In 1998 a small team of Japanese developers worked for eight months on a game called Magic lockwhich they sent out as a pitch to seven major publishers, including Sony. It never went anywhere, but thanks to emulators and the efforts of one of the original teams, we can now 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 tie up its loose ends and make them available to the public. This game looks damn cool, not only because of its isometric style, but also because of a number of very modern touches like a customizable user interface and dynamic music.
This video is from a VHS that the team first created.98 to go along with their pitch, which Sony loved but then also blew by asking the developers to give up Magic lock and work on something else they weren’t particularly interested in.
For more information on the background of the game, see Net Yaroze Europe did an interview with two of the original developers where they talk about things like they got close to playing with another “company that makes famous Japanese role-playing games”, but then The fell apart too.
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You can download the game Here.
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