See the sky
A downloadable game
Thoru Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本徹 or とーるやまもと), born 1955, is a Japanese multimedia artist. Over the years he has released work in many formats including, but not limited to: magazine illustrations, HyperCard decks, interactive CD-ROMs, printed books, websites, digital stickers, and videos. He is perhaps best known for his story books distributed as HyperCard stacks and his unique 1-bit art taking advantage of the limitation imposed by early Apple Macintosh computers.
See the sky is one such story book, a festive-themed Christmas present released for Apple Macintosh in 1992 as a series of HyperCard stacks. In 1996 it was re-released in a remastered form: as an interactive CD-ROM, produced using Macromedia Director, which added ambient music and navigation to the original images. Also released in 1996 was a printed book of the story, presented as 3 images per page. Finally, in 1999 a CD-R of the combined HyperCard stacks was released.
This is a new version of "See the sky" for Playdate, which adds chapter navigation similar to the CD-ROM version.
Whilst the original Macintosh resolution of 512×342 does not match the Playdate's resolution of 400×240, it still works on this device as every screen has been manually repositioned to keep the important elements in view, a process similar to the "pan and scan" adaptation of movies for 4:3 TVs.
Notes
- 500 screens
- 10 chapters
- ~ 1 hour experience
- Quick navigation menu unlocked as you go
- Position is remembered between launches
- Settings for sound and crossfade speed
- A/right/down/crank = next
- B/left/up/crank = previous
- Menu = options & progress
Credits
- Created by Thoru Yamamoto
- Edited by Matt Sephton
- © 1992 Thoru Yamamoto
Links
Download
Install instructions
To play this you must sideload it onto your Playdate, see https://help.play.date/games/sideloading/
It can also be played using the Playdate Simulator that comes with the Playdate SDK, see: https://play.date/dev/
Comments
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As a child, I was strongly influenced by Thoru Yamamoto's works. See the Sky being one of them, of course.
And the very reason I was interested in Playdate was because its 1bit screen reminded me of HyperCard.
Thank you for this wonderful Christmas gift <3
You are very welcome! Please do share it with other people over the holidays.
Are you Japanese? I’d like to hear about how the Macintosh scene was in the early 1990s.
I was born in 1991, so there is not much I can say about that period from my own experience.
In the mid to late 90s, my father subscribed to some Mac magazines, which often had a supplemental CD-ROM. It contained a lot of software, including HyperCard stacks, submitted by readers of the magazine. I remember playing with them a lot.
Thanks! I am British, so my experience of the scene came only from having my own software and games featured in Japanese magazines. At the time I made games for Windows. After that I became a Macintosh fan and eventually worked at Apple for a while. During the COVID pandemic, and since, I collected many Japanese Macintosh Magazine CD-ROM and some 3.5” floppy disks. I shared them all on Internet Archive, and created a searchable database at: https://www.gingerbeardman.com/mmm/ From this collection I’ve recovered many “lost” HyperCard stacks, software and games. It’s a lot of fun! https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/10/30/macintosh-magazine-media/
Enjoyed this little story! Thank you for bringing it to a new audience.
This is amazing! Great job getting this story on the Playdate!
What a perfect lil thing for the playdate.
Cool that a new audience like myself can experience these.
I had never heard of this but it looks really cool! 😄