I wasn't sure when to start working on this video, because I thought whatever I was looking at, it
was going to keep going forever. I wasn't sure how to put a cap on it. Even while I'm writing this,
and while I'm reading it, I'm going to have to add more to this script. I don't know where to
start the story here. I could start a few weeks ago when I found out about the situation. I could
start sometime in 2015 where the documentation on this case starts. Or I could start 30 years
ago when an obscure Japanese gamedev crew got together and made a suggestively-illustrated
Arkanoid clone for home computers. I've decided to start this right now this minute.
Right now, gaming archival as a concept is a huge topic that can easily get more and more obscure
and intricate. Websites can dedicate themselves to recording information about games, vaguely,
but then as you zoom in, it gets more complex when it comes to recording and fact-checking credits,
credits for games made in an era where listing developers and artists weren't even a given for
a title. For a Japan-exclusive game, made for a Japan-exclusive console, by an adult games
company without as much as a Wikipedia article. This is the most fragile possible information,
not only because only a select few people know about it, but because even fewer people would care
enough to seek it out, and even fewer still, maybe even no one, would question and cross-reference
the data once they found it. I'm trying to say eloquently that anyone could just come and make
random shit up. Maybe though, the obscurity of these titles also protects them from vandalism,
since most people would rather make rumors about things people recognize, things with
larger communities dedicated to them. There's no good reason for someone to make stuff up here,
there's no clout to it, nothing. Maybe, with no one needing to lie, there is a shield.
Last month I found out about Custom, a small video game development imprint in Japan with members
such as Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. These two composers went on to soundtrack games like
Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics, and multiple other Square Enix titles after their time with
the company. Custom faded into obscurity in the late 90s after its staff either moved up or moved
out of the games industry. I'm definitely not a Japanese computer buff, pretty much everything
in this video is out of my range of experience. The reason I read up on Custom is because on The
Cutting Room Floor, a games documentation website where any user can add information, I saw the tip
of an iceberg. In 2019, a user joined the wiki specifically to edit the page of one of Custom's
better known titles: Cyberblock Metal Orange EX for the Sharp X68000. The editor decided that the
article needed updating, changing the developer and publisher titles from "Cybertech Custom" to
"MetroVG Studio Cybertech Custom (ex-Cybertech Custom)". Various pages had their developers
changed from "Metro" to "MetroVG SE", a couple were changed to "MetroVG Studio Sikamed A.S.".
Another changed to "MetroVG Studio Tsuburaya Productions Co .Ltd". No sources were provided,
and ultimately the account was banned in a few months for inserting false information. But that
was in 2019, and this is 2022, so how did I find out now? Someone in The Cutting Room Floor Discord
server shared this tweet by GSK, stating that "one of Japan's most well-credentialed VGM historians
is currently getting into it with some Bulgarian guy who's selling music from various Japanese
computer games under the dubious assertion that he worked on their music." That historian is Hally,
real name Haruhisa Tanaka, a composer who has done decades of research on video game music in Japan.
That Bulgarian, on the other hand, is the Cutting Room Floor editor. He is the creator of MetroVG.
He is Yusup Dalmaz. He is the iceberg. Back in April, Hally made a tweet about suspicious Spotify
listings of a few different game soundtracks, saying this person was essentially bootlegging
the albums and making money off the streaming as a result. Indeed, YouTube playthroughs of
the games now have Content ID connected to these re-uploads. Searching the name Yusup
Dalmaz brings up a Spotify profile that includes soundtracks to Cyberblock Metal Orange, Cyberblock
Metal Orange EX, Magical Block Carat, Chip-Chan Kick, and Can Can Bunny Superior. All of these
games except for one are developed by Custom, the company supposedly absorbed by MetroVG.
Every one of these tracks include Yusup Dalmaz as a composer, but there's something strange.
Yusup's Spotify page includes a collection of important dates to the artist, including
apparently publishing two game soundtracks in the 90s, releasing a series of arrangement
albums in 2001, becoming CEO of "MetroVG Music" in 2004, and staying there until retiring in 2021.
That's a pretty full career from the sound of it. Despite this rich history, this is pretty
much the largest bit of information available on Yusup online anywhere, and he wrote it himself.
Everything around Yusup, information-wise, is covered in a strange sort of cloud,
where information was only added in the last couple years either by himself or a new account
on whatever website was hosting the data. He made a GameFAQs account specifically to add his own
credits to various Custom titles here, NECRetro had a page made for MetroVG by an anonymous user,
and MusicBrainz is full of miscellaneous lore being added by himself and later a couple
anonymous accounts made only for these kinds of edits. For a company CEO and someone with 25
years of composing experience, his sources are surprisingly lacking, and Hally knew this too.
Of course, this cloud only gets thicker when I try to look into this company. The closer I got
to MetroVG, the more I could see its rich, complex history. MusicBrainz listed a slew of different
aliases and subdivisions for the company, implying it consists of offices both in Europe and East
Asia, a music label by the name of M-Sound, and an entirely separate licensing company.
For a company running such a gamut, it was interesting to find out just how little it
actually produced. The business exists mostly just in social media. This SoundCloud account
made in 2020 dates the company back to 1997 and has three followers. Discogs lists five releases
from the label at all, including a bootleg of They Call Me Sonic attributed to an unrelated artist.
This video game wiki on Fandom has a page for a series of nonexistent MetroVG arcade machines,
and the person who submitted this also submitted a page for "Streets of War Metro-Active X",
a game supposedly developed by MetroVG and published by Infogrames for the PC-88,
ZX Spectrum, Arcade, PlayStation 2, Windows and mobile phone. The same game also has a page on
the... European WikiFur website, and it's real, and it's a bootleg of an explicit Sonic fangame
made in a free beat-em-up engine. MetroVG has a GameJolt and actually, technically, has games,
yes, but they're Sonic and Sailor Moon beat-em-ups made out of a free-use engine and described as
"prototype developer builds". The same thing can be seen here with this Sailor Moon beat-em-up
getting uploaded to a demoscene website, and a Russian blog post about "Metrostar Europe"
releasing a Sailor Moon beat-em-up for the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, a remake of a game
apparently on the PC-88, PC-98, Dreamcast and smartphone. The same user can be seen on VGMRips
posting a rare prototype bootleg soundtrack to a Sailor Moon beat-em-up published by MetroVG.
If this kind of business excites you, MetroVG is actually hiring sound designers! All you have to
do is put in some personal information, a few demo tracks, your address, a picture of you, a scan
of your passport... If you're still curious, no, MetroVG is not a real company, and Yusup Dalmaz is
not actually a historic Japanese game composer. He was born in 1996 and started using the name
Metro-something in 2015. His Spotify description is fiction, because, well, he would have been CEO
at eight years old, of a company that appeared a few years ago. Anyone looking at this set of
data could deduct that this is fake information, a kind of mythos, but there's one thing that can't
discern fact from fiction exactly: a machine. When Dalmaz added those soundtracks online, this wasn't
just uploaded to Spotify. This was Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Amazon, Shazam, TikTok, and many
other more obscure websites, now hosting albums that put Dalmaz's name next to Sakimoto and Iwata.
JKL Furukawa, a soundtrack artist for Custom, and more than one other artist,
now has a slew of automatically-made album pages appear before their personal websites or actual
social media, because Dalmaz put the albums through an automatic distribution service.
This is revisionism at its most convenient. Automatic garbage data. There is no shield.
With everything I kind of just dumped into this video already, there's something I failed to
mention: a majority of Yusup's information has been placed on Twitter, probably the easiest
place on the Internet for people to... say... things.. yeah. Twitter was where Hally initially
covered the fake Spotify listings, and Twitter's also where Yusup can reply with two different
accounts at the same time to construct this story. At this point, I'm covering a two-week
period of wild misinformation that involves even lying to the faces of the game's actual
composers and developers, and I'll try to do in a way that isn't completely overwhelming, for now.
Yusup's main claim to owning the soundtracks is that his father, Agabek Dalmaz, worked on the
game's music under the codename of Ray-Load... but also that he was Ray-Load. He claimed that
MetroVG bought out Custom and Cocktail Soft, two explicit Japanese games companies from the 90s.
There's no documentation to prove anything about either of these, and it turns out Cocktail Soft
is still around today. As for Ray-Load, he's active on Twitter! He reached out to Yusup and
asked where the hell this guy was in Japan 30 years ago if he's acting like he made all this.
When the Ray-Load claim fell through, Hally began looking for any proof of an Agabek or
a Dalmaz anywhere in any kind of game really. The closest thing that could come up was Yusup himself
sending what he said was a scan from a previously undocumented European prototype of Cyberblock
Metal Orange. Of course, this isn't a scan, it's a screencap of a Word document. And it can't be from
1999 because this font is from 2000. And U.S. Gold was dissolved into Eidos in 1996. Also, that's a
random Nazi General as the German localizer, and that's the two guys from Treasure Island.
Yusup continued sending a couple more "scans" from this manual. Once again,
these fonts here from 2018 and 2021. This can't be from 1999. What he called a "prototype screenshot"
of this Metal Orange version that apparently had his father's work was actually someone's personal
project porting Metal Orange to the Sega Saturn. Nothing made sense. Even the legal document Yusup
has in a few different places online, saying that he owns the name "Cyberblock Metal Orange",
was apparently created by what I think says "Rights Management VG", as in his games company
has its own rights management company attached to it. The last interaction here was Yusup posting a
three-page legal document claiming ownership over Custom's mascot character Chip-Chan.
Hally pointed out that this "MetroLicense Ptv Ltd." has no registration information anywhere,
since this company now has a label, a licensing department, multiple game development offices
across the world, and now a legal department in India. Sometime after this, Yusup blocked Hally,
deleted the MetroVG Twitter account, and made a post saying they just got bought out by ELLO,
some random YouTube music channel. For an archivist like Hally and a mythomaniac like Yusup,
this fight would be difficult to end without actual staff of the game getting involved. Well,
they did, and it didn't stop. Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masahiro Iwata are a little busy to be
tagged in a Twitter thread like this, but wouldn't you know it, Yoshio Furukawa,
also credited as JKL Furukawa, the only other remaining composer for these Custom titles,
is not only active on Twitter, but he has a collection of his own compositions on YouTube.
Furukawa personally confirmed not just that Yusup or his father have never worked with Custom,
but also that Custom never worked with anyone outside of Japan. Rather than admit defeat
right there, with an actual composer of the game talking to him, Yusup continued his own lore,
saying his father worked under a secret code name "Becky" and Custom didn't inform its own employees
about it working overseas. Oh, and, also that he owns Custom and all its intellectual property.
As it turns out, Furukawa wasn't just a composer at Custom. He was involved with public relations
and general affairs and therefore knew most of the group staff personally. Yusup next claimed
that Custom housed another secret employee: "amdf", who also happened to be the only person
who knew his father in the company. Of course, there's no way to contact him, and his only proof
is some spoofed screenshots and an unrelated GitHub page, but this only keeps going. He is,
at this point, treating MetroVG as a completely separate entity, asking Hally and Furukawa to
talk to "Yuri Nomura" instead of him. He begins a diatribe of replies saying he's still waiting
on information from Nomura, who was the one to purchase Custom in 2004. All these people,
all these names, and not one person to confirm (and not deny) Yusup's information. If only his
father were here. He could clear all this up, post some demos, explain how this all came together...
Yes, Yusup's secret agent eroge composer father died the year he transferred his intellectual
rights to his son, and the year Yusup became CEO of MetroVG. Agabek Dalmaz is dead.
I think I'd feel worse if he was actually real.
Yusup doesn't actually own Custom, this Nomura fellow does. amdf apparently made a secret X68 emulator
for Custom that later got stolen and made into the actual emulator XM6. Iwata wasn't a part of
Basiscape in 2004, despite the fact that he was a part of it back when it was founded in 2002.
All of this, now, is being said under the impression that Yusup is simply the messenger
boy for this Yuri Nomura. He can't be blamed, MetroVG must have outdated information! He's
waiting on more papers to get sent to him! Again, this isn't enough, however, to keep
up this ouroboros of lying about lies lying about lies. Yusup says that Yuri comes from a long line
of Japanese entrepreneurs, and that Custom was first owned by Yuri's grandfather Takeshi Nomura,
then passed on to Igor Nomura in 2009 after the MetroVG takeover, and then finally to him. This
excuse was used for this phony information since apparently Yuri's grandfather was the only person
to know about the staff's real names, and he "died in secret" or "died with his secrets". Not only
did his grandson Yuri lose all of these pertinent, Totally Real documents on the history of Custom,
but Yusup can no longer contact Yuri at all. He begins telling Furukawa to contact ELLO instead.
He is denying he was ever CEO of MetroVG in the first place. All the while, his words on this
are taken right from the mouth of Ewan McGregor. "Impossible. Perhaps the archives are incomplete."
The archives are incomplete. The archives are incomplete. This photograph of this legendary
Nomura fellow? It's an unrelated guy on VK. Here's his face on a SoundCloud account. Here's a second
picture of him, despite Yusup saying this is the only picture of him around. Perhaps the archives
are incomplete. Furukawa is, at this point, losing his patience with Yusup and attempting
a more hard-boiled manner of getting information out of him. I was entertained by this actually.
Yusup is now fully distancing himself from the whole situation, his replies just turned into
sending the email address of ELLO. Yusup tries again, says he has found rare tracks from his
father from a Windows version of Magical Block Carat (that actually exists) drafted all the
way back in 1987. Footage of the Windows version is found on YouTube and the track isn't there.
Turns out it's from Mr. Nutz on the Game Boy Advance. The creator of this track actually comes
out and says he made these songs in a couple weeks in 2003, and Yusup says "you're wrong".
The weirdest part is I think he wanted to get caught! He made a page for himself on the Real
Life Villains Wiki talking about his own false claims, his own stolen music, even lists Yuri
Nomura as an alias. He has actually almost 10 pages made about MetroVG on this website
Neolurk (I guess it's like a Russian version of Encyclopedia Dramatica or something.) There's
pages for him, his Sailor Moon fangame, his record label, his games company, the secret corrupt owner
of MetroVG, the mascot of custom that Yusup claims he owns, the secret grandfather owner of MetroVG,
a different explicit Sonic game bootleg published by MetroVG, a fake engine developed by MetroVG,
a collection of erotic fanfiction written with a self-insert character and the mascot of Custom...
This is... this is too much. We both already know too much. This is too much. I have to move on.
This is as far as my own documentation went, but while writing this all down, even more happened.
Yusup made up a fake sister, drafted a new fake company called "ELECOM METRO
VIDEO GAMING ENTERTAINMENT CO LTD" that has no results in Japan's government company registry,
and there is now sockpuppet account infighting around Yusup's tweets as he pretends Irsen Tanaka,
the Cutting Room Floor editor, is someone else entirely. Something I failed to mention so far
is that Furukawa isn't just a former video game music composer. He has 10 years experience as
a political journalist, and according to him has done enough investigation in the past to
prevent a representative in Japan from running for office. This is small, annoying potatoes to him.
Not only that, but as I write this Furukawa is now getting in contact with Sakimoto,
who runs Basiscape, and they are also talking to Mr. Yanagi, who is the original founder of Custom.
It's really not looking good for Yusup here. But what are we, the onlookers of this garbage fire,
to do? Well, I'll first say I know that Yusup's astroturfed album links were all uploaded by a
Russian distribution service called Digital Project. I'm not sure how receptive they'd
be to fan mail, but they'll probably be hearing from Basiscape in the near future. Anywhere else
like MusicBrainz or GameFAQs or Neolurk can be edited by users, so this is pretty much just a
matter of undoing any kind of Metro-vandalism and then citing a source for it. I already had a good
friend undo Yusup's Discogs editing, which then caused him to swear my friend out and then delete
his account. He's already deleted his Irsen Tanaka Twitter after Hally pointed out proof
of them being the same person. So, between editors on these databases undoing this misinformation and
the game's creators hopefully informing Yusup's distributor about this whole sordid affair,
I would hope MetroVG is made nothing more than a funny story deep in the archives.