Strider II - LORE SHOCK

Strider II is a game put out by U.S. Gold and likely developed by Tiertex for the Sega Megadrive: it released in March 1993 in Europe.
The United States release would come in August of the same year, under the name of Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns. The Game Gear version also came out under that name.
The Master System would also get his share of british Strider II fun.
All of Strider II's versions and regions released in 1993.


About U.S. Gold

U.S. Gold, the group and publisher responsible for what we're about to play, was a British company, even though their name leads to other conclusions. They handled a lot of computer releases on various platforms, and developed and published games from 1984 to 1996, when the group was acquired by Eidos.
The company was founded in April 1984 by Geoff Brown in order for Centresoft to have a publishing division.
The core of the development team were actually Silicon Dreams and Core design: the former was a result of their own employees, whereas the latter was an acquired studio.
Amusingly, they did have an American subsidiary, U.S. Gold Inc., established on January the 25th, 1992. They would handle the North American Genesis release of Flashback, among other things, so perhaps we have to thank them for the comic included in that game's manual in the States.

Let's bring up some figures to highlight how successful of a business U.S. Gold was from the very start, importing American games and reselling them at a lower price:
by 1985, U.S. Gold projected a turnover of US$6 million for their first fiscal year, and expected to release further 150 games in the year to come. In 1988, U.S. Gold received the Golden Joystick Award for "Software House of the Year".

In April 1996, Eidos Interactive acquired the entire CentreGold umbrella (including U.S. Gold) for GB£17.6 million.


The origins of the name have to do with Geoff Brown's admiration with American videogames; he started importing them and then eventually ran into the need of a brand to sell other people's game with.
Geoff Brown made a move into the stock market with his succesful company in an attempt to cash in more after his efforts and struggles, but it would prove to be a bit difficult to be understood in that business as a videogame person, at the time.
You can find a personal interview with Geoff Brown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve7YJB1yhHs


U.S. Gold and the Strider license

Most people know Strider as a Capcom game, but this Strider II seems to be the result of U.S. Gold having the license to port the original game.
Capcom would later release their own Strider 2 in 1999 for arcade cabinets and the Sony PlayStation.


US gold had handled all of the overseas pc conversions of the original 1989 arcade game: Amstrad cpc, Commodore 64 and Amiga, ZX Spectrum.
The Sharp X68000 version was handled by Capcom themselves, while Sega took care of the MegaDrive and MasterSystem versions, as Capcom had a deal with Nintendo at the time that wouldn't let them develop for other consoles; a PC Engine CD version was also released later in 1994 and handled by Nec.

Another company of interest to US Gold is Tiertex: established in 1987 in the UK as Tiertex Limited, they would churn out an impressive amount of games for U.S. Gold, but also a number of other publishers such as EA, Activision, THQ, LEGO Media and BBC Worldwide up to the early 2000s.
Back in the day though, for US Gold, they didn't exactly build a quality reputation as they would produce heaps of computer ports which were likely done in an incredibly short amount of time and deemed good enough by U.S. Gold.
Tiertex did provide full development services to publishers, from game design to coding, doing the graphics and audio, providing the tools for themselves and testing.

Perhaps the most infamous quote is about the Strider version that never happened on the Sam Coupè, a computer that failed straight away mainly due to a delayed release and consequent low support:

“If, as with Strider, we’ve already produced a games across all common formats, all we have to do is simply take the code from the Speccy version and the graphics from the ST and sort of mix them together. This should take one bloke around two weeks at most.”

And, more to the detail:

We're getting a very experienced programmer at Tiertex called Chris Brunning to produce a SAM version of Strider for us. Supposedly it'll only take two weeks using our existing Speccy code and ST graphics, but we'll have to see. In my mind I picture it looking a bit like a Konix console game - lots of colours, but without the resolution of the ST, so it'll all look a bit duller and flatter. It's a bit of a try-out for us - if it does really well we'll be happy to continue to support it, but we could still come across any number of problems"

If you're interested in knowing more about the Sam Coupé, here is a link to a brief and well done article: https://www.worldofsam.org/products/sam-coupe

The U.S. Gold legacy

The last game to be released with the U.S. Logo would be Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, released in June of that year, three months after Eidos Interactive bought U.S. Gold: the aftermath of this process was Eidos selling off CentreSoft and Silicon Dreams but keeping Core Design as an owned development studio; they also discarded the U.S. Gold brand, whose father Geoff Brown Holdings didn't bother bringing back when he bought Silicon Dreams back from Eidos to found GBH, Geoff Brown Holdings.
GBH would then change its name into Kaboom Group after founding Audiomotion and acquiring Attention to Detail; they'd also acquire Pivotal Games.
Kaboom Group died out in August 2003: Silicon Dreams would finally be closed, and so would Attention to Detail; Pivotal Games would be acquired by SCi, who were, ironically, the owners of Eidos by then.
Pivotal also closed on August 2008, whereas Audiomotion Studios now works as a contract company for not only the game, but also the movie business, with motion capture services. That was also a quite innovative and succesful company, working even on material such as Robbie Williams and The Gladiator, even winning an MTV award for the former.


The box artwork

The Strider II artwork used on the MegaDrive box art, also used for the game gear and master system versions, was painted by Julie Bell: the work is entitled Night of the Killer Mechs.
Julie Bell is a very succesful artist and is married to Boris Vallejo, another well known artist who was also commissioned some videogame box artworks.
Here is their website, should you like to indulge yourself in some beautiful artworks.
https://www.borisjulie.com/
You can also buy the originals for some thousand dollars.

She seems to have done around 16 videogame cover arts, according to Mobygames, including MegaDrive games Caesar no Yabou II (Warrior of Rome II),  Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls, Eternal Champions and Splatterhouse 3.


Composer

About the composer, I am absolutely clueless and open to suggestions. Project2612 has him credited with the alias of XOR, but no other game has that credit and I can't find further information.
He is even listed under the List of unknown aliases and full names here on the VGMPF wiki (Video Game Music Preservation Foundation).
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/List_of_unknown_aliases_and_full_names
Tiertex never included credits in their games so this is one of those videogame development Mysteries.
Somebody from Tiertex who could possibly be XOR would be one of the following individuals from their audio staff: Donald Campbell, Mike Davies, John Hancock, Mark Ortiz, John Prince, Mark Tait.
What we do know, however, is what sound engine was used: the one made by Donald Campbell.
He wrote a sound driver which would convert MIDI files to the MegaDrive; it was used in 12 games for the system, including two titles already played in the Megamarathon: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Winter Olympic Games: Lillehammer '94.
He also wrote the sound driver used by Tiertex for their Master System games, which was programmed in Z80 Assembly and required music to be written with that.
Donald Campbell was actually Tiertex's founder along with John Prince; he graduated from the University of Bradford for Electric and Electronic Engineering in 1987 and founded the company in that same year.
They didn't suffer as bad of a fate as U.S. Gold, as they're apparently still operative.
Donald Campbell is maintaining a manager role at Tiertex, as he's also working as a director in a company that offers estimations to the domestic construction industry, Proquant Estimating Limited.