Tradewest

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Tradewest's logo.

Tradewest, was an American video game publisher founded in 1986 by former SNK US Vice President John Rowe, and bankers Leland Cook and his son Byron Cook. The company began by publishing SNK arcade games in the US. In 1987, they purchased Cinematronics and renamed it Leland Corporation to function as their own developer. The company published games in the North American and European regions for the arcade, NES, Game Boy, Genesis, Game Gear, SNES, and Jaguar. They primarily published the games of Rare and their own Leland Corporation, but also published games developed by SNK, Technos, and Sculptured Software. In 1994, Tradewest was acquired by WMS Industries and renamed to Williams Entertainment. The brand was revived by a holding company in 2009, but it disappeared again in 2013.

I learned about Tradewest in the late-1980s because the company published the NES port of Double Dragon. While I didn't really pay much attention to video game publishers at the time, my brother got the game the same Christmas I got Bad Dudes which was published by Data East, and the contrast between east and west in the publisher's names was interesting enough to stay in my memory. I remember seeing Tradewest on Battletoads after that, but that was pretty much it. Most of the other titles published by Tradewest were sports or racing games which I had little interest in.

Games

These are the games Tradewest published that are important to me:

NES

Media

Documentation

Links

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