Sound Fantasy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sound Fantasy

Cover art
Developer(s) Nintendo
Publisher(s) Nintendo
Designer(s) Toshio Iwai
Platform(s) Super NES/Super Famicom
Release date(s) Cancelled (but later picked up by Maxis and became SimTunes)
Genre(s) Music Game
Mode(s) Single player
Distribution Cartridge

Sound Fantasy also titled Sound Factory during production,[1] is an unreleased video game for the Super NES/Super Famicom.

Summary

Interactive media artist Toshio Iwai designed the game in the early 1990s using concepts from the installation art piece Music Insects, which he created during his time as an Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Exploratorium.[2] However, the finished product was never brought to market by Nintendo for unknown reasons.

Its eccentric concepts and untested game mechanics may have been the main factor in its cancellation; music games, especially on home consoles, were not popular in the early 1990s, and it wouldn't be until much later in the decade that they gained mainstream attention.

Sound Fantasy was to come packed-in with the SNES Mouse and mouse pad, and it would arrive in a larger game box to hold its contents similar to Super Nintendo games like Mario Paint and EarthBound. It is speculated that Nintendo chose to use Mario Paint to launch its mouse peripheral in 1992 instead, as that game was endorsed by Mario, one of gaming's most recognizable mascots.

Toshio Iwai eventually went on to convert his work into the PC game SimTunes in 1996, and many of Sound Fantasy's unreleased gameplay elements can be found there.

In April 2005, to celebrate the Japanese launch of Toshio Iwai's latest work, Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo opened an exhibit at Tokyo's Harajuku Station to focus on the new game and on Iwai himself. Nintendo made available for perusal the box art and manual for Sound Fantasy, but the "lost game" was not made playable there.

The back of the US box art.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Electronic Gaming Magazine, November 1993, page 86; "International Outlook" look at Sound Factory with six screenshots.
  2. ↑ Wired 5.05: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek (May 1997) Retrieved July 29, 2006

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.