A rhythm-based shoot-'em-up in... 1987?
Before making Sound Fantasy and Electroplankton with Nintendo, Toshio Iwai designed a Famicom Disk System game starring a flying “sound warrior” called Otocky.
Toshio Iwai is an artist, musician, and programmer. He’s also a children’s author, television creator, and public lecturer. Iwai is, and has been, a lot of things — but to those who follow video games, he’s best known for two projects: the experimental Nintendo DS game Electroplankton and the ill-fated Super Famicom game Sound Fantasy.
Neither was his first foray into games, though.
Back in 1987, following a handful of critically acclaimed art installations in college, Iwai took aim at the Famicom Disk System with an idea unlike anything before. Otocky was a rhythm-based shoot-’em-up that merged music and gameplay, like a simple 2D version of Rez over a decade before Tetsuya Mizuguchi popularized the idea.
I recently spoke to Iwai for a profile covering his work on Sound Fantasy and Electroplankton, but the story of Otocky is in some ways just as illustrative of his approach — especially since the game didn’t start as what it ended up becoming, or even as a video game in the traditional sense.