Obscusion B-Side: Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog: 1996 (Part 2)

Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:

"When you look at everything surrounding these four games released on the Atari Jaguar in the first three months of 1996 it's really only natural to wind up thinking negatively... Luckily, the titles that Atari Corp. were putting out in these final days are honestly really good to solid games...for as much flak that the Atari Jaguar has gotten in the decades since its release back in late 1993 the actual official catalog of games that came out on it has surprisingly veered more on the side of 'good-to-great' than being absolute crud, and even this late into the console's short life (officially) this remains true."

We finally made it, people. No, this isn't the final part of Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog (though this 11th entry was originally intended to be the end, before a much better release order was discovered), but we have made it to a true milestone when it comes to the life of the Jag itself: The End of Atari Corporation. As mentioned last time, barely a month after making an appearance at Winter CES in January of 1996 Atari Corp. announced that it would be entering a reverse merger with JT Storage, effectively resulting in the death of one of the two companies formed by the splitting of the original Atari, Inc. back in 1984. While we're not quite at that point juuuuuuust yet, we will be hitting it during this penultimate part of the series. Before we get there, though, we have April 1996 to go over, because in this month two things happen regarding the "Atari" brand. First, ironically enough, was the revival of Atari Games after Time Warner sold off its entire video game business to WMS Industries, which at the time owned Bally, Williams, & Midway's arcade games & brands; this was after Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had put in an unsuccessful bid to buy Atari Games.

Meanwhile, right as Atari Games was coming back from the dead, Atari Corp. would release its final video game... one that simply added fuel to the ironic blaze with its very title.

Truly, it's only fitting that the final game Atari Corporation ever released on the Jaguar (& the company's final game, in general) would be titled Fight for Life, released on April 19. Like some other games for the console, this 3D fighter originally started development back in May 1994 & was designed & directed by Francois Yves Bertrand, who most notably was one of the first two non-Japanese employees for Sega's iconic AM2 team, with Bertrand handling the camera & collision system for the original Virtua Fighter. Bertrand eventually moved to the US, which is where he got hired by Atari to make Fight for Life, & he even got a friend of his, Silvio Porretta, a job at Atari to handle the texture artwork for the game. Unfortunately, Fight for Life's very development was its own "fight for life", as while Bertrand's actual development was going by fine it had a rotation of various people acting as producer, with one of them even making the higher ups believe that it'd redefine the entire genre! Later, when Atari sent preview copies out to video game magazines it accidentally labeled the cartridges as "For Review Only", which resulted in some mags actually reviewing the unfinished build as though it was complete!! Finally, while Bertrand had finished the overall development of Fight for Life by December 1995, he still felt that it needed more time for some extra polish. However, by this point Atari Corp. was already starting talks with JT Storage about the merger, which had resulted in Bertrand even getting fired from Atari, so Bertrand actually tried to hold off on giving Atari his final build for as long as he could, so as to give the game those last little touches. In the end, Bertrand would later admit that the version of Fight for Life that saw release was "in an almost finished state", and though there are rumors of a 100% finished build there's been no evidence of such a thing existing. Still, Bertrand enjoyed his time developing on the Jag, calling it an interesting piece of hardware, & felt that owners at the time respected the effort he put in, especially since it would be Atari's final hurrah for the console. However, does that really mean anything when it comes to how good or bad the actual final release is?

Twelve Short-Lived Musical Acts That Hit Hard with Their Only Anime Part 2

In music there's the concept of the "one-hit wonder", which is a musical act that is known primarily for only one song that wound up becoming a big hit in a major region (usually North America), but it's a concept that really is purely regional. Many "one-hit wonders" are, in fact, simply acts that were big in the region they came from (mostly Europe, in these examples) & remained relatively popular there, but only had that one fleeting moment of being a true worldwide smash. In the cases of these "one-hit anime wonders", as I called them at the end of Part 1, I wanted to make sure I avoided that technicality, as there are Japanese musical acts that have been around for a long time but only ever had their music officially matched to an anime a single time, or maybe they only had one anime for a long time but eventually wound up getting a second one. Examples of the latter would be Masatoshi Ono & Diamond Yukai, both of which had songs attached to the Rokudenashi Blues movies Toei made back in the early 90s, only to never get another anime attached to their name until the 2010s, namely with the Hunter x Hunter anime reboot & Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal II, respectively; Ono would later perform other anime theme songs. Even if they only had one anime to their respective names, though, I still wouldn't consider either Ono or Yukai for this list due to their longevity.

No, this is a list about those musical acts that truly had short lives, and only one anime to their respective names, so let's see what examples from the first decade of the 21st Century I could find.

When it comes to something like the music industry, it's sometimes just as important to have a memorable name as it is to produce memorable music, and it's arguably even more so when it's not a solo act. Group names are imperative, and there have been some especially unique & memorable ones throughout history. I bring this up because we start off with a duo who went with a name whose readability depends on how good someone is at reading phonetics. Formed in 1999, the duo of vocalist Kyou Kodama & guitarist/producer Rei Kimura decided to name their group "Exceed"... but not in that simplistic fashion. Sure, in Japanese the group's name is written in katakana (イクシード), but officially the proper spelling was [iksí:d], which is technically the way the word is written phonetically... maybe. According to the Cambridge dictionary the phonetic spelling for the word "exceed" is "/ɪkˈsiːd/", but at this point I think that'd be splitting hairs, so let's get to the actual musical duo.

Twelve Short-Lived Musical Acts That Hit Hard with Their Only Anime Part 1

Prior to the mid-80s, theme songs for anime were what were known as "anison", which was shorthand for "anime song". In other words, they were songs made precisely for the anime they were associated with & mostly performed by singers who essentially made their careers via performing anison. However, with anime becoming more & more prevalent in Japan, eventually music labels wanted to play larger roles in anime production, and an easy way to do so was to use a new anime, especially one that would air weekly on TV, to help promote a new music act. It's often cited that the City Hunter TV anime that debuted in 1987 is what popularized the concept, as it was the first anime where both of its initial OP & ED themes would enter the Oricon Top 10, but it was by no means the first TV anime to also act as blatant (& somewhat unrelated) music promotion. In fact, while I can't verify if it was the first one either, 1985's Blue Comet SPT Layzner was another show that did the same thing with its OP theme, "Melos no You ni -Lonely Way-" by Airmail from Nagasaki, & it's two ED themes by Seiko Tomizawa... only in Layzner's case neither of its promoted musical acts went on to achieve the continued success that both Kahoru Kohiruimaki & TM Network would go on to see via & after City Hunter, and both acts would break up or leave the music industry after only a handful of years of activity.

However, I would still argue that while Airmail from Nagasaki would break up shortly after Layzner finished airing, "Melos no You ni -Lonely Way-" is a stellar song, so while the band itself was only around for a handful of years they still hit hard. So I gathered together 12 other examples of musical acts that were only officially around for no more than five to seven years & only have a literal single anime to their names... but they all more than made up for that lack of physical longevity as a musical act by truly hitting hard with the one anime opportunity they each had.

While I am in the middle of a year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary in manga, this starting the list is entirely coincidental, since I decided to simply organize this in chronological order, based on when each musical act was originally founded. Therefore, we start off with arguably one of the most iconic short-lived musical acts in anime theme song history: Make-Up. Originally founded in 1983, Make-Up was a rock band that, technically, was an off-shoot of iconic J-metal band Loudness. Originally, the name "Make-Up" was used for a band featuring Loudness' guitarist Akira Takasaki & drummer Munetaka Higuchi, before an old high school classmate of theirs named Hiroaki Matsuzawa took over, after Matsuzawa played guitar for Higuchi's 1983 solo album, Destruction ~Hakai Gaisenroku~. Also contributing to Higuchi's solo album was singer Nobuo "NoB" Yamada, who later joined Matsuzawa to be the vocalist for this new version of Make-Up, alongside keyboardist Yougo Kouno, bassist Yausyoshi Ikeda, & drummer Yoshihiro Toyokawa. With Higuchi acting as producer, Make-Up would finally make its official debut on April 4, 1984 with the album Howling Will, followed by three more albums (& three singles) up through mid-1986. Roughly a month after their third single, though, the TV anime adaptation of Masami Kurumada's newest manga Saint Seiya debuted... and with it was a duo of songs that would define Make-Up forevermore.