The Seven Colors: Legend of PSY・S City (found Masaya Matsuura Mac point-and-click adventure game; 1993)

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Sevencolorscover.png

The cover of the CD-ROM jewel case for The Seven Colors.

Status: Found

Date found: 23 May 2015

Found by: HomeStarRunnerTron

The front of the box for The Seven Colors.
Assorted screenshots from The Seven Colors.
The back of the box for The Seven Colors.

The Seven Colors: Legend of PSY・S City is a Mac-exclusive explorative point-and-click adventure. Of note is it being the debut of Masaya Matsuura (creator of PaRappa the Rapper[1], UmJammer Lammy[2] and Vib-Ribbon[3]) in the world of game development.

History & Significance

Before game development, Masaya Matsuura was a musician, performing in a highly successful pop-rock duo called PSY・S, which was active from 1983 to 1996.[4] Three months before the release of the band's tenth studio album, WINDOW[5], The Seven Colors was created, serving as the basis for the artwork and themes of the upcoming album. Three of the songs in WINDOW are taken directly from parts of the game soundtrack of The Seven Colors. Instrumental versions of other songs from other albums are played throughout The Seven Colors, as well. Specifically, the opening and closing instrumental for their ninth album, HOLIDAY, is utilized in-game.[6]

Masaya Matsuura collaborated with Sony Music Entertainment Japan (which also published Eastern Mind & Chu-Teng[7]), writing new music as PSY・S with his creative partner, CHAKA. The writing in the game was done by Yukinojo Mori, the lyricist/poet behind Cha-La Head-Cha-La from Dragon Ball Z[8], and the art design was headed by Mic*itaya, who had done a great deal of similar work for the past few PSY・S albums and singles.

The game debuted at a solo exhibit of Mic*itaya's art, an event which took place from May 7 to 19, 1992.[9] Later on, some time in 1993, the game would receive a Multimedia Grand Prix award[10]. This would place the game's creation as preceding both MYST and The Journeyman Project (two of the games considered most often to be the trailblazers for the explorative point-and-click genre).

Overview

The game's objective is to rescue all the coloured hearts (unlike American standard, Japanese culture dictates seven major colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Sky Blue, and Purple.) in PSY・S City and, in doing so, bring back the night. The graphics are made primarily out of pre-rendered cel-shaded computer-generated environments. There is very little dialogue (written or spoken) in the game. Clues for how to find hearts are given in cryptic songs, and all objectives can be accomplished in any order. There are also hidden tasks throughout that give experience points and other non-essential interactive tidbits.

Much like every game to follow in Masaya Matsuura's library, the game has a penchant for quirky humour and surrealism.

Availability

For years, the game was merely mentioned by name a handful of times on the Internet, without even a single screenshot of gameplay shared. The most information on the game itself dates back to a Japanese thread from the late 2000s with nostalgic players trying to figure out how to beat the game[11].

In early May 2015 (right around the Lost Media Wiki's migration to this current domain), the CD was found being sold on the Japanese site Yahoo! Auctions. It was bought through a service for international customers called Buyee[12].

The arrival of the package containing The Seven Colors.

Shortly afterward, the game was dumped and archived on Macintosh Garden.

Hacking and English Fantranslation

Initially, when received, the game was unplayable on old Mac OS 7-9 emulation due to an incapability to run Audio CD partitions in-game. In hacking the MacroMind Player files, a workaround was created and released on Macintosh Garden to use compressed audio that could play without a separate audio partition.

Currently, a full English fantranslation is in-progress. A preview can be seen below in the gallery.

Gallery

English fan-translation of "♡のパティオで逢いましょう" from The Seven Colors.

Part 1 of 2 of the PSY・S video special, Music in Your Eyes, which utilizes a great deal of graphics and music from both WINDOW and The Seven Colors.

Part 2 of 2 of the PSY・S video special, Music in Your Eyes, which utilizes a great deal of graphics and music from both WINDOW and The Seven Colors.

External Links

References