personally enjoyed, such as synthesizer music and films from the 1930s. Nakagata was heavily inspired by Japanese tokusatsu movies and kaiju monsters such as Godzilla. Much of the game's content was made to parody common tropes found in tokusatsu films and other video games. Toei Animation assisted in character design and sprite animation, after taking an interest in the game's anime-like artstyle and characters. Bravoman is Namco's only video game to utilize pressure-sensitive buttons, where the harder the player pushed them the stronger their attack was in the game. These buttons were notoriously faulty and fragile, to the annoyance of Namco technicians. Bravoman's real identity, Hitoshi Nakamura, is a caricature of company founder and president Masaya Nakamura, whom the game was dedicated to. The game's title is a nod to a nickname given to a fellow employee of Nakagata worked with in the past. Bravoman was released in May 1988 in Japan, running on the Namco System 1 arcade hardware. It was ported to the TurboGrafx-16 in October 1990, being the game's first appearance outside Japan. Developed by Now Production, it features numerous changes to the game, such as new and altered stage designs, additional enemy types and Bravoman's attacks being changed due to the system lacking pressure-sensitive buttons. The TurboGrafx-16 version was digitally re-released onto the Wii Virtual Console in 2007, followed by the arcade version in Japan in 2009. Bravoman was ported to Japanese mobile phones on October 28, 2010 for the EZweb, i-Mode and S! Appli network services, featuring new stages and remastered visuals and audio. Reception Bravoman received high praise when it was first released in arcades. The video game publication Gamest gave it several awards, including 3rd Grand Prize, 3rd Best Ending, and 12th Annual Hit Game. In their 1991 mook The Best Game, they commended its gameplay for being fun and balanced in terms of its difficulty, and also praised the parodies and spoofs of Japanese pop culture and movies. They also liked the game's level variety, randomness, and colorful graphics. The character of Bravoman was given the first place award for Best Character based on reader vote, while the game itself was placed at the 23rd spot for the best arcade games of all time up to that point. The TurboGrafx-16 conversion received more mixed coverage. Japanese magazine Monthly PC Engine said it was an excellent port of the arcade original, and liked