I was sent a tape with Sunsoft’s promo videos from the show, and here it is – the only surviving video footage of Sunsoft’s The Terminator for the NES.

The game had not been in development for very long and the promo video only featured the games title screen and some cutscenes.

It was for a promo video to be shown at CES. Artist Todd Papaleo, who worked at Sunsoft from 1988 to 1989, sent me a drawing he had been assigned to draw of T-800. A cool flyer with the iconic picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800 was shown along with previews of the game. Besides the unknown Vegas are no less than ten more unknown nicknames in the team and special thanks.Īt the Las Vegas WCES Show in 1989, Sunsoft of America unveiled The Terminator for the NES. The composer was Naoki Kodaka, who composed most of the company’s greatest music between 19. On the sound team was sound programmers Nobuyuki Hara and Shinichi Seya, who coded most of the great Sunsoft music on the Famicom/NES. The programming team was headed by veterans Masahito Nomura (Atlantis no Nazo, Dead Zone, Ufouria: The Saga) and Hiroaki Higashiya (Atlantis no Nazo, Ripple Island, Batman: The Video Game), who had worked at Sunsoft since the early Famicom days. The latter one is Cho Musou while the first person’s true identity isn’t known. The team that developed the game was led by two people nicknamed Vegas and Chow-Mu-Sow.

The game was then developed by Sunsoft in Japan with no design input from the US office. And of course, four years later that was shown to be true when Terminator 2: Judgement Day became a very big hit. Even though the movie was four years old at the time they felt the license still had some life in it. The license was acquired from Creative Licensing Corporation (CLC) and its founder Rand Marlis. In late 1988, Richard Robbins (president of Sunsoft of America) acquired the license for James Cameron’s 1984 hit movie The Terminator. The game wasn’t always meant to be called Journey to Silius, though. Other than that, the game is a straightforward action platformer. The main differences between the two versions are that the main character looks a bit different. When it was released in the US a month later, it was renamed as Journey To Silius. On August 10th, 1990, Sunsoft released a game called Rough World/ ラフワールド (known as WORLD on the game’s title)for the Famicom in Japan.

Terminator pc game sprites