M2, the Japanese developer and emulation expert, has announced on its blog that it has acquired the rights to several PC-Engine games from the Tokyo company Lightweight. This news was made public just today, with the transfer of rights happening last March. M2 didn’t go into specifics on what games were acquired but stated that the collection was previously owned by NEC Interchannel, who had itself inherited the rights from NEC Avenue which was a company best known for publishing PC-Engine ports of Sega, Capcom, and Taito arcade games, which may explain how M2 was able to include the NEC Avenue-developed PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² conversion of Hellfire S in its Zero Fire collection.
However, as the above Twitter thread on the acquisition highlights, M2 only owns the publishing rights to many of these games, so needs to partner up with the corresponding license holders to release any of these games to the public. That said, NEC Avenue did produce a few original games as well.
