Blog:Witch (Arcade)

Witch (Arcade)

by CRV (talk) | Originally posted September 20, 2021

It's a pinball game. It's a gambling game. It's a pinball/gambling game.

Actually, gambling is illegal in Japan; you're playing for tokens. This is what they call a "medal game."

Witch has the elements of a decent pinball game. It has good control and graphics, some nice music from Fumito Tamayama (Decap Attack), and bonus tables similar to the ones in the Crush series.

Unfortunately, none of it is fleshed out, and there's a time limit, so you won't get to play very long anyway. Most everything in this game exists only to bring up numbers on your bingo card. Yes, the pinball game is just window dressing for what is really a bingo game.

A pinball/bingo game might sound weird, but the real "WTF" is what's hidden in the ROMs — data from an unreleased Famicom RPG called Shounen Majutsushi Indy (aka Indy the Magical Kid).

Indy made some headlines in 2019 when a prototype turned up on Yahoo! Auctions in Japan. A collector there won, so don't expect to see it again any time soon. It'd be kinda funny if the whole game was hidden in here.

Alas, that is not the case. Only the credits from Indy have been found, but they are the most damning evidence of who developed this unusual game. Why? Because they mention the name of the company.

That company's name? Graphic Research, also known as GRC. GRC did a lot of work for Vic Tokai, whose name appears on Witch (at least on the Sega version). They also seem to have been involved in the medal game business. Sound designer Fumito Tamayama worked on Witch, as mentioned before, and would have been employed by GRC at the time. (Oh, and there's something from Widget on the NES [1], but that hasn't been documented anywhere.)

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Post updated February 18, 2022