Onthe back pages of some classic video game manuals, there’s occasionally a credits list for key members of the teams that worked on the project. At the end of the Snoopy Tennis Game Boy Color booklet, Infogrames, the publisher, has a nice healthy list of contributors. But there’s also a lonely logo for “Mermaid Studios” with a blank space underneath where the developer names should have been.
Internet searches return similar missing information about the developer. MobyGames credits are greyed out. GameSpot info is empty. GiantBomb leaves the developer name out completely. WikiPedia is barely more than a stub. But Mario Tennis has a bunch of credits info. Ditto for Pokémon and Zelda from around the same period of time. For an indie title in the early days of video game history, this might not be strange, but here was a major publisher with a high-profile license, and also a “modern” game released years after the internet solidified a gaming community rich in data and story. Where was the info about Mermaid Studios? Who was this secret bunch that slipped past the gate and delivered a lob shot over the heads of the gaming industry?