Shuhei Yoshida recently talked about the first game that Sony was going to make for the Nintendo PlayStation. The thing is, he doesn’t quite remember what the game is – but we found someone who believes they know what it is.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Yoshida was just talking casually in an interview on MinnMaxx when he started mentioning this game. As we pointed out, he doesn’t remember the game’s name, and he also didn’t remember the studio. What he could remember was that it was a shmup, and he compared it to a Sega CD shmup that already existed, and was made by studio Game Arts.
As MinnMaxx identifies the Sega CD game was Silpheed, Yoshida went on to describe a game that as a space shooter were all the game’s assets were being streamed in by the CD. To be clear, Yoshida was describing a cutting edge phenomenon here, as at the time there were CD games that could be loaded from the CD onto the console before they started playing.
Yoshida, though, said he wasn’t sure if Sony’s game was made in Japan or the US, but he remembers it was almost finished, and it was already working on the Nintendo PlayStation prototype. For those who don’t remember this, when Sony and Nintendo were still collaborating on a games console, they were working on an add-on to the SNES that could play CDs and CD games. While we admit we casually referred to it as the Nintendo PlayStation, at the time, it was codenamed the Super NES CD-ROM, or SNES CD for short.
VG Dentetsu then made this statement on Bluesky:
“The description of the game matches that of Fortessa, a shmup produced by Epic Sony and (co-?)developed by System Sacom.”
Indeed, VG Dentetsu had already posted about Fortessa, or Fortezza, on their Tumblr years before. They tracked down several interviews and forum posts, including a post on the AssemblerGames forum that has since been expunged. The post said this:
“Now, one title that has not been mentioned that I will mention here that was going to be exclusive for the SNES CD and be a potential pack in was a space shooter called Forteza. It was FMV backgrounds with an overlaid sprite based graphics. Think along the lines of ‘Silpheed’ for the Sega CD but with FMV real looking space graphics for the background. A video tape still exists of this game as well as a playable version. I am trying to get the tape from my former boss who has it, buried somewhere, but we’ll find it and post it eventually.”
Unfortunately, with that AssemblerGames thread now lost to the ether, we don’t know who this poster was. Subsequently, we don’t know if they were able to retrieve that video tape, or that working playable copy, of Fortessa.
For those who were curious, System Sacom was a video game developer for Japanese PCs and consoles in the 1980s and 1990s.The company still exists, but no longer makes video games. After leaving the business in 1998, their games were sold to D4.
In any case, it’s certainly uncanny that Yoshida’s description matches the one found in that forum years ago. Is it possible that Yoshida had an AssemblerGames forum account? We would all certainly love to see this game resurface in some way, maybe even get the Akka Arrh treatment.
