor by the likes of nobility & royalty, even becoming Counselor and Physician-
in-Ordinary to
Charles IX, though Nostradamus' ability at this on his own was later found by historians to be rather poor. In fact, Nostradamus was afraid that he'd be persecuted by the Inquisition, but since he never practiced magic he was considered fine. What's most associated with Nostradamus, to this very day, is his 1555 publication
Les Prophéties, which contained hundreds of poetic quatrains that, in the centuries since his passing in 1566, have often been looked at as prophesizing future events, with most quatrains detailing disasters of some sort. Many people have, in retrospect, tried to associate Nostradamus' almost purposefully vague, randomly ordered, & multi-language-written "predictions" to
various people & historical events, like the French Revolution, the rises of both Napoleon & Hitler, the atomic bomb, & 9/11, among others.
Unsurprisingly, this involves either misreading what Nostradamus actually wrote, ignoring his penchant for simply projecting past events into the future, or not taking into consideration his history as an astrologer. However, this makes Nostradamus a great source for fictional & semi-historical stories, including video games!
Existing roughly from 1988 to 1998, though its last games would continue to come out up through 2001, the Japanese company Face was one of many different publishers in video game history that managed to stick around for a while but never truly became notable throughout its lifetime. If you were to look through Face's catalog you'd find mostly forgotten fare,
though the quality of said fare was apparently more decent than you'd think from such a no-name company, and arguably Face became most notable during its last few years when it was a supporter of SNK's Neo Geo arcade hardware. Namely, Face was responsible (in some part) for the games
Gururin,
ZuPaPa! (which was finished in 1994 but not released until SNK bought the rights to it after Face's dissolution & published it as one of its last games before going bankrupt itself in 2001), &
Money Puzzle/Idol Exchanger. That last one has easily become Face's most famous release, having since achieved cult classic status & is still played competitively in Japan to this day, most recently making news when
a literal high school girl went to EVO Japan this year & absolutely destroyed all her competition in mirror matches. Ironically, it's rumored that Face's most popular game is what killed the company, due to Data East allegedly suing Face over similarities to the
Magical Drop series... and apparently won, with Face suffering financially because of it; to be fair, the two games do play extremely similar, with only slight differences. Today,
if Hamster's ACA Neo Geo re-release of Money Puzzle Exchanger is any indication (
plus Gururin, too), Face's catalog now belongs to
Excel, an "electronic device trading company" that's owned by
Kaga Electronics, which itself has a history in video games via its now-defunct
Naxat Soft/Kaga Create &
Taxan subsidiaries; in fact, Kaga's own modern-day web address even uses the Taxan moniker, which is kind of quaint.
So, what does Face have to do with Nostradamus? Simply put, as you can see from the title screen above, in 1993 Face released an arcade shoot-em-up simply titled
Nostradamus. In more detail, Face released a game that used Nostradamus' prophecy that "in 1999 and seven months" a "great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky", and in this game's case Face allegedly went with the standard idea for a shooter to represent the "great leader out of the sky":
An alien invasion. Beyond that...Face's game really has no connection with Nostradamus outside of the title screen featuring a portrait of the man himself that looks to be based on
the portrait that his son Cesar made in 1614, nearly 50 years after his father's death, only with it flipped & Nostradamus himself looking much, much older on the title screen. Still, just the idea of an arcade sci-fi shooter named
Nostradamus has always caught my interest, & one thing I have yet to cover for the yearly Halloween piece is a good-ol' alien invasion; also, Nostradamus' prophecies are sometimes utilized in horror productions. Therefore, I want celebrate Halloween this year by going over what is easily the most bizarre thing to ever be associated with the legendary (not really a) seer.
Yes, even more bizarre that that time in the 2010s Marvel Comics had a seemingly-immortal Sir Isaac Newton keep Nostradamus alive in order for him to prophesize events for the Brotherhood of the Shield; at least that one actually involved the man himself directly!