What happened to Dungeon Explorer?

Written by Jim Squires

Monday, 01 January 2007 13:02

Everybody's spending today griping at Nintendo about its paltry New Year's Day release list for the Virtual Console and I don't blame them. Nobody was looking forward to Urban Champion and Baseball -- nobody. But I wouldn't go holding Nintendo's feet too close to the fire on this one -- it looks like these weren't supposed to be the only two titles to hit today.

According to the official Hudson Entertainment website, the highly anticipated TurboGrafx-16 Zelda-style adventure Dungeon Explorer should have been joining the all-NES crapfest. So what happened?

If you'll forgive my editorializing for a minute, I'd just like to voice my utter disappointment with Hudson. When the VC first hit a little over a month ago, Hudson seemed to be the only company to have their head screwed on right. They were priced appropriately, they were posting games everybody could get excited about - they started out as the model that all othe companies should have been looking to. But rather quickly, things unravelled. First it was Military Madness - a game with broken emulation that Hudson has refused to comment on, patch, or pull. Then it was R-Type being priced 200 points above all of their previous releases. Now its this - a week without a new title despite the fact that the site has promised one. Not cool Hudson. Not cool at all.

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written by bits bytes pixels & sprite, January 02, 2007

[...] Yesterday I posted about the undelivered promise of New Year’s dungeon crawling courtesy of the TG16 classic Dungeon Explorer. I’d then gone on to give a pretty scathing account of Hudson’s VC-related fall from grace. Well, it looks like I may have been a little quick to judge. Not only have they offered an explanation (although doing so BEFORE the anticipated release would have been nice) but they seem to have offered a bit of a mea culpa regarding Military Madness as well. They didn’t mention Military Madness directly, but you can see how they intended to include it in the scope of what they said. Kind of like when your drunken/abusive father gets you a Christmas present after he’s been on a bender. It’s not really an apology per se, but you know what he means. Here’s the official word from my favorite Hudsonite as of late, John Master Lee; As astute fans may have figured out by now, Dungeon Explorer did not hit the street date as intended. It appears that there were some last minute bugs that needed to be addressed, so we have decided to hold back to see what can be done. [...]