4 replies to this topic

[Ace Kaller]

So, I stumled onto a sort of random junk shop the other day and was poking around because they seemed to have alot of old gaming stuff, and sure enough, I found a couple of older Battletech products. One of them left me a little confused, it was a copy of the Tech Readout 3055, but it was the "revised edition", which I have never seen before (Hell, my TRO:3055 is one of the old school copies with the omni fighters section in the back all messed up). So I got to poking around it a little, noticed a few differences, and checked it out on the wiki when I got back to my computer.

Now, I know the whole story about the unseen, but to me, the Unseen were always just the old school mechs that I grew up with (Warhammer, Archer, etc, basically from TRO:3025), I never noticed that a chunk of the clan mechs from the TRO3055 ended up Unseen as well. I can only surmise it has something to do with the fact that some of the images were credited to "Victor Musical Industries". I figure this is the quickest way to get the scoop on what exactly the whole deal with those mechs going unseen is, anyone know what's up with those mechs from the TRO3055

[Arctic Fox]

You are correct about the reason for that. Victor Musical Industries is the Japanese company that created the art for the Clan Second-Line 'Mechs in TRO:3055. When the whole Unseen mess happened, it was decided that all art that wasn't created by FASA in-house would be pulled, so despite these 'Mechs being original BattleTech designs, rather than originating from Macross/Dougram/Crusher Joe, they too were made Unseen.

The Project Phoenix section in the FanPro/Catalyst printed Technical Readout: 3055 Upgrade has Reseen art for all of them.

Edited by Arctic Fox, 22 August 2012 - 11:46 AM.

[MilitantMonk]

Here's a little bit of what I remember about all that.

Victor did the designs for them to spice up the color section of the book. Suffice to say Victor kept the rights to them and in general they were poorly received since they looked a little too anime style compared to the rest of the Battletech universe.

Lesson of the story. Don't rent out talent without getting the rights to the results.

[Ace Kaller]

Yeah, they were some of the worst looking mechs ever, even worse than the Re-seen versions of alot of the classics

[shuboy]

A little known fact is that FASA also got a Japanese studio (I think it might have been Studio Nue) to draw new designs for the Unseen (well this was before they were called the Unseen) when Battletech was localized for Japan. This was due to the fact that that all the Mech designs in the game were probably too familiar to the Japanese so FASA changed the art.