Rocket Company IS Smilesoft

Discuss Smilesoft/Rocket Company in general here.
GoldenPower(imported)
Posts: 13
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2015 11:22 am

Re: Rocket Company IS Smilesoft

Post by GoldenPower(imported) »

sorry, when I wrote that reply, I dont know anything of YKW, but is true....
sorry, when I wrote that reply, I dont know anything of YKW, but is true....
kmeisthax
Posts: 128
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2010 3:20 pm

Re: Rocket Company IS Smilesoft

Post by kmeisthax »

Uh, so, I was looking for any sort of citation for that "owner got busted for child prostitution thing". The citation URL fails to resolve. Archive.org has three hits for that URL, all of which are 301s or 404s. So all the proof of this is gone.

In search of better information I searched Shuhei's name written in kanji (飯田 就平) and got nothing but the Japanese Wikipedia page for Rocket Company. My Japanese skills are terrible, but I couldn't find any sort of mention of the president being arrested or anything. I did notice this interesting little paragraph...
wrote:2016年7月1日に親会社のイマジニアへ吸収合併され解散。
So, from my extremely limited and not very good Japanese skills, I believe that means that Rocket Company was fully dissolved and it's assets subsumed into the Imagineer mothership in July of this year. Depending on the situation it could mean that they just renamed the studio, shut it down, sold the assets, etc.

Most of what I said before still stands. I will point out that since 2011 there's been a rise in companies taking properties considered non-valuable and releasing them anyway. For example, the absolutely shittastic Bubsy series got a Steam release by a retro publisher called Retroism. Bubsy. So there's a growing chance that the Telefang franchise might get picked up again or reused in some cynical way in the future. Especially if the rights have been subsumed into a massive publisher that doesn't care about them and would rather just make a quick buck reselling them.
Kimbles(imported)
Posts: 470
Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 3:17 am

Re: Rocket Company IS Smilesoft

Post by Kimbles(imported) »

To shed some more light on this... Rocket company is indeed officially gone, along with Delta-Arts, the company that was developing the recent Medarot RPGs for them. These blog posts sum up the situation pretty well:
https://projectrisingbeetle.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/medarot-rpg-developer-delta-arts-has-closed/
https://projectrisingbeetle.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/imagineer-absorbs-rocket-company/
The press release specifically mentioned them transferring ownership of Medarot, but no mention of Telefang. :/ They never made any references to Telefang ever though, so it's not really surprising.

As for the Smilesoft president's arrest... I don't have any doubts that it's true, but it does look like the news articles related to it have completely fallen off the internet (it was 2003 after all). The first place I saw it was on a Japanese Medarot fansite in 2009, which hosted a backup of the (then gone) news article from the Mainichi Shimbun website for proof... Said page on the fansite never got archive-crawled before it died though, so it's long gone now. :P
Further searching leads me to this Japanese blog post from 2007 where the author talks about boycotting one of Rocket Company's kanji study games because of it. The bold text is apparently taken straight from the print news article from Mainichi Shimbun via a newspaper database, but the blog author admits that they don't have the original source to confirm it. I also found a different blog post with some 2ch posts at the top discussing the arrest. One of the posters pasted the text from the same article, so that's two places referencing it at least.

Basically, the article says that Iida Shuuhei, president of the game company "Smilesoft", was arrested for engaging in prostitution with a 15 year old girl who he met on an online dating site. Apparently he was "dating with compensation" by paying her ~$500 in addition to gifts such as a cellphone, and a hotel was involved. (Yikes.)

Article text:
Spoiler!
女子中生を買春、ゲームソフト製作会社社長を逮捕
(神奈川2003/04/11, 毎日新聞 地方版, 25ページ, , 239文字)

 麻生署は10日、インターネットの出会い系サイトで知り合った女子中学生に買春行為を行ったとして、 東京都世田谷区上野毛3、ゲームソフト製作会社 「スマイルソフト」(本社・東京都渋谷区)代表取締役社長、飯田就平容疑者(36) を児童買春禁止法違反容疑で逮捕した。
 調べでは、飯田容疑者は昨年12月12日と今年1月15日の2回にわたり、川崎市内に住む当時中学3年生の女子(15) に現金約5万円や携帯電話などを与え、都内のホテルでみだらな行為をした疑い。容疑を認めているという。【伊藤直孝】 (新聞データベースより)
kmeisthax
Posts: 128
Joined: Sat Dec 04, 2010 3:20 pm

Re: Rocket Company IS Smilesoft

Post by kmeisthax »

Well, I suppose the only good news is that nobody will ever DMCA the Telefang translation... if only because nobody seems to care who owns it at this point.

Thanks for the detective work on the Iida scandal.
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