History

Overview

Toshio Iwai is a japanese interactive media and installation artist, some of which are best known for their visual and sound interactions, and has made quite a few exhibits in his life, starting his career since the 1980s. He would be also involved in the creation of several titles for computers and consoles, which we'll be focusing on here.

Previously to Sound Fantasy, he designed his first video game: Otocky for the Famicom Disk System, published by ASCII Corporation in 1987, only in Japan.

Otocky is a shoot 'em up with a musical twist, where the player uses some sort of ball as a weapon, and where each of the 8 directions it can be punched at makes a different musical note, played to the beat of the background rhythm so you can improvise a song as you play.

In 2000, UrumaDelvi, a husband and wife artist duo, in collaboration with Toshio Iwai and Sony's Sugar & Rockets, Inc., developed the game "Bikkuri Mouse," a sort of an educational and drawing game for the Playstation 2, among the first games on the system and also the first mouse compatible game.

You'll be helping the inhabitants to either decorate a wall, or other minigames in relation to drawing. You could draw as usual, but drawing with a mouse was also made easier with a special paintbrush that transforms simple shapes into surprising objects, sometimes interactive, putting the emphasis on "surprises," the meaning of "Bikkuri."
One of the modes would have you draw wireframe objects that produces sounds on a set rhythm.

Iwai would then work on Tenori-on, alongside BBKY (Kayo Baba), a simple step sequencer for the Bandai WonderSwan, in 2000.
It was only available at an expo in Japan, and it is believed that only around 120 copies were sold.

Iwai would then work with Yamaha Corporation to make the Tenori-on a full fledged electronic instrument, released in 2007, with the intention to make an "instrument of beauty." He would be doing live performances with it before its release, and quite a few popular artists would use the instrument as well.
In 2011, a version of the instrument would be available as an application for iOS devices called "TNR-i," followed by "TNR-e." The distribution of the applications would stop in 2020.

Toshio Iwai would be invited by Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto to produce software for the Nintendo DS. This would result in the creation of Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS, released in 2005 in Japan and 2006 for the rest of the world.

This title can be understood more like a music toy, suited purely for improvisation by interacting with a group of musical fish called Planktons, either using the buttons, touch screen or microphone. It would be a lot closer to some of Iwai's most known works, some of which was adapted from some of his installations.

The Hanenbow Plankton mode would be adapted into a stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii, and would be seen again in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on Nintendo Switch.

This is only a small portion of Toshio Iwai's works, and I would suggest to look up the rest of his works if you're into media art.

Music Insects

After doing computer graphics design, concepts and the virtual set for the weekly educational science TV show Einstein TV for Fuji TV, Toshio Iwai would be offered a one-year residency at San Francisco for the Exploratorium in 1992, a museum of science and technology.

©Exploratorium
Photo: Amy Snyder

He would start the creation of Music Insects, an audio-visual installation, mixing a simple paint program and a music sequencer where insects crawl through the screen, triggering instrumental sounds as they pass over a grid of painted colored pixels. It would become a popular exhibit at the Exploratorium.

One of his friends from Nintendo would see its development, and suggested to the company to develop this software on a Nintendo system. Nintendo would grow interested on the project, and in 1993, they would get Nintendo R&D1 to produce a Super NES version, with its first tentative name: "Sound Factory."

Among the producers at Nintendo R&D1, under Gunpei Yokoi, would be Hirofumi Matsuoka, who was director and graphics artist for the original Mario Paint on Super NES in 1992. As Nintendo did not have a big programming team at the time, as a lot of their projects would have their programming outsourced to external companies such as SRD Co. Ltd., HAL Laboratory and Intelligent Systems, they would hire third party developer Tomcat System for programming, previously known for their impressive Super NES ports of SimEarth & SimAnt, while Toshio Iwai would be the director and designer of this new Super NES version of Music Insects.

Initially planned for release for late November 1993, the project would grow in scope rather than just having an adaptation of Music Insects, itself now renamed "Pix Quartet," it would also see several brand new modes on top, all while focusing on the use of the Super NES Mouse.

Pix Quartet would see additional features compared to the original Music Insects exhibit, where you can now select different types of insects that can now produce different instruments, and the ability to generate patterns, among other things.

In spirit of the project, more modes featuring more audio and visual interactions would be added, such as Beat Hopper, a more action based mode where a grasshopper on a pogo stick would try to hop on all sound tiles on a rhythm and make them disappear to clear a stage. A unique mode where you could kind of create music depending on the order of tiles that you decide to hop on, while retaining some difficulty as the rhythm goes faster.

And Star Fly, a reproduction of Iwai's favorite music box where you could use paper and make holes to compose a score, but could also be treated as a picture, with no direction, essentially playing the song the way you want in any way.
In the software, it's a digital music box where you line up stars in a night sky that plays notes. It's one of the most straight forward modes, but very simple and easy to understand.
Sound Factory would be playable at the Famicom Space World '93 during the Shoshinkai event. Two cartridges of this version would be found and dumped in 2015, you can find it here.

Then the game would be delayed to January/February 1994, and in October 1993, the game would have its final name: "Sound Fantasy."
This allowed additional polish and the development of additional modes, where Pix Quartet would get an insect picker tool where you can move insects however you like, a copy function, stamps, and additional color palettes with different scales.

Beat Hopper would receive a big graphical upgrade, alongside an additional mode with a linear path that gradually appears, and a training mode, while the main mode would receive some gameplay changes such as falling if you miss a tile, instead of giving you another chance.

Star Fly would also get a graphical upgrade and have more options, closer to his base inspiration, such as the ability to change the playback speed, including reverse, more instrument tones with dedicated graphical effects for each, a grid mode and an automatic mode where the Star Fly would randomly change the notes as it plays over time.

At the suggestion of Gunpei Yokoi, Ice Sweeper would be added to the roster of modes, a Breakout clone combined with sound interactions, with two modes: one acts more like a classic Breakout, and the other would be a 4-way breakout, a more difficult mode.

A mid development demo version would be playable at the Winter Consumer Electronic Show of January 1994. Further coverage would be made by magazines later that year, including full previews around Q3 1994 by Famitsu and The Super Famicom magazines, as the game gets constantly delayed, until the final known date of October 1994.

The project was completed after about a year of development, after which Toshio Iwai left for Germany to pursue other ventures. However, the release never came. Later interviews would have Toshio Iwai himself unsure of why it did not release, due to personnel changes at Nintendo, he would not receive a clear answer on why.
Even an European PAL version of the title was completed and called for manufacturing on 18 August 1994 according to leaked data, proving that the game was completed by then, and suggesting a global release was still in the plans, and that the cancellation was possibly done last minute.

Iwai suspects that the market at the time may have rendered experimental projects like Sound Fantasy seen as unfitting by the executives.

Work in progress, words for SimTunes are next.

Development Staff

Nintendo hired Tomcat System, known for their Super NES ports of SimEarth & SimAnt, to handle development of Sound Fantasy, under supervision of Nintendo R&D1 staff, such as Hirofumi Matsuoka, previously director of Mario Paint, and Gunpei Yokoi.
The following was taken from footage of the completed version of the game.

Design & Direction
- Toshio Iwai
Chief Programmer
- Ryoichi Ohkubo (Tomcat System)
Programmer
- Kaoru Kobayashi
- Kazunari Mimura
Assistant
- Koji Higuchi
Sound Designer
- Takane Ohkubo (Beat Maniac)
Producer
- Tsunekazu Ishihara (Ape inc.)
- Makoto Kanoh (Nintendo)
- Takehiro Izushi
- Hirofumi Matsuoka
Executive Producer
- Gunpei Yokoi (Nintendo)

Uncredited
- Benimaru Itoh (Illustrator)

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