‘Mahou Senichiya‘ [魔法千一夜]
[PC98] [JAPAN] [MAGAZINE] [1993]
So this ad certainly took me down a neat rabbit hole!
What we have here is an ad for a visual novel based on ‘Mahou Senichiya: Millennium 2051′, a fantasy series written by Shinji Goto, which appeared in Popcom magazine likely during the early 1990′s. The story appears to be a slice-of-life from the perspective of a magic student named Twilight (no not that one) and was told in small excerpts in each issue. A collection of the first twenty-one chapters/episodes was later published by Japanese publisher Shogakukan under its “Super Quest Bunko” label. A second volume was to be published, but these plans were cancelled. A fansite with the goal of archiving the rest of the chapters was founded in 1998, but ceased at some point during the mid-2000′s. (But can still be viewed through the Wayback Machine.)
Which leads me to the game itself. Once again, there is very little information available; I can only deduce from rough translations and the available screenshots that it is a simple visual novel, with illustrations by Yumi Nakayama. What fascinated me during my research for this post was that is was (to be?) distributed by Brother Industries, an Japanese electronics manufacturer responsible for the game’s sole distribution system: the TAKERU software vendor, a video game writing vending machine that can be summed up as the PC game version of Nintendo’s Famicom Disk Writer kiosks. A whole catalog of games, bought and written on floppy disks, were sold under the Brother label this way.
But here’s where things get murky. Even taking into account the way this game was distributed and that is was marketed with a retail price, I cannot confirm whether or not this game was even released in the end. The sources that myself and some folk over on the MobyGames Discord channel have been able to scrape up paint a murky picture of the game’s fate. As stated before, the second volume of the short stories was never published and Mahou Senichiya’s overall obscurity may suggest that it never caught on despite the wishes of the more devoted fans. It is totally plausible that the game was released but no one bothered to archive a copy from the TAKERU and that the original code itself is rotting on some magetic tape somewhere.
Meanwhile, the TAKERU itself continued to distribute games until 1997 and had a special anniversary celebration in 2016. While I can’t make any conclusions, I believe Shinji Goto had gone on to become a recognized name (and tournament champion) in Magic: The Gathering and may be the producer for another trading card game called ChaOS (Character Operating System)
So. That’s a journey a took today. I’d like to once again thank the MobyGames Discord channel on this research!
Source: Super Soft Hot Information, October 1993 || Internet Archive; Retroprograms
