Fight club

Brandon Cobb is out of sync with the times. He recently traded his old car for a “new” 1999 Honda Civic. His 8-year-old PC runs Windows 98. He refuses to get high-speed Internet, though he’s often doing time-sensitive business with overseas clients. He’s a rabid fan of the band Chicago.

Chicago? Like “Peter Cetera” Chicago?

“‘Peter Cetera’ Chicago, yeah,” the 30-something clarified.

Cobb is president, CEO, art director, lead writer and the only quality-assurance tester for Santee-based Super Fighter Team (www.superfighter.com), a company with a unique business model: manufacturing new, licensed, English-language versions of video games for old video-game consoles.

In December, the company released its second commercial game, the Legend of Wukong. However, Wukong wouldn’t have been possible if not for the success of Super Fighter Team’s first release, Beggar Prince.

Three years ago, Cobb took the role-playing game—which was developed for Chinese Sega consoles in 1996 but never made it to the U.S.—and translated it to English. He then found reputable factories in China that were willing to produce cases and custom cartridge molds that would fit Western game systems. Beggar Prince looks like something from Sega Genesis’ heyday: It comes complete with new cover art; a plastic clamshell storage box; a full-color, 26-page instruction manual; and a cartridge that works in any old-school Genesis.

Cobb’s revised version of the Beggar Prince was unique in retro-gaming—it was a complete package, made to run on actual Sega Genesis consoles instead of through what’s known as emulation. Emulation involves taking an existing foreign video game, hacking it and translating it for Western audiences to play on their computers using software that mimics, or emulates, old hardware like the Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo. Think of it as trying to play a record on a CD player. You could do it, but it means rebuilding the CD player and changing it beyond recognition.

In most cases, emulation is done without the consent of the game’s original publishers, and so it must be distributed discreetly through the Internet. There’s also a growing market for legal emulation—all the big “next-gen” systems, like the Xbox series and Nintendo’s Wii, have retro-gaming options. San Diego-based developer The Behemoth has found great success with Castle Crashers, a retro-tinged title available only for download on the Xbox 360.

So, why would Super Fighter Team release a game exclusively for consoles you can no longer buy in the store? Doing otherwise, Cobb said, would be selling out.

“I would look at that as just ripping the heart out of the damn thing and just running over it,” he said.

Almost like a vinyl aficionado who helps keeps hole-in-the-wall indie record shops in business, Cobb is sincere on this point, almost Luddite.

“If you’re into the system, you own it,” he added.

Cobb’s first love was Super Fighter, made by C&E Inc., the same Taiwanese company that originally produced BeggarPrince. Super Fighter is similar to the more widely known Street Fighter series—a game that’s seen a number of sequels since its release in 1987.

In 2001, Cobb acquired the rights from C&E to distribute Super Fighter in the U.S. To drum up interest in the obscure game, he offered the MS-DOS version as a no-cost download with the intention of porting the game to consoles.

“What ended up happening was, I realized: We’re giving this thing away for free and nobody cares,” he said. He learned that even a labor of love needs savvy marketing. “You get a flyer; you throw it away. But if you sell the flyer, then somebody wants it for some reason.”

Releasing Beggar Prince was originally conceived as a way for Super Fighter Team to raise the money to develop and release its namesake game. Instead, Beggar Prince taught Cobb that the niche retro-games market is not for the meek.

After selling the first 900 copies, Cobb revised Beggar Prince, fixing a bug that prevented players from saving the game on certain Genesis models. He also changed the cover art, giving the package a more polished look. These changes caused some backlash from retro-gaming fans who’d bought the first run of the game, some of whom accused Cobb of revising Beggar Prince just to get them to purchase the newer version. But Cobb defends his choices.

“I would not have been able to live with it had I said ‘OK, we have Beggar Prince come out again and it’s exactly the same: Bad art, no save on these systems. Hey, I can fix it, I just don’t want to, because I want to put out the game again, inferior, and make money.’ It’s not about that,” he said. “It’s about giving people the right product.”

Super Fighter Team applied the lessons learned from stumbling through the Beggar Prince revisions to Legend of Wukong, a role-playing game similar to Beggar Prince.

“I’ve seen way too many good projects—games, software, whatever—go to the toilet because the person doesn’t have enough support from the outside, so he then lets that destroy his own determination to make the product the best, and he just quits,” he said. “That isn’t good for anybody, because everyone loses out. Nine times out of 10, someone’s going to write you an e-mail or a letter or whatever and say what you’re doing is crap and they hate it. Very rarely does anyone say it’s great. You’ve got to be able to not listen to it—know better.”