NMK appreciation thread

NMK was originally established in May 1985 as Nihon Micom Kaihatsu (日本マイコン開発). It was certainly among the best low-profile dedicated arcade developers of their time. Founded by Yukio Kotoyori (琴寄幸雄), former development director at Universal, as well as the former Tehkan Ltd. (now TECMO Koei Ltd.) staffers that developed the arcade classic Bomb Jack. Their first two games were developed for Jaleco: Valtric and Argus, both released in 1986. NMK sticked around with Jaleco for a while, meaning some games like Buta-san and even console games like the Saiyuuki World series were also developed by NMK. They also had their games published by UPL like Black Heart and Task Force Harrier. Then they teamed up with Tecmo to produce what became underrated (especially to gamers outside of Japan). Two of their games are Riot and Thunder Dragon. Perhaps their largest efforts were what made the company Cave respect NMK for. In fact, music composer Manabu Namiki, who later worked for Cave, composed Desert War and these two games. Leaving behind a selected but diverse library of high-quality games, and throughout most of their active years NMK worked principally as a subcontractor under more prominent game companies, and this unfortunately prevented many of their best games to become associated with the NMK brand name. It was really only after the company filled for bankruptcy in 1999 that NMK truly began to get their much overdue and deserved fan appraisal. The company shifted to electromechanical games in 1996, then went bankrupt in 1999. I saw some screenshots of the Game Center CX episode that had some NMK electromechanical arcade games. One of them is the parrot in a circle-shaped hole, the other is similar to UFO crane games.

I liked the game which NMK sold. I often played Thunder Dragon.