Pirate's Treasure

Summary
Pirate's Treasure (海賊の宝) was a game released on November 17th, 1987 in Japan and December 19th, 1987 in America. The game was developed by Ocean Games (海ゲーム) and was published and distributed by Namco (ナムコ). The game launched on the NES (鼻), Famicom (ファミコン), and the Master System (マスタシステム). The game was a pirate adventure game and cost 30.00 USD in America or 3350 yen in Japan.

Development
Pirate's Treasure was the work of the companies leading designer, Yoshioka Koizumi (小泉義昭). Koizumi imagined a pirate game after seeing a Japanese stage play about the swashbuckling adventures of a pirate in 1985. He imagined a game much like Nintendo's (任天堂) new Legend of Zelda (ゼルダの伝説) game, just with a seafaring theme. He brought the idea up to a higher-up at the company who told Koizumi that the game wasn't what the company wanted at that point in time. However, after the failure of Ocean Games newest game, Neo Racer 2, they brought the idea back to Koizumi a year later, asking him to begin development and save the companies reputation. Koizumi thankfully said yes.

The game officially began development on January 27th, 1987, only 10 months before the game officially released in Japan. The game was never changed significantly during its small development.

The game never had many problems in development, with the only major problem being the bugs. Of course, the game would have the Ocean Games signature litany of bugs in every game, which for this game, involved not enough development time to fix every issue.

Launch
Pirate's Treasure received great scores and sold around 100 units in its first initial week on the market. Overall those sales numbers grew to be around 745k in total, becoming the bestselling Ocean Games game up to that point. The project did so well, that the Japanese manga magazine Hobby's Jump (ホビーズジャンプ ) created a limited manga series which lasted for only 1 year because in 1988 the magazine shut down. During the same time, there was a Neo Racer (ネオレーサー) manga running on the same magazine.