Sunsoft to crowdfund ports of three forgotten Famicom releases

’80s titles planned for rerelease on Switch and PC

Old-school cool developer Sunsoft has announced that it is planning a crowdfunding campaign in hopes to bring three of its Japan-only Famicom releases to modern platforms. The campaign will officially launch on the Japanese crowdfunding site Campfire between July 14 – August 31.

The three titles up for rerelease are Edo-set platformer Kanshaku Tamanage Kantarou no Toukaidou Gojuusan-tsugi (1986), side-scrolling fantasy adventure The Wing of Madoola (1986), and finally the casually-paced text adventure Ripple Island (1988). None of the titles ventured outside of Japan and thus have since faded into obscurity, a status that Sunsoft is hoping to revitalize.

Should the Campfire campaign prove successful, the three titles will be ported to PC and Nintendo Switch. In addition, the publisher is hoping to release physical gold cartridges of the games for the Famicom platform. Way back when, Sunsoft was one of the few companies allowed to release its titles on specially branded cartridges, (see image above), and while many of the studio’s games were awarded this prestige, gold-tinted cartridges were a goal never achieved by the studio. Hopefully, Sunsoft will be able to realize its glittery dream, if 40 years after the fact.

Localizations for the titles were not confirmed, and seem unlikely, but we will let you know should this change.

Sunsoft plans crowdfunding campaign to port three Famicom titles to Switch, PC [Gematsu]

Chris Moyse

Senior Editor – Chris has been playing video games since the 1980s and writing about them since the 1880s. Graduated from Galaxy High with honors. Twitter: @ChrisxMoyse