of all the heavily licensed JP legacy catalogues out there, Data East's has to be the most under-served—pretty much every reissue over the past 15+ years has been dollar-store fodder, the (surprisingly few) IP revivals haven't been great... those games deserves so much better
my concern with the reissue industry is that all the highest-quality commercial curation, from the M2s and Digital Eclipses and Code Mystics of the world, is put together by people who grew up alongside these catalogs and intuitively love & understand them, but what'll happen (>)
when we reach the point (& in some cases I feel we already have) where the people servicing these games are doing so from a place of generational detachment, taught the craft but not necessarily instilled with the same passion?
Data East had a long history & a breadth of diverse, interesting & forward-thinking games and hardware, but if you didn't grow up alongside it then nothing with DECO's name on it from the past ~20 years would make you care—in fact, it'd probably make you write them off as trash
...and why shouldn't they? the licencors don't seem to care, the licensees haven't put in any effort & everyone who might conceivably do them justice has been disillusioned & doesn't believe there's a commercial audience for those game's that'd justify the work, and before long…
…even those people, who care but who can't or won't maintain them, will retire, and the people who succeed them aren't going to give the slightest shit about them anymore, thus consigning them to being wiki footnotes with no relevance to anyone
I don't expect s ppl to care about certain games forever or that everything should be sold into perpetuity, but it's frustrating to know the proper preservation of all this "timeless" stuff is limited to a finite window that's quickly closing & those who should be acting, aren't
(yes I'm rambling, yes I have free time to kill atm, yes I'll stop)
