Roly-Polys Nanakorobi Yaoki and Roly-Polys World Tour (found series of Japanese edutainment PC games; 1997)

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Roly-Polys Nanakorobi Yaoki and Roly-Polys World Tour (respectively).

Status: Found

Date found: 21 Jul 2019 (Nanakorobi Yaoki) / 31 May 2023 (Roly Polys World Tour)

Found by: The Osamu Sato Discord (Nanakorobi Yaoki) / BakuDD, potato impact (Roly Polys World Tour)

Roly-Polys Nanakorobi Yaoki (ローリーポーリーズの七転び八起き) and Roly-Polys World Tour (ローリーポーリーズの世界旅行) are edutainment games for PC and Mac that were released in 1997. They were developed by OutSide Directors Company (OSD) and published by Shinko Music Entertainment.

Both games are targeted at children and feature a cast of colorful animal characters known as "Roly-Polys." They were designed to teach basic concepts like history and the alphabet. Although the games are meant for kids, the creator, Osamu Sato, believed that adults should be able to enjoy them as well.

Nanakorobi Yaoki was shown off at Macromedia UCON in September 1996, and was a finalist in the "Kidsware" department of the Macromedia Multimedia Awards. There were plans to release the game internationally as The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog, but they fell through because publishers in the US and Europe were not interested in distributing them. This may explain the delay which moved the game's release date from November 1996 to March 14, 1997.

World Tour was released on November 21st, 1997. Unlike its predecessor, it wasn't featured at any conventions, and there were no plans to release it in other countries.

Availability

Copies of both games are known to exist but are hard to come by. Several Japanese shopping sites have listings for the games, but none of them actually have copies for sale. The only record of a copy being sold online was an auction for the first game in June 2002. It is unknown if any other copies have been sold since then and either way, the game is not available to the general public.

An auction listing for a copy of Roly Polys Nanakorobi Yaoki was found by reddit user VisualMenace, and Osamu Sato Discord server user Gohald bought the copy and ripped the game on July 21st, 2019.[1]

A demo of World Tour was found on MacPeople 1998 No. 2 1.15 CD-ROM[2] by Discord user "eientei" who alerted Osamu Sato Discord server, who in turn alerted Discord user "gingerbeardman "the person that had originally uploaded the CD-ROM image as part of their Macintosh Magazine Media preservation project.

As of May 31st, 2023, a copy of World Tour was found and uploaded to archive.org [3] by Reddit user "BakuDD" and Osamu Sato Discord member potato impact.

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