Engine Software – Bringing over No More Heroes 1&2

Engine Software – Bringing over No More Heroes 1&2

Engine Software, the studio which ported No More Heroes 1 & 2 to the Nintendo Switch, talked in an interview about how they ported the acclaimed games.

Engine Software co-founder and vice president Ruud van de Moosdijk mentioned in the interview how the ports for Nintendo Switch came to be and they revealed that they approached Grasshopper Manufacture through NIS America once they had finished worked on Killer 7.

They spoke with Suda51, who was in Seattle, as they were told by the company that he would love to work with them.

Engine Software interview highlights

How did the Switch versions of No More Heroes 1 and 2 come to be? Who reached out to who?

We first got in touch with Grasshopper Manufacture through NIS America when we worked on the PC port of Killer7. During the final stages of that port we received word that Suda51 would be in Seattle giving interviews at PAX, and that he would love to meet with us.

That is when we discussed for the first time doing a project directly with Grasshopper after Killer7 was done. We had follow-up meetings at GDC and E3 the following year to finalize the No More Heroes project. We then flew to Tokyo to visit Grasshopper’s offices and meet with people from Marvelous.

What sort of work was actually involved in terms of the porting process?

There is a ton of work that is involved with porting an older game to a newer system, especially since you never really know what kind of state the source material is in. Is the archive complete? Do the tools still work? How is the code structured? What kind of formats are used for the graphical assets etc. etc. Our first step is always to get the original sources to work in a modern development environment.

There are some “standard” steps that you already know you will have to take with any port. Remapping of controls or updating the UI for example, but you do not *really* know what you will be running into until you have the base game working and see all the problems.

How long did it take to port the No More Heroes games to Switch?

It took us about five to six months start to finish of pure development time. So that excludes all legal steps and evaluation of the source material, and discussions about what we want the port to be.