Unfinished Japanese PS1 game completed, released two decades later

In 1998, a small team of Japanese developers spent eight months working on a game called Magic castle, which they sent as an argument to seven major publishers, including Sony. It never went anywhere, but thanks to emulators and the efforts of one of the original team members, now we can play it and enjoy it anyway.

One of the team members, PIROWO, recently found the source code for the project—created on Net Yaroze“And decided to fix his problems and make it public. This game looks cool as hell not only for its isometric style but for a number of very modern touches like a customizable user interface and vibrant music.

This video is from a VHS the team first created in ‘98 to accompany their pitch, which Sony loved, but which also blew away by asking the developers to abandon Magic castle and go work on something else, which they weren’t very keen on doing.

To learn more about the game background, Net Yaroze Europe have an interview with two of the original developers where they talk about stuff like how they almost made the game with another “company that makes famous Japanese RPGs”, but then this collapsed too.

You can download the game here.