Short little text-based games that deal with game development in the PC-98 era. The story of both games is rather weak, especially the 2nd one - within the last 10 minutes of the game you find out your newest employee is actually a headhunter for a rival American software company and has sold them the details of the tool you use to make text-based adventure games. The story then fast-forwards to the night before the deadline of the novel game you’ve been developing. After a feverish night of debugging, the protagonist has a dream of this employee crying. The next day, the company has a flower-viewing party, the employees congratulate each other on a job while done, and the credits roll…

…Yeah, this game definitely won’t be winning any awards for the story, but it was still an interesting peek into the state of the industry at that time. I found the contrast between the tone of both games interesting - the first one has a more positive impression of the industry, at one point noting that any game a company puts out is guaranteed to sell (though unfortunately not as much as the Famicom). However, the 2nd game takes on a more pessimistic outlook, touching on topics such as bankruptcy, turnover, and headhunting, with the ever-looming threat of the Famicom and its massive sales still present.

I also liked the day-to-day scenes, like dealing with the customer who illegally copied the game they borrowed from the rental store and called angry that they couldn’t get the game to run. When you explain that it’s an anti-piracy measure, they retort that it works for vhs tapes! I also can’t imagine calling up the development company directly when I get stuck in a game I bought. Thankfully GameFAQs was already around by the time I started gaming...

Side note, I stumbled across this website while looking for some more info on the games. I'd definitely recommend giving it a read, it goes into a lot of detail about the development cycle using info collected through various gaming magazine articles issued in the 80s. There's a bunch of trivia, incluiding how the first game was delayed due to issues with the script caused by the scenario writer's illness and... cavities?