Modren

Hypnosis/MC erotica writer


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Over the last two or three years, there's been a renewed surge of interest in the X-55 (ecks-go-go), a 1995 home karaoke system designed by Taito that allowed players to download and access a large library of karaoke songs via phone line—the high price of the initial unit combined with all the extra fees (a monthly sub plus line connection plus a one-off fee for every song or other piece of content you accessed and/or saved) meant it wasn't explosively popular, but they did sell around 200,000 systems across its various revisions, and Taito later sold their karaoke infrastructure to Xing who then turned it into Joysound, so it remains a crucial part of karaoke history.

(It's also notable as a footnote in the career of the popular '90s idol Amuro Namie: Taito hired her as the X-55's image girl right as she started to blow up, and a lot of the salvaged print materials concerning the X-55 were saved and sourced from Amuro fanatics.)

The X-55 wasn't purely designed for karaoke, however: it also allowed for other forms of downloadable media, primarily very small games that could be controlled via a very dinky 4-button controller (think one of those old-school third-party Genesis-but-with-SNES-button-layout pads) that used either a wireless IR connection or a wired connection via serial port, depending on the controller model. Through brochures, articles and contemporary online testimonials from users and even developers, we've pieced together a broad map of the X-55's software library—put simply, it was mostly conversions and adaptations of various Taito games and whatever else Taito felt like licensing (classic Namco games, pretty much), but they did produce a few original titles for the X-55, the most prominent being Cleopatra Fortune, which saw the good fortune of being adapted for arcades and blessed with the Taito bop of all Taito bops. The arcade version includes promos for the X-55, even, and it's probably the only reason it's even on global folks' radar.

Little is known about the other X-55-original titles, and it seems that people just aren't especially interested in most of them, as they tend to be very pedestrian time-wasters like whack-a-mole games and such, but there is one exception: 1997's Crescent Tale, an original fixed-screen platform action game in the grand Taito tradition and starring the magical girl Marble, with supplemental planning work by Kenji Kaido (Night Striker, Cameltry) and music from original Bubble Bobble composer karu. Enough has been written and shared online about the game that we have a vague idea of how it played—Marble's magic wand could be used to make the platforms ripple and undulate; think arcade Mario Bros. bop-from-below without the below part, I guess, or the first phase of Yoshi's Island's Bowser Jr. fight—and the soundtrack did make it onto one of Zuntata's deep-cut CDs, but there's no footage of the game anywhere and no indication that anyone had the game backed up anywhere, including Taito themselves, so people were resigned to having to imagine how it might've looked and felt in action.

Here's the cleanest and most informative of the very few Crescent Tale screenshots in circulation:

Crescent Tale screenshot

...and here's a recent piano rendition of one of the tunes, direct from karu.:

As it happens, Crescent Tale's original planner "FUINARLE" has been on Twxtter for a minute, and nobody had thought to even ask them about it until a few days ago... and now we know they've retained all the original design documents and a bunch of other paraphernalia, they were personally responsible for sharing what few non-marketing details were out there online and, oh yeah, they've had the game backed up on flash card all this time, and have confirmed it still boots on real hardware. Figures!

Here are the screens they posted from the main unit (via composite>USB converter); they only have a base X-55 and not the controller, it seems, which limits what they can show:




Here's a snippet from a brochure with dev comments and a profile on Marble, which I may or may not translate later:

...and here are some dev docs, which include polaroid photos taken by Kenji Kaido during the process of reviewing each stage; note Marble's incredibly imaginative temp name, CHARA:


The question remains: will this game ever be made accessible to the wider public? I don't see the planner publicly dumping it and I'm sure it's already on Taito's radar, but I don't know that even modern Taito, which subsists almost solely off squeezing blood out of octogenarian arcade rats with too much money and no taste, being able to monetize this game the way they'd want to, and even tacking it onto another package seems like it might require too much effort for too little payoff, but I'd love to be wrong. Whatever happens, it's nice to know it hasn't been completely lost to time.


DevilREI
@DevilREI

I mean, this is probably more appealing to a general audience than some of the other lost games they've recovered. I would reckon folks would get more excited about Crescent Tale than Adventure Canoe


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

as much as i'd love to see the game surface playable some day, what i'm truly amazed by is the fact that they've kept so many of the planning materials; stuff like that is absolutely fascinating and i feel like we never get to see anywhere nearly enough of it, especially from anything from the earlier eras when physical concept work was common-place and can be more easily permanently lost. that stage concept piece and the sprite sheets are so cool!

Hey, I'm always down for another Bubble Bobble-alike, and this one looks better than most. If they can revive the unfinished arcade game Clockwork Aquario, that could open the door for other obscurities like this. (I'm not holding my breath for a Switch port of Chip Chan Kick, though.)