prior to @retropalshq stream tonight i've got myself into a big Japanese internet hole about Culture Brain. it's a fascinating company without much good info about it in English at all

it was run by the same two guys, Yukio Tanaka (aka Yumenosuke Akademiya) and Kazuo Endo since its founding in 1980, they went to elementary school together. started out as an arcade distributor, then made arcade games for others, then moved to self-publishing on console

sadly Endo passed away in 2017. until then he was very active on twitter, here he is going in on some clown who called Super Chinese a kusoge https://twitter.com/1h951dXAKZpsAvp/status/783091157874073600

Yumenosuke seems to have been more reclusive, he and Culture Brain basically became a meme on 2ch & people impersonate him and former employees so a lot of info is obscured by jokes and fake shit
there's a whole wiki cataloguing culture brain shitposts https://w.atwiki.jp/culturebrainwiki/

in the NES/SNES/GB days they seemed profoundly committed to just doing things their own way and who cares if it actually makes sense or not
smashing genres together and making grand proclamations about fulfilling the dreams of humanity

according to the wiki their Japanese marketing copy was just filled with goofy hyperbole and typos and was suspected to be written by Yumenosuke himself
and then they entered the US armed with ads prepared in Japan and directly translated
no one else would dare! it's fantastic!

from the PS1 era right up to Endo's passing they went through the kind of decline that a lot of old game companies experienced, couple attempts at 3D Hiryu no Ken games but after that they shifted to fairly uninspiring stuff on handhelds

they reorganised in 2017 under Culture Brain Excel, now run by Yumenosuke's son(?) Hiroyuki Tanaka. Endo mentioned that Yumenosuke was also fighting illness in late 2016 & he is 71 years old now so it's probably a safe bet that he has retired

They haven't updated their website since the reorganisation and according to the shitposters they vacated their former office so it may be that the company is effectively dormant now & just exists for licensing

wait here's some red-hot info I totally missed out on? they helped develop DONKEY KONG??? this is from NOA's own "Insider's Guide to the NWC"

more behind-the-scenes info from GDRI http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:Mikame_and_Me
the producer/owner mentioned would be Yumenosuke

someone with ideas and passion also being a gigantic asshole who drives talented staff away? in the games industry??? never!

Shunichi Mikame, the interviewed composer, apparently worked on the Japanese version of Scheherazade and was fired shortly before it came out. his music was replaced in the later (and massively-overhauled) US version.

a bit from the wiki which i think is real - Culture Brain's various locations
https://w.atwiki.jp/culturebrainwiki/pages/21.html
they started from this building in the 80s which they kept as a warehouse all the way until 2016 when it was demolished for apartments

in the 90s they had a 7 storey marble office building?!? and then apparently lost it when the financial bubble burst
the office location shifted around a bit after that, most famously ending up above a bento shop, now it's just based out of a private residence

oh yeah i missed the most important part
here's yumenosuke in his cool shades