[TheRedEye]

I've been spending the last couple days digging up info on mysterious unreleased NES games on the way awesome (and way old) Grand Nestral Station unreleased NES games list, trying to make sense of some of the titles that have no attached info to them, and I realized that I have a whole forum of people interested in this stuff too, so maybe I don't have to do it all by myself!

This is a thread for research challenges. I'd like us to combine our detective skills and try to solve little mysteries, piece by piece. This information will dramatically help our top secret Lost Levels unreleased games database, where we hope to finally catalogue all the neat ideas and information that tends to get lost and forgotten in message board posts.

Challenge Number One

Our first challenge is something called Airhawk (or Air Hawk, depending on who you ask). What we know about Airhawk is that now-defunct publisher Romstar announced it as an upcoming title, which was reported in the very first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (cover date May, 1989). The only other mention that we know of, which is also reported on the Grand Nestral list linked above, is in a mailorder ad in EGM #27 - October 1991, nearly 2 1/2 years later.

What we know about its publisher, Romstar, is pretty nicely (though not extensively) covered in its Wikipedia article. We know that Romstar made a business of primarily distributing Japanese games in the American market, mainly for arcades, and that its largest clients were:

Taito
Capcom
SNK
Seta
Toaplan

Here are the games that Romstar published for the NES:

Baseball Stars II (SNK)
Championship Bowling (Athena)
Cowboy Kid (Visco)
Magic Darts (Seta)
Rally Bike (?)
Thunder & Lightning (Athena)
Twin Eagle (Visco)
World Champ (?)

That's probably not TERRIBLY helpful, but hey, it's what we have.

Now, it's pretty safe to assume, I think, that Air Hawk is a shooter of some variety, probably taking place on earth (as in, it's not a space shooter). It might even be a helicopter shooter - it might even be Tiger Heli, which was released in October '89. But that would be a little presumptuous of us, now wouldn't it?

So, I leave it to the forums. Any thoughts or ideas from the detectives and the junior detectives in the crowd?

[ArnoldRimmer83]

[GDRI]

[TheRedEye]

Then I guess we can eliminate it!

[mrdomino]

I was going to say Thundercade (developed by Seta, published by Sammy in 89) until I realised it's a guy on a bike, so calling it Air Hawk probably wouldn't have made much sense. It still plays exactly like a plane-based vertical shooter though... maybe Air Hawk turned into that. Probably not, though.

[adaml]

Twin Eagle came out in October 1989 from Romstar. My uneducated guess would be that Air Hawk turned into Twin Eagle. Maybe digging around in the ROM would turn up some "Air Hawk" text. The Famicom version of Twin Eagle is subtitled "Revenge Joe's Brother" and is actually larger than the US version. Someone smarter than me should be able to dissect both ROMs for clues.

[GDRI]

[dimitri]

Rally Bike and World Champ are also licensed from Visco, which accounts for every game Visco released on the Famicom. None of the Japan-only SNK/KAC, Athena, or Seta titles look like they'd fit the name.

My first thought was Airwolf -- maybe it's a retooled version of the Kyugo game like Crossfire on the Genesis was.

It's entirely possible this was a game commissioned by Romstar (like Championship Bowling) that naver saw release in Japan (like Baseball Stars II). Maybe a port of Twin Hawk? Taito/Toaplan plane shmup fro 1989, saw a release on them Mega Drive apparently...

[handofg0d]

[TheRedEye]

[handofg0d]

While researching Visco, I found that they released Rally Bike (NES) in Japan under the name "Dash Yarou". So to clear that up Toaplan developed and Taito published it in the Arcades. The NES port was (presumabley) developed (ported) and published by Visco in JP and published by Romstar in US.

Other possibilities for Airhawk are:
Sky Soldiers (SNK) Arcade 89
Meta Fox (Seta) Arcade 89
Aqua Jack (Taito) Arcade 90 (Less likely due to technical limitations of the NES)

These are all shmups Romstar brought to the US from the appropriate timeframe that are earth based.

Others are:
Fire Shark (Toaplan) Genesis 90
Air Strike Patrol (Seta) SNES 94 (I'm pushing it)

These are all shmups from the appropriate timeframe that are earth based that are developed by common Romstar partners.

Also, sorry I didn't notice dimitri's post state pretty much the same thing as me about Rally Bike/World Champ.

[Kid Fenris]