the game's stimulating action. Sega of America felt the word held a negative connotation, so rejected it. The team also considered Blade Gunner, in homage to Blade Runner, but this was also rejected because of copyright restrictions. Sega of America eventually suggested the word "Heroes," so Gunstar Heroes became the final title. Treasure consisted of around 18 people, most being programmers from Konami. The staff was split in half to work on both Gunstar Heroes and McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure in parallel. The core team behind Gunstar Heroes consisted of six people: two programmers, two graphic designers, and two sound programmers. The staff (known by their nicknames) was composed of main programmer Yaiman, enemy and boss programmer Nami, graphic designers Han and Iuchi, composer Non, and sound effects programmer Murata. The role of game designer did not exist within Treasure; all game design and planning was undertaken by everyone involved. The team felt they had more freedom working under Sega than Konami. Maegawa got approval to add a Treasure logo when the game booted, which he felt was a rare opportunity for developers to get in that era. Development of Gunstar Heroes lasted around nine to ten months. It was the team's first experience programming for the Genesis, having come off programming for the Super NES at Konami. Programmers Mitsuru Yaida and Hideyuki Suganami previously programmed Contra III: The Alien Wars (1992) for the Super NES at Konami. The team felt the Genesis's processor was more powerful, capable, and friendly to experimentation than other consoles. This led them to consider it more suited for action games and the sophisticated graphical effects they were looking to create. The team implemented heavy visual effects in an exercise in design experimentation (not an effort to push the hardware). Some of that experimenting was done with the system's sprite rotation and scaling capabilities, which evoked a sense of depth. The Genesis had its limitations however, as it could only display 64 colors on screen at once. The team placed extra effort on coloring to compensate. Early backgrounds were drawn with a 16 color palette, but they looked desolate, so ultimately two palettes with 32 colors were used. The team also used programming tricks to make the scenery appear like three to four layers were present, although the Genesis only supports two. The team approached Gunstar Heroes with an "anything goes" concept, that led to