If you've been reading this blog, you can probably tell that I buy a lot of CD-ROMs. I usually do my research ahead of time but if something is cheap enough, or has a cool-enough looking cover, I'll take a chance on it just in case. This was one of those discs, which I stumbled into while browsing the Mac CDs at Suruga-ya; I could find almost nothing about it online, but something struck me about the sketchy cover art and the "XD FirstClass Network" title.

XD-submit Vol. 1, as it turns out, is a promotional disc for a Kansai-area bulletin board system (BBS) called XD FirstClass Network. As I started digging into it I assumed this would be sort of a basic information kit, a digital pamphlet or something, but it's something a lot more exotic: a functioning archive of the BBS with its original client software for Mac. This was supposed to be a demo so you could browse it offline and decide if you wanted to join, but here in 2026, when this BBS has been offline for three decades, it gives us a chance to actually see what it was like when it was alive.

I've read plenty of archived web forums before, but I've never seen a BBS archive quite like this before. 1994 is before the Internet Archive started collecting webpages, but these aren't webpages anyway: BBSs are a pre-internet technology, and BBSs really weren't being archived in the way that webpages are. The idea of being able to browse a period BBS like this using its original interface, just like an archived webpage, is incredibly cool to me and I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to see it.

In 1994, XD seems to still have been a pretty young BBS. It had a small but highly engaged, tight knit community that we'll get to know by reading these posts. These kinds of communities tended to skew pretty small back in the day, but they clearly wanted to grow: they've presented themselves here on this CD for us and chose these posts specifically to show to us so that we might consider joining. They'd like us to be their friends. 30 years on we can't, of course, actually join their community but at least we have the chance to get to know them as they would have liked us to.

Before I tell you that story, though, I have to tell you this one. You see, if you ask the internet about the XD-submit CDs, they'll tell you they're albums. They are that too—put them in your CD player and you get a set of tracks from Kansai area electronic/techno artists, all of whom seem to have been connected to this BBS when it was alive. It's good music, and I absolutely see why people interested in the Japanese underground techno scene have latched onto that angle, but I think it's a bit of a shame it's the only part people want to discuss. After all, this isn't just promoting the musicians but promoting the community that they were a part of. So let's bring the two together: I've embedded a playlist with as much music as I could find on YouTube from across the four volumes of XD-submit. Consider hitting play and enjoying the music while you read their posts.

When we look at a BBS like the one we're looking at today, just keep in mind this is a pre-internet technology^[1]. When you use a BBS, you're dialling directly into one server, not a worldwide network. And since you're dialling, using your modem's telephone line, you're probably connected to a BBS somewhere close to you. Long distance calls cost money, after all. You're doing something online, but it's less global than you're used to on the internet. It means that a lot of BBSs were populated by people in a specific area, sharing locally-relevant information, and you'll be seeing a lot of that here.

BBSs gave way to the internet once internet- and web-based systems showed up in the 90s, which makes this specific snapshot an interesting time to look at. The very first web-based forums launched in 1994, but they wouldn't widely used for awhile. The web itself had only been available to the public for three years, and most computer owners still didn't have access in 1994. This archive, from 1994, is at exactly the point when BBSs were still being widely used^[2] and right before users would start moving over to new services. XD is a young enough BBS that we're not really seeing what the BBS scene as a whole looked like at its peak, but it is a pretty interesting look at a newly-launched BBS in what was, at the time a pretty mature scene.

This archive covers sections of 1994, with the most recent archived posts dating to mid-September^[3]. It's been assembled as something of a core sample; roughly the same number of posts was collected from each subforum, which works out to be about three weeks' worth of posting history for the most popular forums and as much as nine months for the quietest ones. It's not a comprehensive archive, but it's a great little cross-section showing us what the BBS was like in its heyday and what kinds of conversations users were having.

Before we start diving into posts, let's take a tour of actually using the BBS itself. XD used the Canadian FirstClass BBS system and the demo that came on our CD is for Mac^[4], so we'll be exploring on a 1994-vintage Mac OS system.

The first thing for us to do, of course, is dial in. If we were doing this for real it could be a slow process; we would need to wait to actually dial into the BBS's modem (remember, we're dialling them directly! this isn't the internet!) and wait to negotiate a connection, and we might even get a busy signal if there are too many people already connected. Luckily, since we're just simulating it, we don't have to sit through that long process. Once we fill in our authentication information^[5] and hit the login button, it simulates a very fast dial-in and lets us get to the BBS itself.

One we log in, the first thing we get to see is the FirstClass desktop. FirstClass plays heavily into the desktop metaphor, so this looks a lot less like a web forum than we might expect nowadays. Instead, FirstClass navigation feels a lot more like using the Mac's Finder file browser, complete with folders to organize your content and persistent history of where you place the folders and the windows that open when you click those folders. Not what I expected, but pretty interesting stuff! (That little window at the bottom, by the way, tells us our connection time since our time on the BBS is metered. A BBS can only keep so many connections open at a time, so the software is set up with a time limit to prevent users from staying on too long. A timeout feature will automatically disconnect if the user hasn't done anything in awhile. Since this is a demo, we've been given functionally unlimited time... but we do still get logged out if we leave it idle for five minutes.)

Most of these folders contain what FirstClass calls "conferences", or what we'd call "subforums". (FirstClass seems to have been aimed at business users, so a lot of the terminology is very business-ey.) We also have a "News" icon, which is a special conference for the admins to post announcements, and a "MailBox" for private messages that works a lot like email. (It's not actually email though, and has to be read here on the BBS.) It also contains the special "PASSTHRU" folder that I'll talk about later.

I won't comprehensively show posts from every conference; I'll browse through the conferences highlighting whatever seems interesting. Since music was such a big part of XD's identity, I'll be highlighting the music conferences in particular. There are eight main music conferences:

• Rock me on, which discusses rock music
• MIDIum, for discussing MIDI software and hardware and sharing music
• Techno Hardware, a "hardcore" techno forum for music creators to discuss hardware and technique
• Techno Software, a "softcore" techno forum for discussing crossover techno elements in other music genres
• TEKNOの穴 (eg Tekno Hole), a chaotic-feeling techno discussion forum
• HR/HM (Mekong!), a forum for hard rock and heavy metal. Its namesake is the German band Mekong Delta.
• Rock in progress, focused on progressive rock
• Marching Forum, focused on Japanese marching bands

When we open the conference, it pops open a window that looks a lot like an email inbox. This is what browsing a forum looks like in FirstClass; remember, this is before the concept of the web forum really existed, and our model for what a forum system looks like wasn't really there yet! We'll see what looks more like email when we start reading messages in a moment.

This is the general techno forum, not specifically the music producers' forum, so there's plenty of chatter about listening to music from non-musicians—not all of it new music, not all of it local. Here, for example, is frequent poster Yasushi Hashizume opening a thread with the highly relatable subject line "Addicted to CDs":

Our poor poster keeps accumulating CDs faster than they can reasonably organize them! Who among us? In complaining/humblebragging about their growing collection of Japanese techno and Yen Records albums (Jun Togawa mentioned!), they predictably kicked off a long thread of other users commiserating and also taking the bait by admiring their list of albums and branching off subthreads to chat about them.

Here's Controlled Voltage's Sunao Inami zeroing on in the reference to Jun Togawa's Shijin no Ie as an excuse to hijack the thread in order to beg Sony (who's assuredly not reading!) to reissue Ippo-Do's albums Night Mirage and Live And Zen on CD^[6].

Elsewhere in the Tekno Hole, I came across another post from Hashizume with something else I didn't expect to find. It turns out that this XD backup contains attachments, not just the post text! Hashizume created a set of techno-themed Mac background patterns (this being in the era when operating systems could do tiled backgrounds but not full background images) and attached it in a post, and it's been preserved here on this CD for us. Let's admire:

The Techno Software conference name might imply it's about music-making software, but it's not really about "software" at all. Instead, it's about "softcore" techno; that is, techno-pop or techno-influenced pop music. A post from Yoshiken, the admin, lays out an interesting manifesto for the forum outlining an ethos of discussing techno as the common structural element of contemporary music (「音楽の構造基盤として蔓延しているテクノ」). Which, by 1994, is pretty on-point!

That said... the population of XD may be a little too hardcore into techno to stay on this particular topic. Threads I've seen include discussion of British group Coco Steel & Lovebomb on Warp Records and discussion of a then-recent Hard Trance 303 Japanese techno compilation. Hardly techno pop! Perhaps the most on-topic thread is this interesting discussion of Kraftwerk-related albums, especially the Balanescu Quartet's Possessed (1992), a contemporary classical album broadly made up of Kraftwerk covers. The poster marvels at the recreation of techno sounds entirely via acoustic instruments and, having listened for myself, I can't disagree. It's a fascinating album!

On the topic of "techno software" as I originally expected it to be, the one thing we unfortunately don't get much of on this forum of music makers is actual music. This is the dialup era, specifically the slow dialup era, so sharing full recorded songs is out of the question. (MP3 wouldn't launch until next year, anyway.) In this era we might have expected to see people sharing MIDI files intended to be played back on specific DTM MIDI devices, or maybe tracker modules, but unfortunately there aren't any threads where people are sharing either in this archive. MIDIum, which seems to have been brand new at the time this archive was created, has a thread where a user inquires about uploading MIDIs but it doesn't seem anyone actually did so in the period this archive covers.

...or so I wrote before I started skimming the MacLIB filesharing conference. In and among the Mac shareware and freeware utilities, I discovered a track uploaded by XD's own Yasushi Hashizume! (That name has popped up in several screenshots in this post; he was a frequent poster.) This is a cover of Yello's Oh Yeah (as made famous by Ferris Bueller), and it really does manage to squeeze a pretty faithful rendition of the original song into just 120KB despite having to give up a few of the famous vocal samples. It doesn't look like this is Hashizume's own work, unfortunately; I'd been hoping for the chance to listen to an XD poster's desktop music. At the very least, it's an interesting little look into the kind of music that XD's posters were seeking out on their computers. If you want to hear for yourself, there's a copy you can listen to in your browser right here.

Meanwhile, over in the Techno Hardware conference, we have a more "hardcore" set of discussions. Like Techno Software, the guidelines for what exactly constitutes a "hardcore" techno discussion are pretty vague, but most of the chatter here is about techno music-making hardware and techniques. Like the last conference I went in expecting exclusively hardware-related topics, but the actual set of topics is quite a bit looser. There is quite a lot of hardware chatter though. Here, for example, is DJ and Controlled Voltage bandmember Sunao Inami introducing himself self-effacingly as someone who doesn't know the first thing about modern DTM MIDI hardware but an expert on old hardware with all the knobs that produce a single note at a time.

Actually, it seems XD had quite a few longtime synthheads who were all too happy to continue discussing their faves. Here we have Susumu Miki lamenting that no one seems interested in creating "new sounds", by which he means creating waveforms yourself instead of using samples. Which sounds dramatic, but isn't an entirely wrong reaction to the heavily sample-based sound of mid-90s techno. It must have been a dramatic shift for people who still liked analogue synths the best. The very next thread, in fact, discusses a set of sample files to recreate older Roland synths using modern sample-based digital software. (This seems to have been a popular kind of tool in the early desktop computer days; despite Sunao's claim he only knows how to use analogue synths, the CD includes his own recreation of Roland's TB-303 as a set of digital files people could use to create music at home on their Macs.)

Moving away from techno, the Marching Forum folder has a set of conferences that surprised me mostly in that they existed in the first place. I had no idea that marching bands were popular enough in Japan to sustain this much conversation, but this was a busy set of conferences filled with discussion about upcoming events and marching technique.

The other big surprise to me is that this is one of the very few parts of XD I can find any record of online... and, in fact, Japan Marching Forum seems to have survived the end of XD itself. By late 1997 it had its own webpage and a simple web forum that seems to have kept going well into 2005. Beyond that, though... Japan Marching Forum seems to have migrated its FirstClass BBS to the internet! You still used the FirstClass software to access it, but you didn't have to dial in anymore and could access it from, theoretically, anywhere in the world. (I have to imagine it didn't see much activity outside Japan, but maybe this helped it go national.) I knew that FirstClass morphed into providing internet-based services, but this is the first example I've seen of a personal, non-corporate BBS from this era still using it instead of fully migrating all their services to a web browser. I'd love to know how long the FirstClass internet era lasted for forums like this before they moved fully onto the web.

I've mostly skipped the tech talk on XD because, quite honestly, enough ink has already been spilled about early computer-users using computers to talk about computers. There is, however, one thread in Rock me on that struck me.

The administrator, Yoshiken, opens up a discussion on rock journalist Hiroshi Iwatani, who cofounded the influential Japanese rock music magazine Rockin'on in 1972. The part that caught my eye wasn't the music, though, but the comment about Iwatani's career pivot: in the mid-80s he resigned from Rockin'on, quit music journalism, and got into computers. (Spent the rest of his career in computers, at that; he was at TechCrunch Japan from 2008 until he retired in 2022.) When I see a left-turn career transition like this I always find myself wondering what happened, but Yoshiken offers an explanation in a followup post: that Iwatani had been drawn to rock music because of its radical potential for interpersonal communication, but that by the mid-80s he had become disillusioned with how commercial rock music had become and began developing an interest in the potential of computers instead.

It's increasingly hard to remember, but there was a time when home computing felt genuinely revolutionary. Not just a commercial revolution for the companies driving it, that is, but a personally, individually empowering force. The mid-80s would have been exactly the right time for someone disillusioned with the power of one revolutionary medium to put his hope in computers next, just as the 90s seems to have been the right time for XD's music freaks to come to the same conclusion about their passions. They were nowhere near as radical as Iwatani seems to have been (in the 90s he was publishing books with titles like "Radical Computing: The Ultimate Machine for the Mind"), but they saw the start of the computer revolution and immediately latched onto what it could do for their passion for music. And for music this really was the start of the computer music revolution, the time when it felt the future could bring absolutely anything. It might be quaint thinking about how exciting it might be to make music on a computer, just as it is to read about Iwatani making a zine on a computer in 1987, but it was exciting to this group of people all the same.

It's that excitement that brought this group of people together on the computer in the first place. It's easy to cast early online communities as computer nerds talking to each other about computers on computers, but this conversation really highlights why these communities were more diverse in their interests than the stereotypes suggest and what they had to offer the people who came to them from a less-computery background.

I'm also struck, reading this, with how much my own relationship to computers feels like Iwatani's relationship to rock music in the 80s. I, too, was attracted to something I thought had revolutionary personal potential and I, too, have seen that potential slowly sapped away as the medium becomes more and more tightly controlled by a smaller and smaller pool of corporate interests. I don't really have a conclusion here, and I'm not about to drop this blog to pursue a new career in rock journalism, but there's some kind of comfort in seeing someone walk a path this similar to mine and struggle with the same thoughts I have. It's also helpful seeing these conversations in this particular time and place. I'm not seeking a nostalgic return to that time (as much as my very "1996" site design might make you think that), but rather that there's something grounding about seeing this passion and energy.

On this demo CD, we've got connections to a few different networks: AppleCenter Higobashi, Virtual Nipponbashi (Virtual日本橋), and SimNaniwa (Simなにわ), all of which seem to have been located in the Kansai region too^[7]. AppleCenter Higobashi and Virtual Nipponbashi seem like they've left basically zero trace on the modern internet; there are zero search results on the web for either name, which makes it all the more remarkable we don't just have information about them but an interactive copy of some of their messages!

More than just the archive though, we've got an incredibly cool presentation. I talked a little before about how these BBSs are very regional and local to specific areas. These BBS operators decided to make that explicit: each is presented as a pixel art map of a region of Kansai, with little conferences dotted around in areas they're local to. At a time when the internet was about to go global, it's fascinating seeing something that's leaning this hard into being specifically local instead. I'm not going to do a conference by conference summary of these BBSs because, frankly, the amount of content in here could easily be a whole series of posts on its own, but how about we take a look at the maps and see how they chose to represent themselves?

Let's start with the main SimNaniwa map. SimNaniwa was located in Osaka and seems like it also served surrounding areas; it depicts itself with a nice little pixel art map centred on Osaka and its environs littered with icons representing different conferences. A lot of what we can see on this map is regional—take a look to the west and we can see a few local conferences for Kobe (神戸). Over to the east we can see conferences for the cities of Nara (奈良), Kyoto (京都), and more. But we're not just looking at cities; there are conferences for local landmarks too, like Osaka's Kyobashi Station (京橋), whose threads are lit up with people talking about their train commutes or the best places to watch fireworks near the station. I'd already been expecting local content after seeing the flavour of the discussion on XD, but this is far more specifically hyperlocal and it's genuinely quite charming.

This is only the first of a few SimNaniwa maps, though! Click on "SNorth" (Sキタ) and we get directed to a whole second map. This one is a little zoom in on northern Osaka centred around the Umeda (梅田) region. Umeda's a major shopping district and the conference right at those big buildings seems like it was very focused on that specific shopping area; the very first post is a poster telling people about a new food court that just opened up and promising to report back. (Regrettably, they say they spent too much on their Mac to afford lunch out today.) This map seems in general like it's a little more focused on businesses and similar kinds of spaces, since it also includes a conference for specific named places like the Osaka BlueNote jazz club or the digital agency Funfun Kobo (FunFun工房)^[8]. These conferences weren't operated by the businesses they're named after, and this early in the history of online communities it's extremely unlikely most of them were even aware people were there talking about them. A big exception is Funfun Kobo; the lively discussions here include the business's actual owners.

The bottom of that map has an arrow pointing down with the label "SSouth" (Sミナミ); double click on that and we get a new map, this time a closeup of the southern region of Osaka. This area, bounded by Namba Station to the south and Amerikamura to the west, is back to more general neighbourhood discussions. "Amerikamura", for example, is devoted to discussing the popular Amerikamura entertainment district near Shinsaibashi, with threads devoted to discussions of local businesses, theatres, and more. That theatre with the silly face just above Dotonbori appears to be the Shinsaibashi 2-Chome Theatre that was there at the time; this wouldn't be Osaka without a place to discuss comedy after all.

Click the furthest south arrow here, and we land somewhere else entirely. This map of Nipponbashi actually belongs to a separate BBS, Virtual Nipponbashi (Virtual日本橋), but it seems that the two BBSs used relays to link their maps to each other and present them almost like one big area. In the real world Nipponbashi is a major historical shopping district in Osaka that, in the 90s, was very much like Osaka's version of Tokyo's Akihabara. It makes sense that early Osaka computer nerds would choose to recreate it digitally as a place to hang out online.

Virtual Nipponbashi seems to have been a slightly less geographically bound space than SimNaniwa. The map we've got here recreates Nipponbashi, but these conferences aren't specifically about the physical places on the map they represent the way they did in SimNaniwa. Instead, we've got what are basically a set of virtual "shops" or communities that are there for people to talk about the kinds of things you'd go to Nipponbashi to shop for. As usual for a FirstClass BBS, we've got plenty of Mac-focused conferences such as the "Mac Collection" conference where people talk about their own personal computers, but the other platforms get to be represented too: a "DOS/V^[9] Paradise" conference has plenty of space for Virtual Nipponbashi's smaller group of PC devotees to post about their interests, and there's even a "Dr. Amiga" conference on the outskirts for the small Japanese Amiga contingent. (Of course, this is 1994, so the spectre of doom is omnipresent: one of the very first threads in the Amiga forum here is about Commodore's bankruptcy.)

Even though most of Virtual Nipponbashi seems to have been topic-focused, we can find at least a little bit of hyperlocal content here. The "HyperCraft Nipponbashi" conference is about the real-world HyperCraft shop that existed just off Nipponbashi in 1994. This was a Japanese chain of Mac-specific software shops; this profile from January 1995 about its Akihabara location highlights it as a place to get Mac software, and the name certainly does keep coming up in Mac circles in this time period. The threads here are full of people discussing the Osaka shop itself as well as its other regional branches like the Kobe shop that, reportedly, had just opened in April of that year. This article likewise covers Sofmap, a titan of computer hardware in this era, which also had a real-world Nipponbashi location and which gets its own conference here.

These four large areas are all the maps we have in the PASSTHRU folder. Unfortunately, since I don't have any later archives, it's not clear how these communities might have grown after this. I'd love to see archives from 1995 or later, if they exist, to see how they might have chosen to continue growing or whether they ever added any new areas.

That's not quite the end of our story though; I happened to stumble across two bits of information that give us an epilogue. First, as I mentioned before, the Marching Forum conference split off into its own BBS and web forum that survived the end of XD by almost a decade. In its independent form, it claims it was hosted by something called "Cave"... which takes us to my second discovery. I linked to XD's official list of CDs above, and we have that because XD was on the internet at some point. Their website was never archived while it still belonged to XD, so we don't know exactly what was on there, but we do know what it was in 1999: a new internet-based FirstClass BBS called "Cave". The same Cave that was hosting Japan Marching Forum! That's not the only "Cave" in question though. This is also the same "Cave" as the one from Cave Studio, the recording studio belonging to regular XD poster Sunao Inami. In other words, as far as I can tell, "XD" itself may have shut down by the late 90s but it was replaced by another community run by one of XD's most prolific posters and hosting some of the very same communities. I don't know exactly how late Cave operated but Wayback machine archives show posts at least as late as 2001 and it was still online as of 2008, which is pretty late for this kind of BBS. And to this day, even though it's been offline for nearly 20 years, Cave Studio still links to the Cave BBS.

• Hold down the option/alt key and double click the disk icon with the text that reads "Option+ダッブルクリックしてね"
• Double click the icon that reads "aXess2XD Demo 0.6"

2. Stats suggest that 1994 is the exact peak of BBS usage, with the number of active BBSs dropping off sharply after that. ↩

3. The dates suggest the actual archive was created in October, but the most recent exported posts are from late September. ↩

4. FirstClass was originally a Mac-only BBS system. By 1994 it had a Windows client too, but XD seems to have seen itself as a Mac-forward BBS and its CD only includes the Mac client. So we'll be using that! ↩

5. The "Business" username in that screenshot comes from the original FirstClass demo this disc is built on top of. That demo app has a default user named "Robert Business" and a series of very business-ey demo forums. XD changed the content but not the default user identity. I do like the idea of Robert Business enjoying himself talking about techno. ↩

6. He had a long wait. Night Mirage finally made it out on CD in 2013, while the best of my ability to tell, Live and Zen is still waiting. ↩

7. These names are all very regionally-specific: "Naniwa" is an old name for Osaka, Nipponbashi is a shopping district in Osaka, and Higobashi is a train station in Osaka. ↩

8. Not especially relevant to the article, but it seems like Funfun Kobo were still in that spot right up until at least 2010 when they seem to have closed up shop. ↩

9. "DOS/V" is the name for IBM's Japanese-localized version of DOS, but it's also a catchall term for IBM-compatible computers in Japan. When people talk about "DOS/V" in this context they usually mean it the same way we would talk about "PCs" in English. ↩

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Father Christmas is very loosely based on the 1991 cartoon of the same name and two popular British storybooks by author Raymond Briggs. Along with his storybook The Snowman, these are genuine Christmas classics in some parts of the world. The cartoon follows a version of Father Christmas living a down-to-earth British life. Exhausted after the Christmas season, he sets out on a vacation around the world and has misadventures in a variety of different countries before finally returning home and doing his annual Christmas present deliveries.

The game follows the cartoon's plot in only the vaguest sense. A lot of children's CD-ROMs adapted from books and cartoons adopt a storybook format that tries to retell the original plot, but not here. In fact, there's almost no story at all. This is, instead, a geography quiz game that tasks players with guesing at the locations of world landmarks. The main game mode roughly adapts the "trip around the world" concept, but the framing device here is that it's Father Christmas's pet dog and cat that have gone on vacation rather than him. Every round they send a postcard from their latest destination describing it in vague terms; players have to navigate around the in-game globe to locate one of the in-game landmarks that matches the hint. If the player gets it wrong, Father Christmas gives the player a more direct hint and lets them try again. This continues as long as the player wants; there's no further story and no more variety in the game format beyond new places to track the cat and dog.

Maybe the strangest omission here is a way for the player to explore the world and learn about places while trying to track down the pets. The game does have a regular atlas mode, in which players can use the same interface to explore all of the different landmarks in the game and read a bit of text about them, but this text isn't available when playing the game mode. If players want to learn more about the game to improve their chances of tracking them, they have to quit the game mode and switch over to a different mode... and if they then want to get back to finding the pets, they have to quit the atlas mode and start the game mode over from scratch. It's a strange design and almost feels designed to make the game feel like it has slightly more variety than it really does.

The disc does have one other primary feature: a full copy of the 1991 Father Christmas cartoon. It's a reasonably generous extra for 1995, when a movie on VHS could cost as much as a computer game, although even for the time the 12 frames per second video that fills barely 1/5 of the screen wouldn't have been considered the best viewing experience.

Father Christmas was developed in 1995 by Millennium Interactive, at the time a small British studio; they would eventually become more famous after being bought by Sony, for whom they developed games like MediEval (1998) and Killzone: Mercenary (2013). It was published by Japanese media company Gaga Communications, which was very active in CD-ROM game development in the mid-90s, and released simultaneously for Windows PCs and the Sega Saturn game console. The latter was an unusual choice for this kind of educational game, but Gaga seems to have been making a big push to try and expand their computer CD-ROM market into consoles^[1]. The result isn't terribly successful; this is a very barebones port of an already pretty limited piece of educational software, with poorly-converted artwork that looks closer to a first-pass placeholder than something that was ready for release.

An open question with a game developed like this is what language it was developed in. Did the team work in their native language and let the publisher translate it for the target market? Did the publisher assign a writer to write the game natively in their target language? As it happens, Father Christmas has files left over on the disc that make this abundantly clear. The PC disc was mastered with a number of leftover development files on it, including most of the content necessary for a complete English version of the game. The credits list a single English name for the game's text, and more significantly an entire unused English script is present on the disc. Written in a colloquial British English, this is almost certainly the original script created by the game's developers before it was translated into Japanese. Beyond just the script itself, it contains text files which appear to be notes from the developers itemizing content they expected to be in the game along with the speaking script for Father Christmas's voice in English and Japanese.

Beyond just the script, it also includes a full set of English graphical assets for the title screen and text-based buttons. The only resources missing English versions are Father Christmas's voice acting and the Father Christmas cartoon, both of which are the sort of expensive resources that the development team would have been unlikely to be doing on their own. None of these English resources are present in the Sega Saturn version.

Another surprise on the disc is a set of assets for an unreleased Mac version. Millenium's other Christmas game, The Snowman, was released simultaneously for Mac and PC, and it seems they may have considered doing the same with Father Christmas. Not all of the assets are present, and there's no actual Mac executable, but it does contain a complete set of Mac-format text assets, a developer tool for converting PC-format text files to Mac, and a single Mac-format video.

This has been a fairly trivia-heavy post, but sometimes there simply isn't that much interesting to say about a game. Father Christmas isn't especially well-crafted, but it's a game with some surprising discoveries to it and sometimes that's enough.

1. Gaga Communications was a coproducer on the film, so they also had good reason to commission this game even if they only planned to release it in Japan. ↩

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This isn't a list of games I expect to win or that I think are shortlisted for any awards; I'm one of hundreds of judges, and this is just one person's opinion. (Besides, as you're aware if you read this blog, something being interesting to me it's pretty far from a guarantee that it has wide appeal!) This is just a list of games I found interesting and thought my readers might as well. I've tried to highlight several games I think would be especially interesting to CD-ROM Journal readers, but you'll have to excuse my dalliances with "normal gaming". I've also tried to balance the list between game you can play right now and unreleased games.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is the second game from the indie game studio of Meredith Gran, who's best known for her webcomic Octopus Pie. A graphic adventure following the first year of university for small-town kid Mara, it's a lushly-written game—one of those games where you want to click absolutely every surface just to see what description or dialogue it has.

This is mechanically brilliant in ways I didn't expect, even having played the original Perfect Tides. Mara's a writing student, so she needs to write assignments over the course of the game—which you, the player, get to write for her by telling her what topics to pick. These are the same topics you get to talk to all of the game's characters about, and the more you talk about things, the better she becomes at them. This leads to some hilarious moments on its own (at a party Mara has a conversation about music that goes so badly she cries, then gains a level in the concept of "music"), but it also gives the player a surprising amount of freedom in deciding how they're going to approach the world or even what they're going to write about. The game will let you completely ignore the assigned topic and write about anarchism for school if you really want to. It's delightful.

kevin's PLAYING in berlin

This is the latest from experimental art game developer Kevin Du (IGF 2024 Nuovo finalist Kevin(1997-2007) and 2025 finalist Ginger). This year's kevin's PLAYING in berlin is a triptych of loosely-connected games that continue their experimentation with storytelling through constructed languages. I was most struck by You Have Received XX Messages in a Language Unknown Even to Its Speaker, an "emotional ASMR game", in which players explore a field of ASMR messages in a constructed language. It's a smart reflection on how the immediate impact of most ASMR is more about the tone than the actual words being spoken and makes a great medium for Du's experiments. Ke Vin, the most visual of the three, features a vertically-bisected playfield where each half of the screen is filled with half of a video of Du exploring different parts of a city. What if Ginger is a Religion is a play on last year's Ginger, which was focused on story via decoding and reproducing sound; this time the constructed language is encoded via marginalia in a dictionary that players can turn on and off at will.

Du's games tend to be uncompromising in their design, trusting the player to approach the game on their own terms or not at all, and that pureness is what makes them so fascinating.

Stray Children

Stray Children is the latest game from Yoshiro Kimura's studio Onion Games and the spiritual successor to his 1997 RPG without combat Moon. It's a beautiful game that leans fully into the tonal oddities of JRPGs—weaving effortlessly between goofy, chopped-feeling lines and disarmingly genuine emotional moments. It's smart writing that makes good use of the "forced to grow up too soon" feeling from its child protagonist who finds themselves surrounded by adults who don't seem to be able to manage their own problems.

Moon was one of the inspirations for Undertale, and now Stray Children feels like a response to Undertale in turn—playing it feels like experiencing the history of post-RPGs in a single game.

Blippo+

One of the year's biggest surprises. Blippo+ is a game in the form of channel surfing—a TV network from another planet, filled with original programs to watch and swap between. The programs are their own reward, but it has an overarching story that develops over the course of its real-time twelve-week broadcast schedule. It's shockingly well-produced experimental cinema, clearly the result of a team of directors and actors being given free reign to have fun doing whatever they wanted making otherworldly TV.

(Expect to see more about Blippo+ on CD-ROM Journal.)

Jail Dice: Roll to Break

Jail Dice is exactly the kind of game I hope to discover via IGF. It's a genuinely wild collection of mechanics that feels like something from the experimental days of the PS1. Players control a space ship dice rolling across a game field, knocking down walls and collecting gems in order to be able to escape to the next stage. It's simultaneously turn-based (new obstacles and enemies only spawn every time you roll a single tile) and real-time (enemies and obstacles fire in real-time), and also requires players to be paying attention to the positioning of their die's pips as they move around to use their abilities. It had a single review on Steam at the time it was submitted to IGF and could easily have been overlooked without an event like IGF to bring it to more eyes. I'm grateful to have been able to try it.

Mr. Elevator

Mr. Elevator is part of the current school of real-time 3D adventure game a la Blue Prince. It takes its puzzle cues from oldschool escape room puzzle games like Crimson Room, but the real standout is its absurdist control scheme where players control both of their characters' arms individually using the mouse (or two analogue sticks). The awkwardness of trying to juggle all your items at once with only two hands and no inventory menu, and the over-the-top silliness of the animations, gives the Myst-esque puzzling a physicality that really enhances the whole experience. The artwork is also excellent; I've never seen a game that's managed to recreate ca. 1993 Directorcore this effectively in realtime 3D. More than just a skin-deep shader, the 3D objects are carefully sculpted so that they manage to look like lo-fi 2D hand-drawn objects at any given angle.

Demonschool

Necrosoft's Demonschool is a contemporary horror tactical RPG. It's a packed genre, but I was impressed the combat system was this effective at staking out something that feels distinct and that also works this well strategically. Its chess-inspired structure is based on board positioning and character movement. It gives you a set of characters with extremely specific movement skills, but whose skills also have the ability to shift enemies around on the board; since you also have the ability to plot a full round's worth of turns before the enemy gets to move, it allows some very interesting strategic depth in deciding when and where someone will move to let you set up another character for a much more powerful attack. It feels like an attempt to recreate the absolute chaos of Vandal Hearts II or Hoshigami in a way that feels containable.

A Persona-inspired RPG lives or dies on its vibes and, thankfully, Demonschool has the vibes. Its isometric environments do a fantastic job of carrying the game's mood, and I was especially taken with its analogue synth-heavy soundtrack.

Angeline Era

Angeline Era is the latest game from the duo behind Anodyne and Sephonie. A throwback to Ys-style bump combat, this is the kind of "secrets game" I really don't feel like I see much anymore. I can't remember the last time an action game just trusted me to explore it and engage with its specific design vocabulary, and I'm excited to see more from the finished game.

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If not for the sticker on the shrinkwrap warning the listener not to play track 1 on a CD player, Moon Light Café might look like any other self-titled single from a band you've never heard of. The minimalistic graphic design of the cover doesn't really hint at its genre, but on the back cover, next to the list of three tracks, is system requirements for Mac and Windows. What kind of CD single needs a Mac or PC? (What kind of music CD tells you how not to play it before it tells you what kind of music it is?)

But, of course, this isn't Audio CD Journal—if this were just a CD single with a little bit of forgettable music, it wouldn't be here. The system requirements printed on the back make it clear there's something else going on. Pop it into a Mac or Windows computer, and you're presented with something different: a set of videos. The viewer's invited to watch these in order—an opening sequence, followed by a music video for Tokimeki, and an ending sequence. The entire thing runs a breezy nine minutes and can be watched right here.

Watching the video provides some extra context on just what those two instrumental easy-listening tracks were. Those opening and ending sequences provide something like a frame story for the song—that the Moon Light Café is a place where lonely hearts can go to dry their tears, and where you can always return should you need it. What seemed like totally out-of-place tracks when listened to on the CD player suddenly make sense when watched as a video.

And then there's the music video itself, which is a surprisingly lo-fi affair. Full-motion music videos were very much possible at this time—Windows 95 shipped with a full Weezer music video just the year before!—but this isn't anything like that. Instead, we're given a Powerpoint-style slide show that repeatedly pans between a few photos of the singer, Ai Orikasa, in the recording studio them. It's not quite strange enough to be charming as kitsch, but it's also not really genuine enough to work as a standalone video either.

The animation in the opening and ending sequences would have been cutting edge in 1991, but by 1996 would have been considered fairly crude. (Of course, in 2025, it's all wrapped around again and this limited animation has its charms.) The storyline and presentation of the wrapping elements does add a bit to the whole package, but it also raises questions of what exactly the broader project was meant to be. There's not that much of a relationship between the intro message and the song, and the daggy digital Moon Light Café animation we see in the opening and intro doesn't really have much connection to the music video for the song. Was this meant to be a light bit of story that would have connected different singles from the same label?

The actual animation for these three tracks looks very much like early Director animations, but they're actually presented as prerendered QuickTime video files on the disc. A slightly unusual choice in 1996; even at this point, real-time Director animation would have run much better than full-screen 640x480 QuickTime videos. (This may be why the video runs at a generous 8 frames per second.) The jewel case lists no fewer than three programmers for this less-than-nine minute video, which suggests grand plans for an interactive version that absolutely didn't happen. The disc's minimalistic layout—a few video files, a copy of QuickTime, and a README, with no "play now" executable or any interactive content—feels like a compromise, not so much a design decision as a product kicked out the door when the designers struggled to get their original plan running on both Mac and Windows.

Napster, for those who might be a bit too young to remember, was the first mainstream music piracy program and it completely revolutionized music piracy overnight. Pirating an album used to mean mean waiting for it to come on the radio or borrowing your friend's tape to copy it, but now you didn't even need to know anyone else with the album. You could just type the name into a search bar and you could easily get anything you wanted for free.

Music companies were terrified. Since it seemed like anyone could get any music they wanted for free without a second thought, record companies struggled to find ways to incentivize people to keep buying CDs. Aside from suing everyone they could find (which they did), they started looking into extras, bonus features, anything at all to make CDs seem worth it. The actual content on these discs could run anything from a generic app with a video or two to an entire Sarah McLaghlan multimedia application. (Trust me, in the late 90s that seemed cool. To the right person it's still cool!)

But the unifying feature of all of these discs was that the focus was the CD. The music. Enhanced CDs were successful because they were a sweetener to encourage you to buy a CD you were already planning to listen to instead of pirating it. Moon Light Café seems to have instead been an attempt to use the enhanced CD content to entice people to buy a CD they wouldn't have ever heard of... and by all signs it didn't work.

Of course, Moon Light Café didn't invent the idea. The first enhanced CDs came out alongside the CD-i in 1991; these worked in a standard CD player, like other enhanced CDs, but the bonus content was meant to entice people to buy a CD-i player rather than the discs themselves. Unsurprisingly this didn't sell many discs or players, though some of these discs are interesting on their own. The format was mostly dormant for the period between those early releases and Napster, with most "musician CDs" being full multimedia discs of their own rather than bonus features on regular albums. Moon Light Café was almost late enough to come during for the enhanced CD renaissance, but instead was released nearly all on its lonesome.

As for the label itself, the "Moon Light Factory" seems to have disappeared after this one release. The disc features the serial number "MLF-0001", but I haven't seen any evidence there was even a second disc under this label. The album's composers moved on to other work in the anime music industry, rather than the pop music industry this CD seems to have been aimed at, while the album's other producers and programmers don't seem to have other professional credits in the music industry.

This all perhaps sounds a bit harsh, but I do have a real and abiding fondness in my heart for an interesting failure. This disc is clearly not what anyone involved wanted it to be, but there's something intriguing about the almost-clarity of the concept and the room to imagine what it could have been in other circumstances. Moon Light Café didn't live long enough to see its own format live again, but we can still visit from time to time. Can't we?

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If you grew up in Canada in a certain era, there's a good chance you played Crosscountry Canada at school. Over 20 years from 1986 through 2005, this educational trucking sim was a mainstay in generations of Canadian classrooms. The Apple II version was a big hit in the elementary school computer lab when I was growing up^[1]. It was exactly the right balance of educational game: educational enough that schools would buy it and put it on their computers, but game enough that kids would want to play it without being forced to.

There's one Crosscountry that most Canadians didn't play though, and that's Crosscountry BC. Released 2004 only in the province of British Columbia^[2], it's not really a "crosscountry" game at all and takes place exclusively within BC. Since it was designed specifically for schools, it's scarce and obscure even within BC—a rare little oddity that local BC history buffs have been searching for fruitlessly, until now.

Crosscountry is an educational trucking game—Canuck Truck Simulator, if you will. Players take on the role of a long-haul truck driver shuttling goods around the country. In a given campaign, players are assigned a randomized selection of two or more goods to pick up along with a city to deliver them to. Every good in the game is available at only a few cities within the map, and there's no guarantee they'll be anywhere even close to each other, so it's up to the player to consult the map and decide on a route that will take them through all their stops before getting to the spot they need to drop off their cargo—all without breaking the $1000 budget they're given at the start of the game. Players navigate their route one stop at a time; every city or town is a chance to rest and refuel. And, of course, since this is an educational game the player can collect each town's photo and read up on the real-world places they've been.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player's driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it's not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it'll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It's that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.

A player who does read the manual has more surprises to find, however, like instructions on how to speed—in the "minimizing expenses" section. It also, of course, helpfully notes the $50 speeding ticket and risk of getting into an accident, hoping that a player who's tempted to try it out will eventually figure out they're spending more on tickets and repairs than they're saving on other expenses. It's much funnier, though, to picture a child figuring out the ideal speeding strategy that puts them financially ahead of any of the penalties they might see. (A friend shared a story of having discovered a bug in the Apple II version to make the police disappear when they came to pull you over.) Less educational, but probably more realistic to actual trucking.

That sense of being open to playfulness and fun truly stands out to me as an adult coming back to Crosscountry even this many years after my elementary school days. It's much easier as an adult than it was as an eight-year-old; I already have the long-term planning skills the game wants me to be learning from it, so I'm not getting into accidents or forgetting to prepare for long legs of the journey. But this complexity, and the trust in the player to figure it out, helps it stand out.

It doesn't hurt that the art is so fun, too. The idiosyncratic art style mixes a very 90s style of prerendered CGI with heavily photobashed scenes—photoshopped skies, wildly unrealistic colour filtering, CGI and photography welded together. It's remarkable how much it looks like a late 90s multimedia art game at least as much as a children's game. Edutainment isn't necessarily realistic as a genre, but it is striking for a geographic game to take such a fast and loose approach to depicting the real-world cities players are travelling through. Wouldn't it be fun for Burnaby to be a corridor of iridescent cyberpunk buildings? I think so, and Crosscountry BC thinks so too. Each city is also shown via real-world photos the player earns after visiting them, often sourced from local schools or students, so players aren't at the risk of thinking these stylized scenes are real. The educational content is still there... but so is the fun stuff.

Crosscountry BC also has a few features that not all Crosscountry players might have tried. They had always been sold in two editions: a cheaper home version and a more expensive school/educator version, with the school versions including extra features targeted at teachers. The main extra feature is a scenario creator. Normally, as I described above, the game picks the commodities and dropoff location randomly. The scenario creator, though, allows the user to craft a job with exactly the details they want—they can specify the starting and ending cities and can add exactly the commodities they want. The included 100-page teacher's guide PDF provides detailed instructions to teachers on how they might use it, including how it could be incorporated into lesson plans. That said, in a world where kids have fun making levels and sharing them with each other, it's easy to imagine kids just putting together little truck routes for each other and sharing them around.

My copy is a disc in a plain white sleeve, missing any paperwork that may have come with it, so it's not immediately clear whether it's a home or school version—but it's also not clear if there was a difference this time. The installer asks if it was bought for schools or for home, but either way the game makes the extra features available. Given how limited its distribution was, it may just not have made sense to create two separate builds with fewer features, so home players finally got a taste of what teachers could do all this time.

Crosscountry BC is based on the fourth generation of Crosscountry, specifically the 2002 Crosscountry Canada 2^[3] and Crosscountry USA 2. All three games share an engine and the same core gameplay; many of the essential art assets are shared between all three versions, while a number of Canada-specific art assets in Crosscountry BC are taken from Crosscountry Canada 2.

The biggest difference in Crosscountry BC, of course, is the map: Crosscountry Canada 2 takes place in the entire country, while Crosscountry BC takes place in a single province. Comparing their British Columbia maps, it's immediately clear just how abbreviated Canada 2 is—at least from a local perspective. Most of the British Columbia map in Canada 2 fits on a single screen, with a total of 13 municipalities. Looking at it with BC eyes, it's easy to spot how much is missing. Vancouver's here, of course, but neighbouring municipalities like Burnaby (one of the province's biggest!) are missing. Small towns are present when they need to be to supply goods, but major routes such as Vancouver to Prince George (a driving distance of nearly 800 kilometres, close to nine hours by road) are a single hop without any stops along the way. Crosscountry Canada 2 has the national perspective on BC, but not the local perspective. It doesn't just need more content, it needs communities!

Vancouver to Prince George provides a great example of this in a microcosm. In BC, this isn't a single hop: as seen in the screenshot above, it's a route with many stops along the way. The player has several options, thanks to the expanded road network surrounding Kamloops; a sample route could take the player from Vancouver to Princeton, Merritt, Kamloops, Williams, and Quesnel before finally landing in Prince George. Any of these are places for the player to take stock and refuel, eat, or reset, but they're not just rest stops. Each of these is a destination the player could pick up goods from, or drop off their cargo at the end of the journey. And, of course, they're little learning opportunities for the player, with their own photos and educational blurbs.

These are also chances for school children to spot themselves on the map. The credits are filled with the names of individual schools that that consulted on the game, and the names of those comunities show up in the game as destinations too. By those standards, it's not surprising to see remote communities like Atlin, or Daajing Giids^[4] on Haida Gwaii. This is a game for BC school kids, so it's natural that it's also a chance for children from remote communities, used to seeing themselves passed over in other media, to see their own homes or the places their families live represented.

Given that the other Crosscountry games are long-haul trucking simulators, it's not surprising that Crosscountry BC needed a few tweaks to the game formula. A lot of the challenge of Crosscountry comes from resource usage: gas used up over long trips; hunger and exhaustion that build up over time; and the financial cost of refuelling, resting in hotels, and eating. Crosscountry's focus on realism means that these prices couldn't really be rebalanced; the cost of gas and meals are accurate to the time period, and even the lodging tax is strictly simulated for every single community. Instead, the game adjusts the player's starting budget ($1000 in Crosscountry BC, versus $10,000 for Crosscountry Canada 2) and by giving the players more frequent decisions. Communities are placed much more closely together in Crosscountry BC; this is partly just to compensate for the smaller map size, and partly because representing local communities was a large part of the game's mission. The result, though, is that players aren't travelling hundreds of kilometres in a single pass: they're making decisions several times along a route that would have been a single choice in Crosscountry Canada 2.

When I say that Crosscountry BC was aimed at local schools, it helps to contrast it with how educational games were usually developed to get an idea what this really means. It was developed by Ingenuity Works, a longtime educational game developer who are still based in Vancouver. This was the latest in a long line of Crosscountry games which they'd been selling to schools and parents. Selling an educational game isn't quite like selling a game that's going to store shelves, but it's not totally different either: the game's designed by the company, based on their own ideas and market research, and then goes out to sale to anyone who wants it. BC, meanwhile, was an explicit government partnership: it wasn't developed as a general product, but specifically for and in consultation with BC schools. (This wasn't the first time they'd tried this approach; in the Apple II era, they'd made a customized Crosscountry North Dakota for state schools^[5][6].) Since it was made specifically for school boards, it wasn't sold like a normal game. While the BC Ministry of Education press release mentions that students could order a copy for home, it never appeared on Ingenuity Works's own website and certainly never appeared in stores. If it was genuinely available to buy outside of school, very few copies were ever sold this way—which is, of course, why people have spent so many years trying and failing to find it.

This explains why it's rare, of course, but it also explains why it's so specific. Even when you do your best market research, you don't always know exactly what the customer expects. But when you have exactly one customer, and that customer commissioned the game, you can give them exactly what they want. And in the case of Crosscountry BC, that's communities. As I mentioned earlier, it was developed in consultation with individual schools across the province, giving them a chance to make sure they were represented accurately and—and, also, to present themselves to their students the way they wanted to be seen. The government's checklist^[7] is a cute insight into exactly what schools were providing: a photograph (indeed, many of the photos in-game come directly from teachers and students); a description of their community; the commodities it would make sense for their city to supply for the in-game economy; its terrain, for the in-game driving scenes; and so on. It's giving the customer what they want, but for a hyperlocal game it's also a chance to make sure kids get to see their communities as they think of them.

Of course, like most local art, Crosscountry BC is the most interesting to people to live here—and what's wrong with that? A little slice of home, the chance to point and say "I was there!" What could be better?

2. Education, M. of. (2004, March 29). Educational Computer Game Will Help Students Achieve. https://archive.news.gov.bc.ca/releases/archive/2001-2005/2004BCED0015-000202.htm ↩

3. Crosscountry Canada 2. (ca. 2004). Ingenuity Works Inc. https://web.archive.org/web/20041206093859/http://www.ingenuityworks.com/iworks/main/products/crosscountry_canada/ ↩

4. Here labelled Queen Charlotte City; it wasn't officially renamed until 2022. ↩

5. Canadian Firm Carves Niche Selling Software About U.S. (1992, October). The Computer Paper: B.C. Edition, 5(10), 63. ↩

6. The same article mentions plans for Ontario and BC versions for Apple II, but neither of those happened at the time. It's also interesting to compare their North Dakota game to the famous Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? ↩

7. Education, M. of. (2004, March 29). Crosscountry B.C. Content. https://archive.news.gov.bc.ca/releases/archive/2001-2005/2004BCED0015-000202-Attachment1.htm ↩

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I've been invited to guest over at the excellent Indie Tsushin, so you can find my latest post over there. I wrote about iTA-Choco Systems's excellently strange Rodem the Wild (Yaken Rodem, 野犬ロデム).]]>

A video game is maybe the least likely kind of merchandise they could have created, and the genre of that game is even less likely. It's easy to imagine that a video game based on the Jingle Cats albums would be a music game, or maybe a virtual pet game, but somehow it's neither of these things. It's more of a cross between a puzzle game and a virtual pet game. The player takes on the role of the caretaker of Jingle Cats House, with one important duty: the house's nine cats have to get along. They have to be friends.

However, anyone who's ever had a cat knows that the single hardest thing to do is to get a cat to do something they don't want to do. And so, the player's role isn't just to get the cats to become friends, but to find subtle ways to trick the cats into becoming friends.

Each level, the player is given the chance to pick two cats who haven't made friends yet and put them in the house together. The cats have individual personalities and preferences, which are explained in some cute and quite flavourful descriptions when the player is choosing them; while the player has quite a few choices of pairings in any given stage, not all possible pairings are as compatible as each other and a large part of the strategy involves picking cats who are most likely to share something in common. Once the player has chosen cats and begun a stage, they wander freely and do whatever they feel like... until the player starts interfering. At the top of the screen, the cats have individual "love" meters representing their affection for the other cat; the player's goal is to get both of these as high as they can so that they can then become friends. Left to their own devices, the cats aren't likely to become friends; they might wander around, ignore reach other, or fight, but they won't proactively learn to tolerate each other. Instead, the player needs to inject themselves into the situation—playing with one cat while another is nearby, feeding them in close proximity to each other, finding favourite toys and stationing both cats next to each other. Slowly but surely, as the player finds ways to get them to tolerate each other, they'll even learn to like each other.

Once the player thinks they're ready, they can trigger a friendship "attack". As the attack begins, the game cuts to a short cutscene where the cats either become fast friends... or hiss at each other, depending on whether they were actually ready or not. Become friends, and it's off to the next stage with a new set of cats. Fail, and they simply return to the level to keep trying without any penalty.

After the first stage, the game begins throwing an extra complication at the player: there are extra cats. The second stage features one extra cat, chosen from one of the two the player had chosen in the first stage; the third stage then features two extra cats; and so on. The more cats, the harder the game becomes. The player can sort of force positive interactions between just two cats just by constantly keeping them close to each other if there's only two, but as the number of cats grow, the distractions do too. There's no "point" or "utility" to the wrong pair of cats becoming friends after all! You have a goal to meet, and so extra cats are purely agents of chaos.

The theming is, honestly, perfect. As an AV Club reviewer also points out^[2], this genuinely is true to the experience of having a cat, and of having a goal while struggling to have your cat agree that your goal is at all important. Likewise, the only thing less cooperative than a cat who doesn't want to do something is several cats who don't want to do something. Filling your house with cats is the worst way to get anything at all done, which is why it's the perfect subject for a puzzle game.

The cat designs are delightful, strangely-proportioned spindley-legged cartoon creatures who, in all their weirdness, feel exactly like the concept of a cat. Their designs and their weird movements very much sell the chaos that's happening around them. The cats are named after Jingle Cats creator Mike Spalla's real cats^[3], though their cartoon designs are based more directly on cartoon versions of those cats who had appeared in Japanese versions of the Jingle Cats albums as early as 1995^[4]. The original cats from the Japanese album covers are cute, but the game's designs add just that extra bit of scrungliness that truly makes them. It's better that they're weird creatures who don't quite walk right.

The game was developed by Vantan International, an arm of longtime vocational school Vantan Game Academy. Without context, it's hard to tell if this was a student project; Vantan International may have been a work experience program that paired students with experienced designers, similar to the environment at Namco's game school that produced Katamari Damacy, or it may simply have been a professional studio that was open to hiring its parent company's own students. The artwork, and Jingle Cats's take on the characters, come thanks to Vantan employee Yo Murashima^[5] whose distinctive quirky cartoon designs also appeared in the Game-Ware magazine series, the Saturn Music School edutainment discs, and the later PlayStation game Ten Made Jack.

Jingle Cats was released for both computers and for the PlayStation game console. These versions are mostly the same, featuring the same cats and the same core gameplay. Some evidence suggests the Mac and Windows computer versions were probably the lead platforms. The internal file build dates come about four months prior to the PlayStation version and their cutscenes and graphics contain details that are illegible on the PlayStation, suggesting that artwork was created at high resolution first and only later converted to the PlayStation's lower resolution. Perhaps most tellingly, the PlayStation version has about half the text of the computer versions—in order to keep font size large and legible, the PlayStation version eliminates about half of the text in each cat's biography in the character select menu.

One thing the PlayStation version does feature, however, is singing. Being based on a novelty album series, it's no surprise that all versions of Jingle Cats feature music. On Mac and Windows, completing a level rewards the player with a recording of one of the Jingle Cats pop music covers, while artwork of the cats scrolls by on the screen. The PlayStation version, meanwhile, features custom animations of the cats singing the song with some very charmingly weird mouth animations. There's a difference, it turns out, between just hearing music and seeing it be performed even when it's exactly the same recording, and there's certainly a reason why the cat concert scenes are the best-known element from the PlayStation version.

With or without singing, though, this game is a surreal delight—something strange and cute, and far, far better than it ever even needed to be.

1. About Us. (2013, December 16). JINGLE CATS MUSIC. https://web.archive.org/web/20131216095653/http://www.jinglecats.com/about-us.aspx ↩

2. Agnello, A. J. (2016, April 5). Jingle Cats can be as surreal as actually living with a cat. The A.V. Club. https://www.avclub.com/jingle-cats-can-be-as-surreal-as-actually-living-with-a-1798245890 ↩

3. It’s the Cats’ Meows: Mike Spalla’s new Christmas compact disc features felines yowling Yuletide favorites. (1993, November 19). Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-11-19-va-58488-story.html ↩

4. ジングルドッグ. (1995). クリスマスパーティ [CD]. Coming Records. ↩

5. Yo Murashima. (n.d.). MobyGames. Retrieved September 30, 2024, from https://www.mobygames.com/person/34724/yo-murashima/ ↩

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I recently ran into floppy disk containing a pair of dingbat fonts released in 1999 from Japanese agency Maniackers Design. (Thanks again to Etienne, who sent the disk to me to be backed up.) Maniackers is a label used by designers Masayuki and Mami Sato since 1995, and it's been active on the internet since 1998. Masayuki Sato works in a number of areas of graphic design but, in particular, he's active as a typeface designer.

The same disk includes a second font, Poranger, which is based around the design of Japanese-style superheroes like Ultraman and Super Sentai/Power Rangers. Unlike Lucha Doll, which is purely decorative, Poranger features an actual alphabet of a sort. It has 26 masks, one for each letter of the alphabet, with the letter incorporated somehow into the mask design. It's impressive again how much detail it's packed in and how creative these designs are. They look even better in print.

These fonts were released as a part of a collaboration with Japanese streetwear brand Rolling Cradle. The brand's namesake is a move in lucha libre wrestling, so the lucha theme for the primary font makes sense. They were sold at an event called Flokke (aka Floppy Market; フロッケ展), an art show similar to Macintosho (described in more detail in my post on Takashi Murakami). Unlike Macintosho, this seems to have been a more casual affair: something more akin to art fairs like Comitia and less like a gallery exhibition. The main rule seems to have been that the work being sold needed to fit on a floppy disk, which makes for an interesting limitation. A limitation, certainly, that lends itself well to something like a font.

Like the Murakami floppy, the Lucha Doll/Poranger disk comes with a set of printed cover sheets. They include colourized versions of the font—a nice hint to whoever buys it that they can hand-colour whatever they print out. It also comes on sticker paper, and the copy I handled had had several favourite images cut out by a previous owner. A cute touch in an already quite charming little package, and a reminder that this disk had been loved by someone else at some point.

The disk includes the fonts in two formats: PostScript Type 1, an older font primarily used on Mac and in Adobe products, and the common TrueType format. The TrueType font works perfectly on modern computers, and in fact renders beautifully on high-density modern monitors. Maniackers Design also maintains a list of all its fonts on its website, and includes pages for both of them. While Lucha Doll's page doesn't include a download, Poranger's does in TrueType format that's compatible with all modern operating systems. And I encourage you to download it and give it a go. The next time you print off a document, perhaps you can slip a Poranger in there somewhere. Why not? Weird fonts are still fun.

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A sculpture first exhibited in 1997, Hiropon is a looming, larger-than-life anime character who stands at two and a quarter meters (7'4"). An adolescent female figure just barely dressed in a bikini slipping from her breasts, as she hangs suspended in motion skipping on a jumprope made from her own breastmilk. Her exaggerated proportions barely fit within the eye's frame at a glance, commanding attention no matter where she's installed. Hiropon is often (though not universally; see McQuilten, 2013) taken as a criticism of otaku sexuality, but her exact message remains a puzzle—and she marks a significant departure from the character of the rest of Murakami's work^[1].

It's tempting to read Hiropon as an attention-seeking stunt, or a prank. Certainly, there's a prankishness to her that's only enhanced by seeing her in a gallery with more "serious", "ordinary" work. The essential joke of placing Hiropon in the gallery is that it forces a more serious, aesthetic interpretation that her "low art" peers are denied. Critics describe her "miraculous, rather decorative suspension of bodily fluids, the big colorful prisms of the eyes that suggest abstract paintings" (Smith, 1999). Shock value only lasts so long, as Smith notes; any critic who doesn't simply dismiss her out of hand is forced to consider the artistic qualities of her components, breaking her down into pieces that can be considered at a time; the form of her bodily fluids here, the curve of a breast there. But is she just a joke on the critic? What else might be here?

Hiropon has her origins in a project to establish recurring characters in his work, a sort of high art world response to Hello Kitty and other mascot characters. In Japan Art Today 07, a digital art magazine published in 1993, he describes sketching out three such characters: Mr. Dob, who would become the central recurring character of his career; Hiropon; and an obscure figure known as Daniel III (ダニエル3世) (Nakazawa, 1993). While Mr. Dob draws explicitly from character merchandising, Murakami cites a more underground influence on Hiropon. He describes having visited Comiket, a large-scale comic market where artwork and goods are sold by independent artists, where he saw a piece of artwork of a young-looking female figure posing with lactating breasts; this became the model for Hiropon (Nakazawa, 1993).

Two different paintings by the Hiropon name were shown at his early exhibitions, including 1993's "A Romantic Evening" (Nakazawa, 1993), held from October to November at Gallery Cellar in Nagoya (Sotheby's, 2003). Painted on aluminum, these versions lack the sculpture's imposing presence but feature a number of the ideas that would eventually become the focus of the sculpture. Like the later version, these Hiropons focus very specifically on an adolescent figure exaggerated to the point of distortion, with enormous breasts that feature cow teat-like nipples. The key piece for this exhibition, as depicted in contemporary reviews (Nakazawa, 1993) and later exhibitions, isn't the Hiropon that would become famous later but a reclining figure whose body seems to be almost melting under the weight of her exaggerated physique and whose nipples are pierced in a way that calls to mind a cow's nosering. The secondary work (seen at the top of the article), meanwhile, is clearly the model of the sculpture: nearly the same pose, represented two-dimensionally, and suspended over the looped phrase "dobozite, dobozite, oshamanbe"—a key phrase in Murakami's early art, frequently associated with Mr. Dob. (Mr. Dob himself, in fact, was first exhibited in A Romantic Evening (Ngai, 2005)).

Hiropon wasn't yet a central character in his ouvre, and even the name "Hiropon" wasn't exclusively hers. Rather, "Hiropon"—both a cutesy misspelling of "heroin" and a reference to a methamphetamine drug developed by the Japanese government during World War II (Kelts, 2012)—was a common name used across Murakami's early works. Already by 1993, works from both A Romantic Evening and Macintosho feature the text "© Hiropon", and when Murakami founded his Warholian art factory in 1996 he would name it "Hiropon Factory" before eventually settling on its current name, "Kaikai Kiki" (Gagosian, 2018).

These Hiropons would feature in exhibit retrospectives (Nakazawa again, 1993), but they wouldn't hold the central position of his early work that the sculpture tends to today. They're both literally and figuratively two-dimensional, simpler and less spectacular works than the later sculpture. Rather, the key works of this exhibit seem to have been the initial Mr. Dob painting and Shellmet, a sculpture of a retro-futuristic helmet (see photo above). Hiropon wouldn't take center stage until the following month, when a new version of her would debut exclusively at the small new media art show Macintosho.

The Macintosho^[2] exhibition, held October 30 to December 26 1993 (bxjp, 2021), was organized by new media publisher Digitalogue. (Longtime readers may remember Digitalogue from the article on The Reactive Square.) This was in the earliest days of computer art, and the question how exactly to exhibit a digital work was still in the open. (Across the ocean, Olia Lialina memorably describes the "zoo"-like atmosphere from trying to capture a digital work—and its artist—and place it in a bottle for exhibition (2020).) The exhibition they settled on was a hybrid: at once physical and digital, in the gallery and in the patron's home, and focused exclusively on the Macintosh computers that the scene's adherents preferred. It consisted of 21 original works by a variety of artists, all commissioned for the exhibition, where attendees could try them out for themselves or buy a copy to bring home for their own home computer (bxjp, 2021). Reviewing the list shows a fascinating variety; it includes artists who are well-known now (Murakami, Gabin Ito), artists who were well-known within the early computer art career without having broken into the mainstream (Hideki Nakazawa, Gento Matsumoto) and many others who remained in the underground.

It's surprising to see Murakami in a digital exhibition this early in his career, at a time when he was focused exclusively on traditional media, but he was already well-acquainted with Digitalogue and the other organizers of Macintosho. He has described Digitalogue-affiliated artist Gento Matsumoto's influence on Hiropon's composition (Nakazawa, 1993), and A Romantic Evening was attended by Hideki Nakazawa; it was the sole focus of issue 7 of his early electronic art magazine Japan Art Today.

Murakami's entry to Macintosho was a hybrid work combining both a floppy disk and several traditional artworks. While the staging of the physical exhibit isn't clear from available retrospectives, the purchaseable floppy disk featured five small-form 3.5" prints which served as cover sheets; they may have been physically exhibited alongside the computer. It naturally features replicas of the two Hiropon paintings from A Romantic Evening, with the reclining figure as the primary image. The other prints include an early version of his Mushroom Bomb series, as made famous much later in the Time Bokan print series, and his two Seven Stars prints. Mushroom Bomb is a graphic design-inspired piece making use of only two colours and negative space and characteristic bold, defining lines. (A copy is reproduced at the top of this article.) It depicts a a mushroom cloud explosion in the shape of a skull, recalling the stylized skull designs of both the Time Bokan and Captain Harlock anime series. Seven Stars, meanwhile, features minimalistic geometric patterns which suggest a woman's legs and a nude figure.

Hiropon the software is an altogether stranger work than the paintings. The prints included with the disk may have primed the viwer to expect some form of digital replica of the Hiropon painting, but after only the briefest flash of one of the Seven Stars prints and Mr. Dob's slogan "dobozite, dobozite, oshamanbe", the viewer is presented with a photo of a model—a real flesh and blood woman, that is, not the anime girls that Hiropon purportedly critiques. As several unidentified people chatter at random, it rotates between slides of models—sometimes clothed, sometimes nude—and, finally, a quick sequence of images: the logo of men's magazine Beppin, known for its nude centerfolds; the classic NTT Dial Q2 (ダイヤルQツー) phone service, infamous for its use for phone sex; a photo of a model labelled simply "huge breasts" (きょにゅう); and, at long last, the two images of Hiropon herself labelled "huge breasts 2" (巨乳２).

The effect is disorienting, but not in the same way as viewing Hiropon-the-sculpture herself in person. The background chatter is almost entirely unconnected to the visual content of the work, with the speakers only occasionally making comments that could be considered even tangentially related to the work. The setting—the izakaya^[3], or perhaps the implication that this could be a Dial Q2 call—just reinforces the informality and, ultimately, the inessentiality of it. It's noise, a distraction, and perhaps a sound to blend in with the chatter of the surrounding gallery.

Also noteworthy is what this work doesn't have: interactivity, of any form. Unlike some of the other works in the same exhibition, such as Hideki Nakazawa's anarchic Baka Video Drug, Hiropon is entirely insensate to the viewer's touch; there's no way to speed her along, to cause the work to skip ahead or rewind, or to ask any more information of any of the images it presents. The viewer is there for the ride. In traditional video art or paintings the viewer would never expect interactivity, but here as a choice it asks the viewer to take a passive position: viewer, not participant, in the work, much in the way a viewer of pornography interacts with the subject of that media. It's also an interesting contrast to the later sculpture, where it's easy to argue that the experience of walking around the sculpture, of its massive scale confounding attempts to take it in all at once, is itself interactive in a way that this computer artwork isn't.

A hint as to Murakami's intentions with Hiropon can be seen in his 1999 Tokyo Pop Manifesto (as quoted in Superflat Trilogy, 2005, p. 152). Written the year before he would coin the term "superflat", it provides a valuable insight into his thinking in his earlier years. In charting the development of Japan's pop art scene, as distinct from America's, he describes the 20th century history of Japan as living essentially in America's shadow post-occupation. "Our society and hierarchies were dismantled. We were forced into a system that does not produce “adults”. … The growing Japan is burdened with a childish, irresponsible society". The key moment for Hiropon is when he describes Japan as possessing "a value system based on an infantile sensibility"; we can easily draw a line between that "infantile sensibility" and the imagery of juvenile, young women in the kinds of otaku sexuality that Hiropon is drawn from. The actual intent of the work, such as it is, comes in the contrast of the two sexualities over its running time, of "traditional" sexuality versus Hiropon. The men's magazine nude models, the Dial Q2 service for phone sex: this is "adult" sexuality. Hiropon, "huge breasts 2", the next evolution in the history of sexuality: this is the "infantile sensibility". The comparison is only heightened via ironic contrast in how they're written: the real model is given "きょにゅう" in hiragana, a childish and less educated way of spelling it, while Hiropon is given a more complex "巨乳２" in kanji.

McQuilten (2013) makes the case that Hiropon was designed to "directly appeal to the market" while dismissing claims that it acted as a critique of otaku sexuality. She's certainly not wrong; Murakami's attachment to the market is well-documented, and he's openly described himself as a "slave to my customers" (Itoi, 2002, p. 17). Hiropon isn't merely pandering to the market, however, but trapped in an uncomfortable tension where Murakami attempted to pander to the market while actively critiquing it. Producer Shuichi Miyawaki, from the company that produced the Hiropon sculpture, flatly stated that "At present, almost no otaku have accepted Murakami as an otaku artist making objects within the otaku community", and it's clear that Murakami's critiques of otaku sexuality were a major reason for that rejection. He goes on to describe how "Murakami has made some comments about how otaku are uncomfortable with real women, and about their expressions represent exaggerations of repressed desires". In response, Murakami's work became more derivative; the followup to Hiropon, Miss ko² (various editions starting 1997; Murakami, 2001), is conservatively designed, more directly aping otaku figures and less clearly exaggerated than Hiropon. This is what direct appeal to the market without any form of critique looks like, and the result was mediocre. Hobby and toy writer Masahiko Asano bluntly stated that "I don’t consider the first Miss ko² figure to be a work of art. Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy were sort of almost what you could call art, but the first Miss ko², constructed in shallow, cheap taste, had no context and nothing worth critiquing about it" (2001, p. 94).

Koga (1993) compares Hiropon to Henry Darger, the American outsider artist whose extensive ouevre focuses on fantastical images of girls^[4]. Darger's girls are depicted with penises, an artistic quirk that has been the subject of debate for decades; Koga equates Darger's artistic naïveté with personal naïveté to suggest that he doesn't know his subject, and instead projects his personal self onto his subjects. If he has a penis, why shouldn't the women he's drawing?^[5] And so Hiropon stands in as a Darger-esque woman drawn by an otaku naïf, a copy of a copy created by an otaku who lacks a reference to the real object and who has created a bizarre simulacrum out of his^[6] own ignorance. Koga also draws a comparison to Hiropon's oddly phallic nipples, making the case we should read them not as a cow's teats but as penises: a Darger-esque assignment of the site of sexual power to the woman, assuming that she must draw power from the same organ the male artist does.

Based on Koga's reading of the naïve, ignorant artist, we could say that the contrast between the real women and Hiropon in the Macintosho work serves to make that comparison more explicit: here are real women, and here is Hiropon, created without reference to real women. Could "huge breasts 2" have been created by an artist with reference to a real woman? it seems to ask. If so, this seems a somewhat puerile comparison; "otaku are just virgins who have never touched a woman" is more of a schoolyard taunt or message board post than the core argument for a gallery work. There are many things that can be critiqued in otaku sexuality, but this critique seems shallow and poorly-considered.

Ignoring Hiropon herself, what are we to make of the images of real-life erotic models used here? Unlike Hiropon, an original work inspired by art Murakami had seen elsewhere, these are lifted directly from somewhere else—presumably without consent or permission. If Murakami is really critiquing otaku sexuality, what does it say that he presents us this catalogue of mainstream men's sexuality? The "appropriation" in Hiropon is stylistic, and filtered through the lens of exaggeration, but these are actual photos of actual models, presented ambiguously as objects of either desire or derision. If we're meant to read Hiropon as a critique of otaku sexuality, are we being presented with these photos as critique of mainstream sexuality or merely as a contrast with a form of normatized, adult sexuality? And if it's the latter, what value does it even serve to display, possibly to appropriate, their images in this way?

We've seen two very different kinds of women in Hiropon—the sexualized anime woman, and the real-world nude models—but where are the men in this work? We have Hiropon herself to represent otaku sexuality and the imagery of nude models to represent "traditional" commercial eroticism, but men are present only in their absence—only the immaterial, almost irrelevant male voice in the audio track serves to actually depict any sort of male figure who's consuming this sexuality. In their absence, it's easy to treat the desirer as an abstraction whose existence is simply presumed, and to instead turn any criticisms of sexuality purely onto the image: it's the image that's ludicrous, the image that's obscene—and, of course, the actual nude model who poses for the photographs who bears the weight of our scorn without any real concern for the implicit man who we understand to be demanding this image. It recalls Berger when he describes the male viewer "morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure" (1972, p. 51). It's a critique of sexuality that has no consideration or respect for the women it uses and consumes for its point. It's telling that critical discussion of My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), her male counterpart, tend to adopt a similar framing. Critic Yusuke Minami, for example, summarizes the work as a satire on male sexuality: "demonstrating that this image of a mature “man’s work” is in fact built upon juvenile sexual fantasies" and "artist (=man) seeking a painting (=woman) to subjugate" (2001, pp.59-60). In other words, whether the sculpture is a male or a female figure, the female perspective is somehow always absent: the woman exists just as an image to be consumed and the male perspective is centred.

The choice to open the digital Hiropon with an image of Seven Stars is a tantalizing throwaway moment, and a brief snatch of what could have been a more interesting conversation with the rest of his work. Seven Stars's sleek sexuality is a sharp contrast from Hiropon, both as a 2D image and as a sculpture, and the decision to package these works together in the Macintosho package provides a stronger critique than the choice of real-life models in the digital work. Seven Stars, unlike Hiropon, is a work designed in Murakami's typical mould: logo-like cleanliness in design, flawless linework, a superflat approach to colour design and aesthetic. It fits within Murakami's usual approach to pop culture appropriation: to take concepts, snatches of imagery, then build original works from them with the sleekness and expense of a gallery work. Seven Stars, in other words, would be the typical Murakami approach to erotic art in a way that Hiropon isn't; despite opening with a brief flash of Seven Stars, it's surprising that he makes so little of the comparison and leans instead on nude models.

It's also worth contrasting the specifics of Hiropon's style to Murakami's other works from the same period, including the other prints distributed alongside the floppy disk. Murakami was, of course, already drawing from otaku-based art styles at this point, but these other works are qualitatively different. Mr. Dob, even in his earliest iterations, is defined by clean lines and the specifically professional sheen of his mascot-ness. Mushroom Bomb, even in this early version, is defined by the careful definition of its shapes, the attention paid to the minimalist construction of its colour design and facial shape. Hiropon is different in her intentional crudeness: the shakiness of her lines, in contrast to the refinement seen in those other works; the weakness of her anatomy and posing; the slightly wall-eyed expression. Murakami's other work in this period takes the shape of "elevating" mascot- and otaku-based artwork to the gallery, but Hiropon's very style argues against this kind of interpretation.

An interpretation of Murakami's later figure-based work, including the 1997 Hiropon sculpture, might suggest that this is the result of intentionally magnifying a 1:3.5 scale model to a larger-than-1:1 figure. Hobby and toy writer Masahiko Asano (2001) openly describes the issues that he identified in blowing up a figure to such a scale, though they're clearly intentional from Murakami's perspective. There are physical limitations to painting a 1:3.5 scale figure; the Hiropon sculpture's shaky lines and quirks can be easily read as intentionally exaggerating those physical properties past the scale where they're necessary. But for an audience that's seen the 1993 painting, it becomes harder to read the sculpture in the same light. It's not an exaggeration of a miniaturized work with the same physical limitations; it's an intentional choice to stylize the work this way from first principles.

There's a sense of the freak show here: of taking something the viewer clearly sees as degrading or embarrassing, and "elevating" it to the gallery as a way to mock it. Lichtenstein's work most obviously works this way, as a kind of "pop art" that has no actual respect for the work he's lifting, but Hiropon works within the same mode. That essential crudeness, the weak lines and shaky anatomy, tells a story: this isn't work Murakami has respect for, and the mere act of bringing it to the gallery in the first place is his critique. Just like the freak show, too, Murakami is charging a premium for access. Hiropon is physically blown up to a larger size, with her flaws enlarged for the viewer's eye, in the same way that she's transplanted from Comiket to the gallery. Both are a kind of expansion—of scale, of audience—that serve to throw the perceived flaws and technical limitations to a new audience. His major gallery customers would likely never purchase the actual pornography he's drawing from, but they'll buy Hiropon for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The key illustration for the original Hiropon is, by the standards of the erotic art it aims to critique, almost staid: her breasts are improbably enormous, yes, and so are her nipples, but there's little to nothing to differentiate her from her erotic magazine peers. What makes the sculpture stand out is its next-level absurdity: details such as the jump rope formed out of her own breast milk, the way that she exists in the room, lurking alongside the viewer. One article describes her eyes as "blank white orbs of reflected light sat just off-center" which, when "[v]iewed from other angles... could look menacing" (Kelts, 2012)—an experience and aesthetic genuinely unattainable either on aluminum or in the small scale of an anime figure.

The lack of that transformative exaggeration in the original painting and in the software—the truly absurd step that would actually mark it as being something other than the low art it claims to critique—leaves it languishing as a retread of Lichtenstein's comic paintings. It's an original work, not a direct copy as Lichtenstein made, but the underlying intent is the same: lifting a work of low art and marking it as crude via the juxtaposition of placing it in a new setting. It could have been a direct copy of another work and the work wouldn't have fundamentally changed. It would, in fact, be quite possible to mistake it for erotic art from any magazine or computer game of the era. Reproduction of fundamentally the same imagery fails as meaningful critique.

The sculpture has those same aesthetic qualities as the painting and the software, but the sheer scale and exaggeration goes beyond what those can achieve—and that, in the end, is where the work derives its greatest successes. Whether positive or negative, all of the critics I've cited previously were responding to the work's scale and imposing presence. Her central argument—the somewhat shallow critique of otaku sexuality and the dare to the viewer to take the work seriously in the first place—finally succeeds from her epic scale where these earlier renditions fell short. Her meaning is confused, but can't scale and aesthetics close that gap?

Notes

2. Alternately spelled "Macinto書", using the character for "book" ("sho"). ↩

3. A traditional Japanese bar. ↩

4. Koga is referring specifically to the Henry Darger Exhibition held at the Setagaya Museum in Tokyo in 1993 (Exhibitions). ↩

5. It should be noted that this interpretation of Darger's work isn't by any means definitive; why exactly he depicted girls the way he did is the subject of much debate. ↩

6. We can readily assume here that the artist is meant to be male; there has been no room for a woman on the artist's side of the camera or brush anywhere in this discussion. ↩

Bibliography

The Day of St. Claus opens with the dog and their relationship with a little girl. After she receives the dog for her birthday, they become fast friends—until a freak accident washes the dog off to sea one day. Luckily, they happen to come ashore in the North Pole at St. Town, the town where Santa and his single reindeer live. They rescue the little dog and take them in.

St. Claus is told entirely wordlessly aside from a minimal amount of text in the chapter title cards. Each scene is instead a little diorama, a partially-animated page showing a slice of the story with room for player interaction. As in most interactive storybooks, there are no branching pathways. Interaction reveals little extra details about the scene, cute easter eggs, or just small character moments that provide more characterization. It's nice when the player clicks and a fun thing happens; it's nice when you see a little more about a scene because you tried something. Sometimes these details are little sight gags, like witnessing a penguin steal from the reindeer's fish bucket; sometimes it provides extra characterizing details, like seeing St. Claus's family photos on his bookshelf and being able to imagine moments in his life.

At first, the shape of the story seems fairly straightforward—dog gets lost, dog gets found by Santa, Santa delivers dog back home. It's a traditional Christmas storybook format. The really surprising part is how much of this story isn't devoted to that core premise, but instead setting up the dog's daily life in St. Town.

Despite the Christmassy trappings, most of the story isn't about Christmas at all. It's less a Christmas story and more a story that happens to be bookended by gift-giving celebrations. A significant amount of the runtime is devoted to the dog's first human friend, a little girl who hangs out in the field they like to play in. She develops a crush on an older boy, and experiences her first heartbreak when he graduates and moves to another town for his career. These aren't small moments, passed over quickly; it communicates the real sense that the dog has established a life here in St. Town, that they built a second home after losing their last one.

Most of the story takes place in the year leading up to Christmas, a time when nothing particularly Christmassey is on anyone's mind. We have a few scenes of St. Claus preparing presents, but it's clear that Christmas is only his and his reindeer's job. He doesn't live in the all-year Christmas industrial complex of Rankin/Bass's Rudolph or most other depictions of Christmas. St. Town might be named after Santa, but its residents have their own distinctly non-Christmassey lives and their own things to do. There are a few sprites and elves, but they're not Santa's helpers, just residents with their own concerns. When the little girl's crush prepares to head off to the real world after graduation, it's not in preparation for Christmas work of some kind, but for an entirely recognizable everyday life. That the dog has built a new life here is far more believable, and far more effective, when St. Town is just a place that exists and not a 24-hour Christmas zone that only exists in service to the world's children.

A significant amount of time is also given to the reindeer's budding relationship with the dog. The reindeer seems irritated with the dog's childlike mischief for a good part of the book, but as it develops there's a growing parental concern; the reindeer becomes protective, loving and genuinely caring towards them. By the end, when the puppy is finally returned home, it's hard for them to say goodbye—paralleling the earlier railroad departure of the student. This wasn't a short trip; the dog spent most of a year there with the reindeer, enough time to have started to build a life there before going back to his original home again. The reindeer's mixed feelings at saying goodbye also bookends the game's earlier scenes with a version for parents; where the girl's sorrow at losing her puppy and the other girl's sadness at her older crush moving away are a child's version of learning to cope with loss, the reindeer is an adult's sense of simultaneous pride and loss at seeing their child grow up and move in in life. The children reading this disc will have responded most strongly to the children's sense of loss, but the parent reading along will see themselves in the reindeer.

Both the art and story are the work of Kyoto-based artist Atsuko Hinata^[1]. Her slightly crude, distinctly hand-drawn art style has been consistent throughout her career; the work shown on her website and her blog today is very clearly the work of the same person who drew St. Claus. The early part of her career involved work for CD-ROM publisher Taiyodo, who published St. Claus along with short works that appeared in their Uruuru CD-ROM compilation series. A significant part of her work has been character-focused, creating characters for use by companies like Yamaha and NEC BIGLOBE. More recently, she's focused on her singular love of dogs; her own profile, on her own website, devotes more time to biographies of her beloved pets than herself, and her personal blog showcases her original work for things like her local animal hospital's calendar^[2].

According to the credits, Hinata was the sole artist responsible for this disc; she wasn't an art director, but truly illustrated every single page and every animation. That singular style shines through in every page; as much as a team of artists can recreate an individual's style, there's a particular energy that comes through when one artist is realizing their own work that's distinctly recognizable here. The art style has the slight crudeness of early digital work drawn directly on the computer, with slightly rough lines and a willingness to allow a natural wiggliness between frames. There are no straight lines, no regular shapes; everything has the distinct look of having been drawn by mouse and luxuriates in its irregularities. It's hard to say how it would have been received in its time, but in 2023 it gives a distinctly lo-fi, hand-drawn vibe in the same way that Ganbare! Inuchan and Amanda Stories do. It's a personal touch.

Aside from the artwork, the single largest chunk of the credits is devoted to music. St. Claus was composed by Shoichi Karasaki, a composer most known for his work on the stage^[3]. His original score for St. Claus is pleasant, emotional without being cloying, and overall effective. It's also remarkably restrained; rather than the wall-to-wall music that many games use, it luxuriates in moments of silence, saving music for when it's needed and when it's effective.

Karasaki himself plays guitar and is joined by seven other musicians for the small live orchestra that performs it. The choice of an entirely live, non-synthesized soundtrack is surprising but effective; like the artwork, it gives a human touch to the story. As a theatre composer, Karasaki was well-suited to the role. This kind of small orchestra is the same scale as what a theatre production could afford, and let him make the most of his experience.

It's that combination of artistry and storytelling, with its willingness to spend time on the minutiae of their lives, that makes The Day of St. Claus so special. It could have been just another Christmas story, but it's the non-Christmas parts of the story that make it so charming and so special.

2. Hinata, A. (2023, November 11). 12日前. きょうのわんこずさま. http://wankos.blog84.fc2.com/blog-entry-3592.html ↩

3. からさきしょういち オフィシャルWEB. (n.d.). からさきしょういち オフィシャルWEB. Retrieved December 22, 2023, from http://s-karasaki.com/index.html ↩

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