Unfinished PS1 game Magic Castle launches more than 20 years later

Editor’s take: Retro gaming enthusiasts’ good fortunes are spilling over into 2021 with the recent release of a long-forgotten game for the original PlayStation. Even in its unfinished state, Magic Castle looks very impressive and could have made serious waves back in the late 90s had it made it to market.

As the story goes, Magic Castle was created by two independent developers in the late 90s using the Net Yaroze platform, a development kit for the original PlayStation.

The goal with Magic Castle was to “create a rogue-like game in 3D that could be played any number of times.” It features four playable character classes – knight, magician, archer and fighter – and tasks players with progressing through 20 castle floors.

(A Sony Net Yaroze development kit.)

After eight months of grinding, the duo shopped it around and while Sony expressed enthusiasm, they were mostly interested in acquiring the developers to work on a different project.

The team declined, Magic Castle was shelved, and eventually, the individual devs went their separate ways.

One of the game’s creators, who goes by the name PIROWO, recently rediscovered the unfinished project and decided to bring it up to speed.

The game is mostly complete at this stage, only missing four-player support and a Japanese translation. It has since been released on the Internet for all to enjoy. You can grab a copy of the game and its instruction manual over on the Internet Archive.

An updated version, perhaps with some of the aforementioned content, is listed as “coming soon.”

Image courtesy Wikipedia