Kenji Kaido: "Taito's arcade golden age was 1985-92, with '85-89 being particularly amazing; until then, Taito was so prolific—they released two new arcade games a month!—that ppl mocked them for 'quantity over quality', but during their golden age, they had quality to match"🇯🇵
"when Sega kicked off the deluxe cabinet boom, Taito initially followed suit w games like Midnight Landing & Full Throttle. Later (prob due to intl requests) they changed route to compact chassis; Operation Wolf went from remote monitor to all-in-one unit"
"Wolf was also planned as a conversion board for NY Captor; Chase HQ squeezed the seat into the very end of the enclosure, so the cabinet took up relatively little space; bc of this, both Wolf & HQ were huge overseas (the games themselves were great too)"
"Looking over the release list, I myself put out three arcade games in 1989...talk about luna—I mean, genius! those games were Night Striker, Champion Wrestler and Cameltry"
"the karaoke dept was doing well & we felt like we had the momentum to take over the world… as I've tweeted before, Taito went all-in on Kyocera management: morning calisthetics, 3-minute company mottoes, mandatory uniforms, etc & good devs quit 1 by 1"
"after that, Taito did fine (like with Densha de Go!) but it felt like the Square-Enix takeover eroded their devt capabilities; by that point I'd already left, and the prolific work Taito had been known for was no longer possible. Good luck, Taito..."
"by the way, we former members of Taito still get together for reunions and so on. (Come to think of it, it's been a while since the last one, because there are so many of us & it's hard to corral everyone.) our love for Taito remains strong"
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