Variety of reasons I believe: anti-poaching, preferring to go by their gamer tag, not really industry standard at the time (Yoko Shimomura for example did a lot of iconic early Capcom stuff but it was credited as “Capcom Music Team”), gaming seen as a “lesser” industry so people didn’t want to be associated with it, corporate egos, anti-doxxing (yes, even back in the day. Gaming was a small industry). It really depends on the country/company etc.
It’s actually gotten to a point where certain older games getting ported are actually entirely credited to the porting team rather than the OG creators. I know the Metroid ports had their OG creator credits removed (not sure if they were patched back in or not), and it was a minor kerfuffle. It’s a topic discussed in game preservation spaces with some frequency.
Old ports are iffy. Often they were written from scratch with new assets resembling the originals thrown in. I could see limited storage and memory making a lot of extra work, cleaning up code to make room for crediting people who basically only served as inspiration for this version of the game. Meanwhile, the publishers are breathing down the devs’ necks, trying to get the ports to market as quickly as possible.
It’s a dick move to remove existing credits, though.
I was wondering if “Booby Master” got his nickname from having BRA initials that would show up on high-score tables.
Somewhat off-topic: I was in another post about Colecovision and thought this was funny: Donkey Kong by Nintendo ported to Atari 2600 by Coleco and distributed by Sega. Around the time of the big video game crash, everyone’s just doing whatever they can for a paycheck.
Variety of reasons I believe: anti-poaching, preferring to go by their gamer tag, not really industry standard at the time (Yoko Shimomura for example did a lot of iconic early Capcom stuff but it was credited as “Capcom Music Team”), gaming seen as a “lesser” industry so people didn’t want to be associated with it, corporate egos, anti-doxxing (yes, even back in the day. Gaming was a small industry). It really depends on the country/company etc.
It’s actually gotten to a point where certain older games getting ported are actually entirely credited to the porting team rather than the OG creators. I know the Metroid ports had their OG creator credits removed (not sure if they were patched back in or not), and it was a minor kerfuffle. It’s a topic discussed in game preservation spaces with some frequency.
you’re right it was primarily due to anti-poaching. Many Japanese publishers forbade their devs to use their real names out of fear that another company would try to hire the devs for their own games: https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-heres-why-japanese-video-game-companies-often-didnt-credit-their-developers
Old ports are iffy. Often they were written from scratch with new assets resembling the originals thrown in. I could see limited storage and memory making a lot of extra work, cleaning up code to make room for crediting people who basically only served as inspiration for this version of the game. Meanwhile, the publishers are breathing down the devs’ necks, trying to get the ports to market as quickly as possible.
It’s a dick move to remove existing credits, though.
I was wondering if “Booby Master” got his nickname from having BRA initials that would show up on high-score tables.
Somewhat off-topic: I was in another post about Colecovision and thought this was funny: Donkey Kong by Nintendo ported to Atari 2600 by Coleco and distributed by Sega. Around the time of the big video game crash, everyone’s just doing whatever they can for a paycheck.