Named after the "Origin of Heaven", i.e. the center point on a go board (similar to how the "Atari" name was also a go reference), Tengen was founded in 1987 & initially started off as your standard third-party Nintendo licensee, releasing Gauntlet, R.B.I. Baseball (a localization of the first Famista game), & Pac-Man for the NES as official releases in mid-to-late 1988. The latter two games were the result of Atari Games' close relationship with Namco, which had been majority owner of Atari Games from 1985 to 1987. At the time Namco had infamously decided to not agree to be a licensee for Nintendo of America, due to the terms, instead preferring to license its Famicom games out to other companies for international release, like Bandai, Sunsoft, & Tengen; Namco wouldn't publish its first NES game until 1993. Similarly, Tengen was also no fan of Nintendo's licensee terms & never planned on staying official, so after those initial three games it went rogue & became an unlicensed third-party, illegally acquiring a copy of Nintendo's lock-out program, so as to bypass it, by telling the US Copyright Office that they needed it for potential litigation against Nintendo. The initial unofficial releases would start a legal battle between Nintendo & Tengen that would hound the latter for pretty much its entire life (under that name, at least), during which Tengen would eventually find fairer pastures over with Sega of America & its Genesis, Game Gear, & (in Europe) Master System, among some other short-lived deals on other hardware, like TurboGrafx-16, PCs, & even the SNES (via officially licensed third-parties, like Mindscape & THQ, for that last one).
However, Tengen (& Atari Games) wasn't solely operating in North America & Europe. Established in 1988, Tengen, Ltd. was Tengen (Inc.)'s Japanese subsidiary that not only released Japanese versions of Tengen's titles, plus both James Bond 007: The Duel & MIG-29 Fighter Pilot for Domark, but also did some development of its own; from here on out I'll just refer to it as "Tengen Japan". More often than not this was in regards to port jobs, but occasionally Tengen Japan developed original games, though the only one of those that ever saw release outside of Japan would be 1991's Magical Puzzle Popils for the Game Gear. And, in that case, we reach the subject of this overview: Japan-exclusive releases! Shockingly enough, there were only seven games (via eight releases) put out by Tengen, & its later incarnation of Time Warner Interactive, that only ever saw release in Japan (at least back in the day, for two of them), and they actually wind up coinciding with the final years of Atari Games' console division, in general. So let's go over Tengen & Time Warner Interactive's Japan-exclusive games, all while seeing how an infamous third-party console developer/publisher eventually got put out to pasture.
Our first two Japan-exclusive releases are Tengen games only by technicality, as Tengen Japan only published them, while the actual development was done elsewhere. Also, they have actually recently been given worldwide re-releases, so they are no longer Japan-exclusives, but they originally did have the Tengen logo on their covers & were only released in Japan back in the day, so I'll still count them. Anyway, the first Japan-exclusive game from Tengen would be Snow Bros.: Nick & Tom for the Mega Drive, released on May 28, 1993, a port of Toaplan's iconic single-screen arcade platformer from 1990. Playing as one of the two titular snowmen, the goal of each stage is simply to defeat all of the foes on screen, which requires you to continually throw snow balls until a foe in encased in a giant snow ball. At that point you can then shove the giant snow ball, which will travel down the platforms & bounce off the walls until reaching the bottom & collapsing, removing the enemy from the board. However, any additional enemies who are caught in the path of the giant snow ball as it careens down the board will also be instantly taken out, giving additional points & even items that act as power ups. Therefore, the trick to Snow Bros. is to balance out when to take out individual foes & when to go for chains, depending on the stage layout & time remaining, as taking too long will spawn an invincible pumpkin head that can summons ghosts that will hunt you down. Each of the five stages are made up of 10 "floors", with every 10th floor seeing you take on a giant boss.
While Toaplan was renown for its excellent arcade shooters, Snow Bros. was easily Toaplan's most iconic non-shooter, doing so well that it essentially created its own sub-genre of single-screen platformers, with imitators like NMK's Saboten Bombers, Data East's Tumblepop and Joe & Mac Returns, & AM Factory's Nightmare in the Dark, while 1994's Snow Bros. 2 would wind up being Taoplan's final game. As for the Mega Drive version, which is the only console port to be developed in-house at Toaplan, it's a damn fine version of Snow Bros. & may even be better than the arcade original. Visually it looks to be almost exactly the same as the arcade, the controls are extremely solid & tight, and I feel that the music is even better here than in the arcade version; there's even an exclusive intro cinematic to establish the story. Not just that, but this version even has a second 20-floor bonus campaign after beating the initial 50 floors, which see you play as the princesses that the brothers were originally rescuing, giving this port a total of 70 floors. Today, the Mega Drive port of Snow Bros. is an extremely sought after & valued game, easily going for hundreds of dollars for just the cart, though it has seen some recent re-releases. First, it was included with the Sega Mega Drive Mini in both Japan & Asia (sorry, North America & Europe) in 2019. Then, at the start of this very year, Limited Run Games teamed with Tatsujin (the current owner of Toaplan's catalog) to produce a new physical print run of this port of Snow Bros., finally giving the port its first official release outside of Japan (& Asia); as of the publishing of this piece it's currently scheduled to ship out September 2025.
A little less than two months later the next Japan-exclusive Tengen release would come out, this one being another port of a Toaplan classic. In this case it was Slap Fight MD, released on June 11, 1993, a port of Toaplan's 1986 vertical arcade shooter that was renamed to Alcon for its North American release back in the day by publisher Taito. Unlike Snow Bros., Slap Fight MD was not produced in-house at Toaplan, instead being handled by M.N.M Software, a studio founded by Mikio Ichikawa, formerly of Dempa Micom. According to an interview with Eurogamer in 2015, Ichikawa met Toaplan's Tatsuya Uemura at the home of Bubble Bobble creator Fukio Mitsuji (who himself had a short stint at Tengen Japan, where he created Popils), and after exchanging business cards Ichikawa eventually asked if his studio could develop a port of Twin Cobra, but since that was already taken Uemura offered Slap Fight to Ichikawa & M.N.M. instead. Slap Fight MD was but one of four concurrent projects at M.N.M., which included assisting with the development of Streets of Rage 2 & an unreleased Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Rally Bike, with the former concurrent project resulting in Ichikawa hiring Yuzo Koshiro to compose the music for Slap Fight MD.
Technically, there are two completely different campaigns in this package. The first is a straight port of the original Slap Fight from the arcade, right down to the campaign being made up of a single, 80-checkpoint stretch that you go through (still about a good 30-minute game from start to finish), complete with the game's overall gimmick. Namely, destroying certain enemies will drop a star & picking one up advances down the power up list on the right side of the screen, which lists a speed up, a side shot, a four-part "Wing" that adds additional firepower, a shield, & four types of attacks (Shot, Bomb, Laser, & Homing Missile). Just as with Gradius, when the selection is on the one you want you can press a button to activate it, and while dying removes all power ups you've earned the game's vast amount of checkpoints prevents you from feeling completely powerless should you die late into the game. However, go to the options & you can select the second campaign, the titular Slap Fight MD, which is a wholly original 81-checkpoint stretch with its own musical score (the one that Yuzo Koshiro composed), and while the overall gameplay remains the same there are some notable differences. First, you start off with a larger ship that allows more firepower at the start, but if things get hairy you can press a button to activate a bomb that blows up the outer shell & revert yourself to the OG smaller ship, which trades off increased firepower for easier bullet evasion. Not just that, but the Option-like Wings also now act as a bonus hit, as the MD campaign doesn't kill you if a bullet hits them, but instead simply blows them up, like the outer shell bomb. Finally, while you can simply credit feed your way to the end of the arcade campaign, the MD campaign actually requires you to finish the last five checkpoints (77 to 81) together, as dying at the final boss reverts you back to checkpoint 77, not 81; to be fair, the four checkpoints before the final boss amount to ~1.5 minutes of scrolling. Needless to say, as much as I tried, I wasn't able to finish the MD campaign, though I did manage to get to the final boss a few times.
Overall, Slap Fight MD is an outstanding package of an overheard shooter for the Mega Drive, offering two very enjoyable (& challenging) campaigns that are notably different enough from each other, and the MD campaign even changes up the gameplay in ways that help make it even more unique. Just as with Snow Bros., the original Tengen-published cart now goes for literal hundreds, but a reprint is currently in the works as of this piece, this time by Retro-Bit, and was offered for pre-order either on its own or with the Genesis port of Grind Stormer that Tengen Japan produced in-house (& saw international release back in the day) as a two-game bundle; the Genesis port of Twin Cobra was also initially going to be offered, but wound up having licensing issues.
Tengen's original run of Japan-exclusive releases came to an end on August 13, 1993 with the release of Marble Madness for the Mega Drive... which is NOT the same thing as Marble Madness for the Genesis in North America & Mega Drive in Europe. Designed by an 18 year old Mark Cerny back in 1984, Marble Madness was Atari Games' first major arcade release after the sale of (the future) Atari Corporation, though its initial white-hot success was short-lived, which Cerny himself attributed to the game's short length, at only six stages. However, Marble Madness was able to maintain a long tail with its hard difficulty, unique reliance on a trackball for control, M.C. Escher-influenced visuals, & outstanding sound design, being the first arcade game to ever use an FM sound chip by Yamaha, as well as one of the earliest to utilize stereo sound & have a recognizable score. It would go on to inspire many other games, find itself copycat titles, & even had a 1991 arcade sequel (which Cerny had no involvement with) that never saw release, but has since been leaked. Naturally, Marble Madness also saw many ports for the home, with probably the most well known being the NES version that was published by Milton Bradley in 1989 (Tengen likely felt that it was worth getting released officially, in some form), & in late 1991 Electronic Arts released a port for the Genesis.
Ported over by Michael Schwartz, "EA Marble Madness" is a perfectly fine & enjoyable version of the game, as while a d-pad can never truly replace a trackball for a game like this Schwartz was able to make it work & feel natural enough to control; it's not entirely arcade accurate in a lot of ways, but it's still fun. Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw to "EA Marble Madness": The music by Steven E. Hayes. Simply put, Hayes converted the late Brad Fuller & Hal Canon's iconic score into something so completely shrill, cacophonous, & harsh that it's seriously better to just play the game with the audio muted. Meanwhile, "Tengen Marble Madness" was a completely separate port done in-house at Tengen Japan by a four-person team headed up Jun Amanai, who previously had worked at SoftBank for some of its old PC releases in the 80s, & later helped develop the original Pro Yakyu World Stadium for Namco. At this point Amanai was a reliable programmer for Tengen Japan, having helped out with both Popils & the TG-16 port of Klax, so he was made "Project Leader" for this new Marble Madness port, and at the same time he'd also oversee & advise M2 on their development of Gauntlet IV, which came out a month later. The end result is a much more arcade-accurate port, with the visuals & audio being much closer to the OG game (Kenji Yokoyama's music is infinitely better than Hayes' work), & even additional options like support for the Mega Mouse in place of the trackball (complete with adjustable "move scales") & "widescreen" support (which in reality just zooms in the screen & adds in pan-&-scan side scrolling).
However, "Tengen Marble Madness" is also a much more difficult game, as the physics here result in a much heavier-feeling marble, and in some ways I think it's even tougher than the arcade original. Admittedly, I'm comparing this to the arcade emulation seen in 2012's Midway Arcade Origins, but it was immensely tough just to get to Stage 4 of "Tengen Marble Madness", even on Very Easy, where I could consistently make it to that stage on both EA's port & the arcade game via MAO. Still, there's no doubt that Tengen Japan's port is the superior Genesis/Mega Drive port of this arcade classic, and it was something that was well worth doing for Japan. Unlike the two prior Tengen Japan games, this port of Marble Madness has remained exclusive to Japan to this very day, but just like its two Toaplan cohorts that original cart now goes for ridiculous prices on the secondhand market, even in Japan itself. Considering who owns the rights to Marble Madness today I highly doubt this port will ever be given a second chance via a reprint, sadly.
As mentioned at the start, Tengen's whole "Commit actual fraud in order to get a copy of Nintendo's lock-out program" gambit would result in years of legal battles between Tengen & Nintendo, not helped by Nintendo filing a separate lawsuit regarding the legality of Tengen's NES port of Tetris, but after going back & forth in both civil & appellate court the two sides eventually agreed to a settlement in 1994. Said settlement may have come about due to the fact that Time Warner (the result of a merger between Warner Communications & Time Inc. in 1989) wound up reacquiring majority ownership of Atari Games that same year (it had previously been split three ways between Warner, Namco, & Atari Games' own employees), & I would imagine Time Warner didn't want to inherit Tengen's lawsuit with Nintendo; the timing just seems too coincidental, otherwise. The reacquisition would eventually result in the death of the Atari Games branding (for a few years, at least), while the Tengen branding itself was killed off entirely, with Time Warner Interactive being the resulting company from all of this, starting on June 28, 1994. Tengen Japan would, in turn, get renamed to KK Time Warner Interactive, but I'll just call it "TWI Japan", for simplicity's sake.
Following the release of "Tengen Marble Madness", & likely during the development of the aforementioned Genesis port of Grind Stormer, Jun Amanai's team over at Tengen/TWI Japan moved on to their next in-house project, which in some ways was kind of a spiritual successor to Marble Madness. The development would get hit with a bizarre snag when the original director just up & left TWI Japan during development, something that was outright admitted by co-planner Mizuho Yoshioka in the game's instructions, but the team was able to rally & finish the game as planned, resulting in Tama: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth. Developed for both the Sega Saturn & Sony PlayStation, Tama would be a launch title for both consoles in Japan, so the Saturn version came out first on November 22, 1994, while the PS1 version came out a little over a week later on December 3, 1994; I'll be judging the game off of the Saturn version, though the two are very similar. I call Tama a "spiritual successor to Marble Madness" because it's all about guiding a marble to the goal of each stage, but in this case it's a literal Labyrinth-style game, so instead of directly controlling the marble itself you actually move the playfield around in order to move the marble, i.e. the titular Tama. Being a 3D polygonal game, though, instead of simply tilting the playfield for each stage you can also rotate the area space, with gravity always affecting Tama, i.e. turning the field around will make Tama go the direction it originally came from. The in-game explanation is that the power of the evil "Akudama" has resulted in Tama being unable to move on its own, so it needs the player's help in moving it around in order to defeat Akudama. You can also zoom the camera in super close, allowing players to fully appreciate the flat-shaded polygonal visuals, and in some instances it can be helpful to do so.
At a total of 30 "waves", comprised of six worlds containing five stages each, Tama is a rather basic game, at its core, but it's important to remember that this was literally a launch game for both Saturn & PS1. Therefore, it's still kind of adhering to a lot of the ethos of the prior generation, like not needing a game to be long, and instead encourage repeat playing by either upping the difficulty or trying for a better score/time/etc. (if not both). Tama is a simple game at heart, and a full playthrough by someone who knows what they're doing shouldn't take more than an hour, but it's a game that does take a little bit to get fully used to its quirks & mechanics. For example, the game most certainly doesn't run at 60 fps, or even 30 fps to be honest, and moving/rotating the playfield around does have a bit of jerkiness to its movement. However, much like in later marble-based video games (Kororinpa, Marble It Up!, etc.) there is a physics engine at play when it comes to moving Tama around, and the playfield is indeed a physical "board", if you will. Therefore you actually can jump Tama around the field & skip over sections if you know what to do & how to properly execute it, though in this game it's more about jumping Tama off of slanted spaces & the like to go over walls than it would be in more "modern" marble games. However, that's not to say that Tama is an easy game that you can just blaze through, as by the end of the second world you're already getting things like moving holes to avoid, floating platforms you have to move Tama on in order to reach normally inaccessible areas, & the time limit for each stage does reduce enough that by the fifth & final "wave" in a world things can be tight. Combine all of that with limited continues & no saving between stages or even worlds & Tama actually winds up being a bit tougher than you'd initially think. Visually it's admittedly nothing special (& may likely be the reason why it never got localized outside of Japan), but Tama is still a neat little marble labyrinth game to check out, if you enjoy titles like this.
It's not stated who the original director that left Tama's development was, but this would also be Jun Amanai's final game with Tengen/TWI Japan, though he would later move over to Atari Games & assist with the development of 1998's Gauntlet Legends. Amanai has since also shared footage of never-released PC-Engine ports of Marble Madness, Off the Wall (which has since been leaked online), Peter Pack Rat, & Popils, as well as a unreleased Famicom port of Popils, on YouTube back in 2016.
With Tama out of the way the next Japan-exclusive Time Warner Interactive release was another TWI Japan joint, but this time it was another port, with the intention of offering an arcade-perfect experience, if not even better. Originally released in arcades in 1989, Hard Drivin' was one of the earliest 3D polygonal driving games ever made, along with Namco's Winning Run in 1988 (which used very similar hardware), with the cabinet even giving the steering wheels haptic vibration so that players could better get the feeling of driving something that felt as real as possible, given the hardware. It was effectively state-of-the-art for its time (Virtua Racing wouldn't come out for another three years), but that sure didn't stop home ports from coming out for PCs (including the likes of the C64 & Spectrum), Genesis, & even the Lynx! The following year saw the release of Race Drivin' in 1990, which was pretty much an expanded & improved revamp, as not only did it have two new tracks to drive on it also included the one track that Hard Drivin' offered, thereby making the original game a bit redundant (outside of maybe some slightly different physics). Like its predecessor, Race Drivin' also saw home ports at the time for PCs (though this time only Atari ST, DOS, & Amiga), as well as the Genesis, SNES, & even Game Boy... but, understandably, almost none of them could offer the true Race Drivin' experience (outside of a more recent fan hack for the SNES version that uses the SA-1 chip).
However, come the mid-90s it looked as though home console technology was now capable of offering a proper, arcade-accurate port, so on August 4, 1995 TWI Japan released Race Drivin' for the Sega Saturn. You might think it's odd that this was a Japan-exclusive, but much like Marble Madness (& Gauntlet) the Japanese apparently really loved Race Drivin', and this port actually predates the Sega Saturn "port" (more like a remake) of Virtua Racing, which was developed by TWI over in America, by three months. For this Japan-exclusive port you get all three courses (Original, Autocross, & Super Stunt) & vehicles (Sports star, Speed star, & Road star) from the arcade original, along with five brand new vehicles (Classic star, Power star [i.e. a big rig], Mad star, Baby star [i.e. a three-wheeled truck], & Wing star) & three "new" courses (Rainbow Road, Windy Forest, & Old Sun Dawn). The original three courses are under the "Arcade" category, while the three new ones are under the "Real" category, due to them featuring textured-mapped polygons, compared to the original courses keeping their flat-shaded polygons. However, the truth of the matter is that the "Real" courses are nothing more than the "Arcade" courses under new names & visual themes, so Rainbow Road is simply the Original course with you now driving around a bunch of waterfalls in place of the more farm-like aesthetic. Also, while the new visuals for the "Real" courses are appealing in their own way, and the new music tracks accompanying each of them are enjoyable to listen to, they also kind of restrict the player by implementing barricades around the paths (so you can't take advantage of any possible out of bounds shortcuts), and some of the new environmental elements are truly just there for aesthetic & aren't actually there in a physical fashion. In some ways I honestly prefer the tracks in their "Arcade" forms, though I wish I could listen to the music while racing on them.
Still, there's no doubt that Race Drivin' on the Saturn is definitely a fun time to be had. The new vehicles do differ from each other (some more subtly, while others more obviously) to help give replay value, the general concept of beating the par time in order to earn a one-lap "Championship Race" encourages you to memorize the tracks & be a better driver, and the frame rate is excellent (though there are some small hitches here & there), with the only real "issue" being the draw distance, which is admittedly kind of short; however, it never affects your ability to react to the next turn or stunt section. While it obviously won't go down as one of the Saturn's best racing games, Race Drivin' is still a great little driving game for the console, and it's cool to see that it's a port that may very well be better than the arcade original.
Time Warner Interactive wouldn't really exist as a company for all that long, honesty, as by the end of 1995 Time Warner was already wanting to get out of the video game business. In a surprising move admitted by TWI president Dan Van Elderen, Time Warner allowed the former Atari Games to find a buyer for themselves (showing how little Time Warner really cared, by this point), and after an unsuccessful bid by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell the division would be sold on March 29, 1996 to WMS Industries, the then-owner of Williams, Bally, & Midway, which in turn resulted in the revival of the Atari Games branding. This also marked the end of Time Warner Interactive on April 12, 1996, which was folded into Williams Entertainment, i.e. the former Tradewest & shortly later renamed to Midway Games... but only in North America, at least for the time being. You see, both TWI Europe & TWI Japan still had some titles in development, and in an honestly nice showing from WMS it was decided that both studios would be kept open until their current projects were all finished & released, though since they weren't going to stick around for much longer they still kept their "Time Warner" names... despite Time Warner no longer owning them.
In fact, TWI Europe would actually get renamed to just Warner Interactive during its final year, even bringing back the old Warner Communications emblem that hadn't been seen since the start of 1990, despite the fact that (again) Warner had no ownership of the company by that point. I can't tell if that's ballsy, brilliant, or both.
The first of the still-in-development TWI Japan games would finally see release on June 28, 1996... and it's another port of Race Drivin'! However, this wasn't simply a straight port of the Saturn version from a year prior, but rather this was Race Drivin' a Go! Go! for the PlayStation, which offered some exclusive content. Similar to the Saturn port this game is split up into two modes: Arcade Mode & Go Go Mode. Arcade Mode is the same three tracks from the arcade game, only now with some slightly enhanced visuals (but still looking like the arcade game, overall), while Go Go Mode now gives you three wholly new tracks. World Sphere takes place in a city scape & is highlighted by an extra large loop-de-loop followed immediately by a rising spiral, which can easily result in you flying off course & crashing, plus a spot where you have to avoid driving over landmines... for some reason. Mirage City is based (in part) on San Francisco & features a bunch of precarious driving where you can easily fall over, including two consecutive loop-de-loops & a trio of short hops. Finally, Wild Beat is sort of the game's take on Sega Rally's iconic desert stage, complete with a section where you drive on a cliff, as well as a part where you drive through a mini-maze & need to pay attention to the signs that guide you through. The gussied up reskins of the arcade trio from the Saturn port are nowhere to be seen here, though their respective songs are still in the game & can be swapped over to at any point while paused (alongside the eight new songs composed just for this version), but it is cool that the PS1 game actually offers six wholly unique tracks, compared to the Saturn version. Also, while you only start with six vehicles (the Mad star & Wing star are both gone) you can unlock an additional six vehicles by beating the Championship Race for each course (the Go Go Mode tracks even give you rival drivers who talk trash before & after a race), plus a seventh unlockable vehicle after unlocking the rest; these are mostly animal-based vehicles, primarily frogs.
Combine all of that with more detailed visuals (including the third-person view now giving you proper full screen visuals) & textures (though there is a lot more polygon jitter here), rock steady 60 fps performance, and a much improved draw distance it sounds like Race Drivin' a Go! Go! is automatically the best home version of Race Drivin'... right? Well, at least for me, that's a tough thing to say & it comes down to one little detail: The driving physics. From what I can tell, the staff at TWI Japan changed the physics a bit, at least in comparison to the Saturn version, and that includes adding in the ability to actually tip over should you take a turn at too much speed. While this doesn't really affect the arcade tracks all that much, the Go Go Mode tracks kind of suffer from this a fair bit. You see, these new tracks really don't match the general vibe of the OG Race Drivin' tracks all that much, despite featuring stunt sections inspired by them (especially the Super Stunt track), and sometimes it honestly would feel like I was punished for taking a turn at just slightly faster a speed than what the devs likely intended, resulting in my vehicle tipping over; you can recover before getting fully tipped, but more likely than not you will go over. For a game where, aside from unlocking the secret vehicles, the main goal is effectively time attacking tracks over & over to see just how low you can make your lap time go the idea that you could tip over feels a bit counterintuitive to that whole idea. While Race Drivin' was designed to be more of a "sim" racer for its time, this was now mid-1996 & even then the game's mechanics felt more "arcade" racer by that point; hell, the first Gran Turismo game would come out in Japan the end of the following year. Now, don't take this to mean that I think that Race Drivin' a Go! Go! is the inferior version when compared to the Saturn port, but rather I think it's best to really look at the two as opposite sides of the same coin. If what you want is something more akin to the arcade original, only with more vehicles & an option to dress the tracks in new visual aesthetics, then go with the Saturn port. If what you want is something that tries to act almost, in some ways, like a semi-successor to the arcade original then go with the PS1 version; that being said, for collectors the Saturn port is way more affordable today. However, the PS1 version does include support for Namco's cool NeGcon controller, which is a plus.
With Race Drivin' a Go! Go! now released in Japan, over at TWI Europe/Warner Interactive things would soon reach its end. Following European releases of Return Fire on the PS1 & PC that September, PO'ed for the PS1 in November, & finally International Moto X & Pitball for the PS1 in December, the last one being the final game developed by TWI Europe itself, the European division was closed down completely, leaving only TWI Japan remaining. There would be one last release over in Japan in 1996 with the PS1 version of Primal Rage coming out on December 13, becoming the final PS1 game to ever feature the TWI logo, but the dev team over at TWI Japan had one last game of their own to release... and it'd become legendary, both for quality & rarity.
As we've seen just from these Japan-exclusive releases from both Tengen & TWI, 100% wholly original IP wasn't really a focus for either of these companies. As Tengen the company could rely on ports of Atari Games' arcade output, while as TWI it could rely mainly on both licensed IP & working with other companies, as well as leverage some of the Atari Games catalog. There was the occasional original title developed in-house from either entity, but they were rare & have since either been forgotten with time (Tama & Pitball), become derided (Awesome Possum), or become a super cult-classic (Popils). When it comes to the final video game from TWI Japan, the Saturn-exclusive Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru/Spiritual Curse Killer Taromaru (though it's often translated as "Psychic Killer/Assassin Taromaru"), it's often cited as an example of the very last & is considered one of the best cult-classics on a console that's honestly inundated with them. The game was released on January 17, 1997, the same exact day that TWI Japan was fully closed down, and because of this Taromaru received only a single, small-scale print run, though the exact number has been in dispute, with 5,000, 7,500, & even 50,000 all being cited as the alleged number of copies that were produced. Regardless, this quickly resulted in the game becoming uber-expensive after the fact, & today it's often considered a bit of a holy grail for Saturn collectors... but is the game itself even worth the notoriety that its rarity has given it?
Playing as either the titular Taromaru or his partner Enkai as they hunt after a kidnapped girl in Edo-era Japan (& there is two-player couch co-op), Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru is a 2.5D side-scrolling run-&-gun, except in place of the traditional guns you instead utilize a lock-on reticle to shoot foes with energy blasts, either rapid fire by mashing the attack button or charging a shot first for more single-hit damage. You can also double-tap down before pressing attack to unleash an energy field that gives you a moment of invincibility & shove aways all normal foes crowding you, and you have also have the standard movement options of double-tapping left or right to run in that direction (though you can't run while charging an attack, and you can't move at all while attacking), jumping, & a slide by pressing jump while crouching. However, easily the most interesting mechanic in Taromaru is the ability to convert an enemy to your side as an AI-controlled ally by hitting them with your other attack button, which on its own does no damage but if done to an enemy that's taken enough damage will then turn yellow & start helping you out by attacking any on-screen enemies. Eventually, though, your new friend will take enough damage & die, but it's a really neat mechanic & it gives some nice replay value due to the decent amount of variety between grunts for you to convert to your side. That's the general gameplay loop throughout all seven stages (named after a portion of the Chinese zodiac, though not in direct order), but the main attraction of Taromaru is easily the variety of boss battles. In fact, this game is probably best compared to Treasure's cult-classic run-&-gun Alien Soldier, which was focused primarily on 26 boss fights (with small little standard stages between each), though TWI Japan's game actually surpasses Treasure's with 28 boss fights; to be fair, the last eight are part of a giant boss rush in the final stage. Amusingly enough, Hiroshi Iuchi actually worked on both Alien Soldier & Taromaru (though only as a graphic designer), before returning to Treasure after TWI Japan's closure... where he then directed Radiant Silvergun & then later both Ikaruga & Gradius V.
However, this game is nowhere near as absurdly challenging as Alien Soldier, as even on default settings I was able to make it to the final stage boss rush on my first try before using all of my (limited) continues. Still, Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru is an excellent run-&-gun game that absolutely deserves its cult-classic status, and it's truly a shame that it fell victim to TWI Japan's closure, has never been re-released, & is now only really available today via emulation. This is 100% a must play for anyone who loves the genre, and it is easily the best game seen in this entire overview.
As mentioned, the release date of Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru, January 17, 1997, was also the date that TWI Japan closed up for good, bringing an end to not just Time Warner Interactive as a whole but also a legacy that dated an entire decade back with the founding of Tengen. By this point Williams Entertainment had fully switched over to the Midway Games branding, and this would result in the very last console port of Primal Rage to see release at the time, the Japanese version of the Saturn port on March 23, 1998, actually being released under the Midway name, alongside GT Software & SoftBank's GameBank label. The Atari Games branding would continue on until the middle of 1999 before getting renamed Midway Games West, with the last game to feature the "Atari Games" logo being San Francisco Rush 2049, & the company would eventually get closed in 2003, only continuing to exist for legal reasons when it came to maintaining copyright over its various IP, with its final game being 3D console platformer Dr. Muto.
In 2009 Midway, and all of the accompanying Williams, Bally, Atari Games, Tengen, & Time Warner Interactive video games, would get sold to Warner Bros., which today remains the current owner of all of it... except for the Tengen branding itself. In 2022 a homebrew developer named Jeff Silvers noticed that the trademark for "Tengen" actually wound up getting abandoned by WB when it never bothered to renew, so in 2024 Silvers decided to acquire it & started up Tengen Games, which is the current company using that name. Currently the only game published under this revived banner looks to be Zed and Zee for the NES, Famicom, & Windows, but the modern Tengen looks to fully embrace itself as a successor to the "maverick" nature of the original company. Here's hoping that Tengen Games doesn't eventually decide to also commit fraud one day... though it would admittedly be on brand.
As I went over back in 2023, the history of the word "Atari" when it comes to video games (& even tech, in general) is... complicated & confusing, and part of that comes down to Warner Communications essentially wanting to continue using the "Atari" name for the arcade division it decided to hold on to after the selling the home division, despite it arguably becoming more synonymous with the nascent home console market by 1983. Regardless, it's really only fitting that Atari Games' own life would be filled with a bit of confusion in & of itself, what with the creation of Tengen for its own home division, then the trail of ownership of the company itself, going from Warner to Warner & Namco co-owning it to self-ownership to then being re-acquired by (Time) Warner to then being sold off to WMS to then becoming a subsidiary of Midway to then finally become nothing more than part of a larger acquisition... by Warner, once again! Throughout all of this the Japanese division continued on as its own studio, eventually resulting in a series of Japan-exclusive video game releases that, in some way, would wind up being the actual swan song for the entire company, at least under both the Tengen & Time Warner Interactive names.
As for those very Japan-exclusive titles, on the whole they're actually all rather good, but at the same time I can see why they all never left Japan. When it comes to Snow Bros. my only guess would be that Capcom (which published the NES & Game Boy ports in North America) had exclusive console port rights at the time outside of Japan, & since Capcom had such spotty support for the Genesis in general that might have prevented Snow Bros. from seeing international release on Sega's 16-bit console. As for Slap Fight MD I would imagine that it was simply a case of the Genesis already having a crap ton of shooters already for it, and a combination of the game's age & Alcon possibly not being all that successful in arcades back in the day likely killed any interest outside of Japan. "Tengen Marble Madness", obviously, wasn't going to come over simply due to EA's prior port existing, simple as that.
Meanwhile, as I stated before, Tama's rather basic 3D visuals more than likely killed any interest from both Sega & Sony Computer Entertainment from wanting it published outside of Japan, and the game's entire concept itself likely was seen as not being interesting enough. The Saturn port of Race Drivin' could have been possible outside of Japan, especially since it's already in full English to start with, but with TWI already working on its own port of Virtua Racing for the same console I imagine they didn't want to potentially compete with themselves. Finally, Race Drivin' a Go! Go! & Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru both came out after TWI itself had already been put to pasture (Pitball had to get licensed out to Accolade for its North American release), and by mid 1996 I don't think anyone was interested in publishing an updated version of Race Drivin' outside of Japan, while by the start of 1997 the Saturn was already considered a lost cause abroad. Still, overall Tengen & Time Warner Interactive's small catalog of Japan exclusives are actually way better than I think most people would think, and they're all worth a play by anybody curious about any of them.
Snow Bros.: Nick & Tom (Mega Drive) © Tatsujin
Slap Fight MD © Tatsujin
Marble Madness (Mega Drive) © Atari Games (now WB Games) © Tengen (now WB Games)
Tama: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth © 1994 Time Warner Interactive (now WB Games)
Race Drivin' (Saturn) © Atari Games (now WB Games) © Time Warner Interactive (now WB Games)
Race Drivin' a Go! Go! © Time Warner Interactive (now WB Games)
Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru © 1997 Time Warner Interactive (now WB Games)
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