Factor 5 GmbH

The "Pegasus system", a development system consisting of custom built hardware and custom assemblers and tools, which they started to work on in 1987, is later adapted to the Atari ST and in 1992 implemented on Super Famicom/Super Nintendo and Mega Drive.

Contributed by Sciere.

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Factor 5 came from the demo programming, hacker scene in the 80's. Their first game was Katakis for the Amiga, released in 1988. A game showing some similarities in gameplay to R-Type. Funny to note, that Activision Europe sued them at once, as they held the rights for R-Type (would the same tactics be used today, eg., id Software could basically sue every company releasing a 3D shooter).

However, it became more ridiculous, taken from an interview with Julian Eggebrecht: "...Activision Europe (a completely different company from today's Activision) promptly sued us, since they held the rights for R-Type (laughs). And for the right to keep selling Katakis, we had to -- this is pretty funny -- we had to do the official R-Type conversion for Amiga because Activision couldn't find any programmers. So they threatened to sue us if we didn't do the conversion. Quite frankly, that was a dream come true for us -- we never expected anything like that. We all came from the hacker scene, demo programming, back in the 80s. To be able to do R-Type for such a big company, that was simply incredible. Those were three brutal months. First R-Type, then Turrican. And Turrican turned into a gigantic success in Europe."

Contributed by Robert Teichmann.