A project to turn the cancelled 90s JRPG Indy The Magical Kid into a concept book has recently been announced on X. The organizers of the project also released never-before-seen gameplay footage of the now-lost prototype version of the game on their YouTube channel. With the permission of the original developers, the team’s goal is to create a book featuring the game’s concept art, developer interviews and other unreleased material (source: Game*Spark).
Indy The Magical Kid is a game developed by Graphic Research for the NES. The title, based on a gamebook series of the same name, was originally scheduled to be published by IGS in 1993, but was eventually scrapped. According to Famicoms.net, at the time, it was rumored that the game had already been 90% complete, and there were even flyers and other advertising material being made to accompany the release. However, due to unknown circumstances, Indy The Magical Kid never ended up getting a release. Asides from what we know from the already available promotional material scattered throughout the Internet and one YouTube video documenting a short gameplay clip from an old TV show, information about the game is rather scarce.
Interestingly, a listing of the game’s prototype ROM mysteriously appeared on Yahoo! Auctions in 2019, selling for over 1.5 million yen (about $9,600 USD). But, as Famicoms.net writes, the successful bidder decided to keep the mythical ROM in their own collection, promising to safeguard it from getting illegally distributed and sold. Presuming that the ROM is still in the hands of the aforementioned bidder and its contents are likely never going to be made public, it is effectively considered to be “lost media” by retro game fans.
However, in a strange twist of events, a 7-minute-long YouTube video featuring gameplay of Indy The Magical Kid was posted on YouTube in December 2025, more than 30 years after the game’s planned release. Published by an unofficial source with the goal of eventually turning all of the development material into a full concept book, the video showcases clips of gameplay footage recorded on a VHS, supposedly at the time of development. Apparently, the organizers of the Indy The Magical Kid book adaptation project got the permission from the original development team – Naomi Inoue (author), Hiroyuki Nakata (producer), Hiroshi Fuji (character designer), Yuichiro Shinozaki (monster designer), and Yamashita Yasushi (composer) – to release the footage and other related material.
Besides the VHS tapes, they also claim to have discovered multiple character design cels, enemy design illustrations, approximately 50 pieces of concept art, floppy disks containing story outlines, soundtrack demo tapes and even doujinshi which were written by development staff right before the planned release of the game. By compiling the said materials and conducting interviews with the original creators, the team behind the adaptation project is aiming to revive Indy as a concept book, with hope that their efforts gain enough traction for the project to kick off. More clips of the gameplay footage are also planned to be published on YouTube in the future, but due to the game not being finished at the time of recording, many parts of the story have been omitted.
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