Unfinished Japanese game for PS1 completed and 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 a pitch to seven major publishers, including Sony. It never went anywhere, but thanks to the emulators and efforts of a member of the original team, we can now play and have fun anyway.

One of the team members, PIROWO, recently found the project’s source code—created on Net Yaroze– and decided to tie up his loose ends and release it to the public. This game looks really cool, not just for its isometric style, but for a series of very modern touches, like a customizable user interface and dynamic music.

This video is from a VHS that the team first created in ‘98 to follow his speech, which Sony loved, but also exploded when asking developers to abandon Magic castle and go to work on something else, which they weren’t very interested in doing.

For more information about the game, Net Yaroze Europe have an interview with two of the original developers where they talk about things like how they got close to making the game with another “company that makes famous Japanese RPGs”, but then This one collapsed too.

You can download the game on here.