Battle Lode Runner

[ParanoiaDragon]

From my understanding, of when I used to talk to one of the Shirley boys over at WD(Don or Leroy), King of the Monsters 2 was absolutly finished, as was World Heroes 1.  But, there's irony involved.  He told me, they weren't going to end up releasing World Heroes, since they thought TTI was for sure going to release the Arcade Card, & World Heroes 2, so they figured it wouldn't be profitable.  However, they could still do King of the Monsters 2.  Problem was, he stated that there was so much memory involved in that game, that they "required" the Arcade card to run it, otherwise, it would have to reload several times thruout a level.  I never did talk to him after that, but obviously it didn't get released, due to the fact that the Arcade card never got released

[esteban]

The reason why Bomberman makes an appearance in Battle Lode Runner is that Bomberman made his first appearance in...Lode Runner! Hudson was in charge of the famicom version of the game back in 1985 (that was, by the way, the first non-nintendo million-seller for the famciom) and the last boss was no less than Bomberman.

Ha! I love it . I didn't know that...

[Necromancer]

Thanks for filling me in ParanoiaDragon.  I didn't realize that WD was responsible for porting King of the Monsters; I had assumed that Hudson was porting it for the PCE.  That was a pretty ambitious endeavor compared to a translation, and it's too bad that WD couldn't cut a deal with Hudson to release the games anyway (in Japan and/or the US).  If all the heavy lifting was already done, the cost of pressing the discs would have been pretty low.  I'm sure that they would have been happy to recoup some of there costs, but they probably weren't too concerned after moving on to other projects.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Yeah, from what I recall, Victor was close to the head of SNK in the US at the time, so, they worked out a special deal with them.  I think SNK themselves made World Heroes 1 & King of the Monsters 2 for the Turbo, or maybe whatever company made the originals......Alpha System maybe?