While doing a bit of research on Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling Gekitou Densetsu, I came across another New Japan Pro Wrestling title published by Tomy – 1999’s Shin Nihon Pro-Wrestling: Tōkon Retsuden for Wonderswan. The screenshot I stumbled over instantly looked familiar, and upon closer inspection, I can say that the wrestler sprites, the ring, the crowd in the background, the UI – it all looks very very much like what’s in the few screenshots we have of the VB game (https://www.virtual-boy.com/games/shin-nihon-pro-wrestling-gekitou-densetsu/images/959496/) and the leaflet (https://www.virtual-boy.com/games/shin-nihon-pro-wrestling-gekitou-densetsu/images/1043155/). With a little smaller field of view and thus less scrolling obviously, due to the smaller pixel dimensions of the WS screen (224×144) compared to the VB’s (384×224). Presentation, menus, title screen look similar as well. The WS game has exactly the same four modes as the VB game, and the six wrestlers in the WS game were all in the VB game as well (plus two additional ones for a total of 8).
Convince yourselves! Screenshots below (courtesy of MobyGames).
The developer of the WS game, Tose Co. Ltd., a Japanese contract developer, also developed Virtual Bowling for Athena and did some work on Mario’s Tennis, so they clearly had Virtual Boy development equipment and made good use of it. All this leads me to believe that Tose also developed the VB version and later more or less ported the game to Wonderswan.
Should be fun trying to recreate some of the Virtual Boy version screenshots with art from the WS version. 🙂
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Here’s some mock ups I did yesterday. I didn’t bother too much with pixel accuracy, with replacing the sub title on the title screen, etc. Just a quick “what could’ve been”.
