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The games industry makes for seriously strange bedfellows, as Select Button.net writer Torumatsuta discovered when he found a similarity between PS1 relic The Unholy War and gameplay footage for an only-in-Japan anime PS1 game, Little Witching Mischiefs. Both games came from development house Toys For Bob, a company perhaps best known for Star Control I and II. Not only did Toys For Bob use the core engine and concept of Unholy War for the wildly moe Little Witching Mischiefs, but they also worked in enemies pulled directly from Unholy War. It’s a culture clash of epic proportions!

Seeking answers, Torumatsuta contacted Toys For Bob and received the story straight from the source. It began as Toys For Bob was working on the post-apocalyptic sci-fi strategy game The Unholy War… and then the company was asked by Bandai to re-skin the game for the Japanese market using the Sailor Moon license. For unknown reasons the Sailor Moon connection was pulled and replaced with a handful of other popular female anime characters dating from the 1950s and 60s! However, Toys For Bob had very little info on these characters and was forced to improvise:

I don’t think we understood their respective stories or knew exactly what Bandai wanted us to do with them but we got a sense of what each character’s magic powers should be like and what side characters intersected with their stories. The one thing I don’t believe we got from Bandai at all was who the enemies should be so in the interest of time and ridiculousness, we used characters from not only Unholy War, but Pandemonium 1 and 2!

It’s a fascinating expose of what devs have to do when they’ve been handed the keys but not necessarily the gas. Don’t miss the full report on this footnote-worthy anecdote. Recap the namedropping here: Star Control, Unholy War, Pandemonium, Sailor Moon! It’s like hundreds of gaming nerds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Two screenshots after the jump reveal one of the shared Unholy War characters. Crazy!

Source: Select Button.net