Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons (1994)

After reaching 1 million files in my Macintosh Magazine Media project, I thought it would be cool to post about something I found recently in those discs. I get a real buzz rediscovering something like this after more than 30 years have passed.

It’s a sweet little point and click adventure game for Classic Macintosh called “Station: Travel Through the Four Seasons” by Mitsuo Isaka, about taking train rides through the Japanese countryside. You meet and interact with a variety of people and explore each scene to figure out how to move on.

It was found on CD2 マルチメディアチャレンジ ’94 要賞作品篥 (Multimedia Challenge ’94 Award Winning Works) of MACLIFE Special: Gokuraku Paradise Theater 1994. You can download the ISO to explore that disc for yourself in an emulator or on a vintage Macintosh. I also uploaded just the game to Macintosh Garden so that you don’t need to download the whole CD for just this game.

Play it in your browser

But if you want to try it right now you can do so in your browser thanks to the Infinite Mac website, using this link: KanjiTalk 7.5.3 with the Station disk image already mounted

The game is in Japanese and features mostly voiceover and a little on screen text. Google Translate can probably help with its conversation (audio) and camera (visual) translation modes. Ganbare!

Introduction

In Japanese, it says:

ここは“四季の里”といわれるとこる。昔から一両だけのディーゼル車がのんびりと走っているという。

駅は全部で四つの小さな鉄道だけれど不思議なことに、ひとつひとつの駅にそれぞれのきまった季節があるという。

ぼくは、さっそくその鉄道に乗ってみようと春の季節をもっといわれる“桜ヶ丘”という駅を訪ねることにした・・・

Translated into English:

This place is known as the ‘Village of the Four Seasons’. A single diesel train has been running slowly and leisurely here for a long time.

There are four stations in total on this small railway, but strangely enough, each station has its own set season.

I decided to visit a station called ‘Sakuragaoka’, which is known more for its spring season, to try out the railway…