Azusa 999 by Ichirō Sogabe, October 1997
Azusa 999 is an RPG Maker adventure game (à la Corpse Party or To the Moon) developed in 1997 for the classic Japanese PC-98 personal computer. It’s a heavy emotional story about suicide and an otherworldly train… among other things. It’s quite unlike anything else – a flawed diamond, forgotten by time – which is why I decided to translate it to English over two decades after its original release!
The venerable RPG Maker Dante98: the very first official version of RPG Maker, for the good old PC-98. Between 1995 and 2001, Enterbrain, the company behind the software, famously held a huge annual RPG Maker game-making contest with their parent company – the Ascii Entertainment Software Contest – in which winners could receive up to 10,000,000 yen (~10,500,000 yen; ~100,000 USD in today’s money). The most notable winner, in retrospect, was the horror adventure cult-classic-cum-genre-progenitor Corpse Party. You might’ve heard of it!
What’s not as famous, though, is that this grand contest wasn’t the only one of its kind. Between 1997 and 2002, Enterbrain also held a monthly contest for smaller games with smaller prizes to match, via a site called the “Internet Contest Park”; colloquially known as “Conpark”. A contest for small, experimental games, with a focus on ingenuity, creativity, and heart… It was special.
I first found out about Conpark via the website of Sasuke Kannazuki, the creator of the cult classic RPG Maker title Moon Whistle. Back in the day, being an RPG Maker enthusiast, he occasionally reviewed games seen on Conpark – and two decades later, I stumbled upon those reviews. Finding out about this cultural treasure trove – oodles upon oodles of forgotten Japanese-only video games, made in the visions of singular enthusiasts, all buried beneath the sands of time – I found myself hungrily digging through the archives; living this cultural past that I never knew existed. When the dust settled, my interest had solidified most for one game. A game with strikingly stylized aesthetics. A game with an emotional premise. A game that I somehow felt compelled to translate, so that it may be experienced by people in another place; in another time.
That game was Azusa 999. Submitted for the October 1997 edition of Conpark, it netted its creator Ichirō Sogabe 68,000 yen (~71,000 yen; ~654 USD in today’s money) at the ripe old age of 19. Though it was seemingly developed in only two months (his previous winning entry, CLOCK, was in August of the same year), this story about death and an otherworldly train was immensely well-received, and is beloved by the precious few who know it.
When asked for a short comment upon winning the prize, Sogabe wrote:
Originally, the game’s title was “Asuka 999"… It wasn’t until after I’d sent it in that I noticed that the pop song was called "Azusa #2” and not “Asuka #2”! So in the end, I changed it. In any case, I’m very thankful.
The title is, as explicated above, a reference to the 1977 pre-J-pop humdinger Azusa 2-Gō (“On Azusa #2, at 8 AM on the dot, I depart from you”). The “999”, one can imagine, is straight from Galaxy Express 999, a peerlessly influential manga and anime that similarly is about a mystical train. The Azusa #2 – the train on which you tearfully depart from that which pains your heart – and the Galaxy Express 999 – the train not of this world. Combine the two, and you get Azusa 999… both in name and in concept.
When I decided to translate Azusa 999, I had not yet played through the story in its entirety, and I had no experience with PC-98 hacking. I did, frankly, not know what I was getting into. This project that I thought would be “free of hacking” ended up luring me into 22 total hours of assembly hacking, and half that to program tools – not to mention that the story was longer and made me far more uncomfortable than I had expected. If I’d known these things in advance, I would probably not have decided to translate it. But… I’m glad I did, for here is a fascinating, storied, unique work that deserves to be shared – and it was translated and released precisely because I let passion get the better of me. And therein lie the fan translator’s greatest assets: boundless enthusiasm, and a lack of common sense.
In English for the first time since its creation over 20 years ago, have this poignant look into Japanese indie game history on me.
Samuel “obskyr” Messner, Urawa, 2020–04–19
Content Warnings: Suicide, child death, depictions of homophobia, implied sexual violence.
