Mahō no Shōjo Silky Lip: Sannin no Jo-ō Kōho (lost build cancelled adventure game for PC-Engine CD; 1994)

Title screen

Status: Lost

Mahō no Shōjo Silky Lip: Sannin no Jo-ō Kōho (魔法の少女シルキーリップ三人の女王候補, "Magical Girl Silky Lip: Three Queen Candidates") is a cancelled adventure game for the PC Engine peripheral Super CD-ROM2, planned for development and release by Telenet Japan.

Backgound

According to Shōjirō Endō^[1]^[2], who was the director of the game, the genesis of this game began when, while developing Magical Girl Silky Lip, which was released for Mega CD on June 19, 1992, he decided it would be a shame to let this concept end with just one game, and started planning a second game called Mahō no Keiji Fire Rouge (魔法の刑事ファイヤールージュ,"Magical Detective Fire Rouge"). Like its predecessor, this one was planned for Mega CD and featured a protagonist who merged with a junior high school boy and could only be a magical girl for 12 hours. At the same time, Silky Lip for CD-ROM2 was also planned, with the premise that these two games would be commissioned to a company that specialized in developing games for PC-Engine, and the concept of Silky Lip was a solid port of Mega CD with unused commands and bug fixes at that time. However, the company refused to commission the two projects on the grounds that they were unlikely to sell.

Later, the department to which Endō belonged, the External Relations Department, was to be dismantled, and Endō was transferred to the newly established PC engine line of Telenet Japan's Development Department. There, Endo launched a new game project called Jūsō Brenade (重装ブレネイド, "Heavy Armored Brenade"), and scenario work and design orders began. However, two months after the start of the project, Telenet Japan ordered Endō to stop the development of Brenade and develop Silky Lip. The reason was that a producer of a certain company liked Silky Lip and appealed its merchantability to Telenet Japan's upper management, who realized the product's value. The development department was in turmoil over the cancellation of the Brenade project, but since the company's orders could only be obeyed, Endō was forced to go apologize to the various parties that had placed the order. He planned to add a new scenario, new characters, etc., if he were to remake Silky Lip again, and submitted a development proposal to the company for eight months, which was the same time frame as Brenade. However, the company rejected the proposal and offered a development time of six months.

The company thought that they could make it even in six months if they were going to do a solid port of the original Mega CD version, but since that project was planned with the new Fire Rouge in mind, Endō and the company agreed to finally develop a renewed version. The scenario and character designs were reworked from scratch, new audio was recorded, and the only thing that was used over again was the theme song. Other attempts were made to add scenarios and improve other problems, but Silky Lip was not developed in time, as Telenet Japan withdrew from PC Engine game development after Cosmic Fantasy 4, released on November 25, 1994.

It was often featured in PC Engine magazines, and PC Engine Fan listed it as "TBA" in its coming soon list from the October 1993 issue to the October 1994 issue. The release date was scheduled for March 1994 on the flyer.

Aftermath

After Telenet Japan went bankrupt, the intellectual property rights of Silky Lip went to Waffle. On March 28, 2008, Three Queen Candidates was revived as an adult game that replicated the cancelled PC Engine version as much as possible. The original development team, including Endō, had nothing to do with this game.

Overview

The game is strongly based on the TV anime and consists of 11 scenarios. The opening cutscene with a theme song is included in each scenario. This game was originally a port of the Mega CD version, but was later renewed and the field screens and battle scenes from the original port were removed. This was because the conversation scenes in the original port were so well received that they decided to focus heavily on the conversation mode in this game. In this game, the player selects Lip's actions at important points while reading the novel, a visual novel type of game not often seen on the PC Engine.

Availability

The prototype of this game is known to have leaked after its development was cancelled. The owner of the website "PC Engine Paradise" introduced the game on the site around 2001, with screenshots believed to have been taken from an emulator^[3]. The prototype was apparently a port of the Mega CD version with a scenario added, and was almost complete, including the ending. In October 2008, a prototype with jacket was sold on Yahoo Auction. It was introduced in a blog post, and the scheduled closing time for bidding was 23:03 on the 21st, and the price was 40,100 yen at the time of writing.

Video game blogger Murakun has three prototypes in his possession and posted an article introducing them on November 7 to 9, 2010^[4]^[5]^[6]. The prototypes are versioned Ver 3.1, Ver 5.0, and Ver 7.0, respectively. Checking the screenshot of Ver. 3.1, the Lip's character design is very similar to the Mega CD version, and the title screen is quite simple, suggesting that this is probably the earliest prototype of the development that can be confirmed.

As of 2023, prototypes have been dumped, but none of the builds have been shared.