1986 was also the year when Ken Williams made his first business trip to Japan. His intentions with the trip was to set up methods of selling Sierra software there. He traveled there with the impression that he could teach the Japanese a thing or two about computer gaming and perhaps sell a few products to them. What he found there was a total surprise. The Japanese computer gaming industry was not at all behind the American. On the contrary, they were way ahead of them. Nintendo, a company few people in America had even heard about yet, had already sold their Famicom console to over 4 million Japanese homes, and games like Super Mario Brothers were well known in the whole country. The games themselves were outstanding for the day, with stereo soundtracks and incredible graphics. Ken soon realized that it was the Japanese that could teach him, not vice versa. The trip ended up with one game bought instead of several sold. It was the action game Thexder that had captured Ken's interest. Sierra aquired the rights to port and publish the game in the U.S. from Game Arts, the Japanese publisher.
Thexder was a phenomenal success when it reached the shelves just before Christmas 1986. It became Sierra's bestselling game in 1987 and cooperation with Japanese publishers continued throughout the late 80's.—The History of Sierra Entertainment
It was soon ported to MSX and Famicom, but originally Hibiki Godai and Satoshi Uesaka programmed Thexder for the NEC PC-8801. The graphics adapter of this platform had only the four binary colors, but at the relatively high resolution of 640×200. (This may seem like a weird resolution, but actually it comes quite natural when you have 8×8 characters on a 80×25 screen. IBM's Color Graphics Adapter had the same maximum resolution. Like the IBM PC, the NEC PC was not designed as a game platform, and text mode was more important than graphics mode.)
When Sierra ported Thexder to various US platforms, they left the graphics unchanged on those that supported a similar mode. This was the case on the Amiga, Apple ][GS, the PC's Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and, later, the color Macintosh. On the PC, the colors were different, on the other platforms it looked exactly the same. This makes the game somewhat exotic. As far as I know, under EGA the 640×200 resolution was used only for PC-88/PC-98 ports like Railroad Empire or the Koei strategy games. On the Amiga, the high resolution was used rarely, the few examples include Dark Seed and Hannibal.
The business relation between Sierra and Game Arts continued, and it made games like Silpheed, Sorcerian, Zeliard, or the Ys series known outside Japan.
