Get Info: #samegame

Shark Turtle: a modern version of SameGame/MaciGame

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:44:00 +0000

I’m releasing an expanded version of my game Shark Turtle for macOS and Windows. Grab it at itch: gingerbeardman.itch.io/shark-turtle-desktop/

The result is a feature-rich, native desktop version of SameGame with fast calculation, animated block removal, mouse/keyboard control, incremental scoring, variable grid sizes each with their own high score table, multi-level undo, lots of options, and great music. It’s a lot of fun and ideal to play little-by-little when you have a spare moment, as you dictate the pace of the game turn-by-turn.

About the icon

I couldn’t find the exact licence for Google’s Emoji Kitchen, it’s either SIL as part of the Noto font or CC BY 4.0. But I did find a comment by a Google staffer saying that it would be a good idea to draw a custom version that was less generic—I read that as unique and yours—so that’s exactly what I did. There was no choice but to do this, as I needed a vector version to generate an 1024×1024px icon. I like to think that with the raised eyebrow and slight smirk there’s a bit more personality in my version.

What’s in a name?

This concept was originally released as Chain Shot! in 1985 by 森辺訓章 Kuniaki Moribe “Morisuke” and went on to become very popular, mostly through a version known as さめがめ SameGame. The game was at one time more popular than Tetris in Japan and even made its way onto consoles like the Super Famicom and even as recent as Wii.

In English we pronounce the name as it is spelled: same game. But in Japanese it sounds just like the words “same” さめ (shark) and “game” がめ (sea turtle). A short leap from SameGame to Shark Turtle.

Perhaps the most well known version of the concept, MaciGame まきがめ also riffed on this. I’m not sure of the exact meaning, but I like to think it’s a clever double meaning of something cool in Japanese and it also being a game for Macintosh.

Recovering tile sets

I’d previously recovered a range of tile sets for a download pack I uploaded to Macintosh Garden, but that was done in the Classic Macintosh environment so I needed to redo it on modern macOS to be able to extract the images easily.

MaciGame supported custom tile sets in three formats:

SameGameFormat (160×64, from the PC-98 version of the game)
SameGameFormat2 (192×64, includes additional background tiles)
MaruSameFormat (256×65, includes connected variations and alternate palettes)

These tile sets were popular user created content for 1990s Macintosh fans, given how easy it was to load up a paint app or ResEdit. They were made available for free download at online repositories like NIFTY-Serve, Info-Mac, and on magazine cover mounted media around the world. I found several unique tile sets in my Macintosh Magazine Media archive of vintage CD-ROMs.

The main online source of these is at: vector.co.jp/vpack/filearea/osx/game/puzzle/makigame/ and I automated the clicking of the download buttons using a temporary user script (gist) to redirect to the download page and then click the button. I use PageExtender for such things. I could have gone one level deeper by automating the clicking of all the items on the list page, but I quite like clicking through long lists.

user script at gist.github.com

We can expand these esoteric archives with The Unarchiver. I needed to confirm MacOS Japanese encoding for the filenames that it was unable to heuristically determine. Read more about the madness of classic Macintosh text encodings in the pre-Unicode age.

Next we can convert the PICT resources we’re after with deark. Deark doesn’t have a recursive mode, so we need to wrap it in a one-liner:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} deark {} -k -od /destination/

I verified those and found some others using DiscMaster. A few stranglers found on the web brought the grand total to 320 tile sets.

De-duplicating

It was obvious that there were some duplicates, so what to do? My first thought was to optimise all images equally, I used ect command line tool for this purpose. After that, still on the command line, we can do a quick de-dupe using the fdupes tool. This helped me get rid of a bunch, but there were still some hanging around.

I wanted to compare files at a pixel level, so wrapped imagemagick in a shell script (gist). We compare each image with every other image. I tried adding pre-checks to the script but they slowed it down and removed the ability for it to run in parallel. Keep it simple wins again.

shell script at gist.github.com

Organising

For organisation sake I wanted to verify and categorise the dimensions of each image. I created a shell script to tag images of specific sizes with Finder colours (gist). I noticed that some converted images were one pixel wider than expected, it turns out that this is a quirk in how those specific image were composed. So I coloured them red and edited them by hand after the fact.

shell script at gist.github.com

All tile sets

Here’s a video of my 5 tile sets plus the 320 classic user created tile sets. Gotta catch ‘em all!

Playdate

I originally wrote a version of Shark Turtle for Playdate back in 2023 and released it earlier this month. The desktop version of the game is expanded and enhanced in the way that desktop apps can be. Those features took a bunch more work and I’ve undoubtedly been working on the platform specific stuff far more than I did on the core of the game.

Buyers of the Shark Turtle for Playdate get the desktop version for free! Head to this bundle.

Old Codes, New Releases for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:24:00 +0000

As I sadly move away from game dev on Playdate, I’ve released a couple of interesting old things…

SHARK TURTLE

This is a version of SameGame (さめがめ) originally released under the name CHAIN SHOT in 1985 by Kuniaki “Morisuke” Moribe for Fujitsu FM-8 home computer. The concept is as old as Tetris, perhaps even older, and at one time SameGame in its many guises was more popular than Tetris in Japan. One version had an active modding scene and some had strategy guide books.

It was submitted and rejected in the first wave of submissions to Playdate Catalog. At one point the plan was to wrap this in a theme/concept and give it the same sort of love that resulted in the great experiences of my other games like YOYOZO, Fore! Track, Bender 2: Bend Harder, but for one reason or another it never happened.

What is here is a fully-playable, feature-rich, albeit “no frills” version of SameGame with fast updates, solid controls, and great music. It’s a lot of fun and great to play little-by-little when you have a spare moment, as you dictate the pace and progress of the game turn-by-turn.

gingerbeardman.itch.io/shark-turtle

NEW WORLD

This is an interactive music track where you’re the DJ. You control various instruments and vocals, doing live mixing of the track. It’s really fun to play with!

It is a technology demo that was put together as part of a pitch for a game. Whilst the game never came to be, an improved version of this technology went on to be used in Bender 2: Bend Harder for the dynamic background patterns that animate to the beat of the music.

gingerbeardman.itch.io/new-world

More games!

All my Playdate games:

YOYOZO
- read about it being a GOTY 2023
Sparrow Solitaire
- read the making of
Bender 2: Bend Harder
- read the making of
Fore! Track
- read the making of
Super ICARUS
- read about its dynamic music

Ordering photocopies from Japan’s National Library

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I have been looking for a specific issue of an old 1985 Japanese PC magazine, but there are non currently for sale, nor have there been any sold for some time judging by sold listings. Over the past several years what I would normally do in this scenario is play the waiting game and hope one pops up for sale and that I can win it. But this time I decided to play things a little different, after finding a detailed table of contents for the magazine at Japan’s National Diet Library (NDL) and seeing that they offered a remote duplication service.

Remote duplication?

Japan has very strict copyright laws which are obeyed by their citizens and that goes for the library and its employees. Even though the magazine in question had been scanned onto their system the scans can only be viewed in person at NDL. That’s because even though the magazine is from 1985 it’s still in copyright so it’s a breach of that copyright to send the scans digitally: either over the internet to your web browser or by email. But they are totally fine making a photocopy and posting it to you. In this particular scenario, I’m totally fine with that!

Note: the majority of this process happens in Japanese so make sure to use the built-in translation features of your operating system (iOS can translate any selected text), email service (Gmail will offer to translate foreign language emails), or web browser (Safari and Chrome can translate any web page). With that out of the way, let’s go!

Step-by-step

It turns out this process is pretty old-school, powered by a mix of website and email.

Find the item on the NDL website and check if it’s available to view online, if so there’s no need for you to do this process!
If it’s only available for remote duplication you’ll need to set up an account at NDL Online, a little tricky as I could only find the registration form in Japanese and make sure to confirm your email address
Fill out the remote duplication form making sure to specify all details and most importantly the page number range. You can request an estimate up-front or wait for the invoice on receipt. That’s right, you don’t pay for this service until after you receive the material!
Next, waiting for the item to be picked from the shelves and make it to the front of the duplication queue. For me this took about a week, but it was easy to see it progressing as the status the request can be checked on the website at all times
At this point I received an email - in Japanese - asking me to please check my address and make sure that it contains the country. For whatever reason it didn’t have country, so I made sure to correct it and then replied to the email to let them know I’d done it
You’ll receive a final email when the item has been processed and shipped!
Wait for it to arrive, a mere 4 days to get to me in the UK

Costs

My request was only 3 magazine pages which, when scanned two-at-a-time, fit on two A3 sheets.

Charge	Cost
A4 paper (¥43 per sheet)	¥86
Packing charge	¥350
Postage charge	¥400
Total	¥836

Note: they recommend online payment by card as it’s free. If you really need to you can pay by bank transfer, but it costs an extra ¥4,000! Yikes.

Paying

As I mentioned earlier you don’t pay until you receive the material. Included alongside my two photocopies were: a 2-page stapled A4 invoice, a single A4 sheet payment request fax form, and an A5 information slip on how to request an online payment. So, let’s pay online!

Send an email to their email address, with your name and invoice number
They reply confirming and asking you to watch for an email from the payment provider, and reminding you that you need to pay within the 3 days during which the link is active
The payment website is basic but functional and straightforward
It accepted my strange European debit card
Total cost in GBP £4.89

Conclusion

All in all a very useful service, fairly painless process, and one that I will no doubt use again in future!

MaciGame user created graphics

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 04 May 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I recently collected over 250(!) sets of user created graphics for MaciGame the classic Macintosh tile-matching puzzle game by Takeshi “KEN” Takahashi.

まきがめ (MaciGame) was a wildly popular game worldwide in the mid-to-late 1990s, and there was even a play guide book published about it in its native Japan! The game is a variation of さめがめ (SameGame) by Eiji “Kyoto” Fukumoto, which is in turn a variation of the original game in the genre: Chain Shot by Kuniaki “Morisuke” Moribe.

The goal of this type of game is to clear the board of blocks by clicking on groups of two or more, empty space is then removed vertically by the remaining blocks dropping down and horizontally by empty columns being replaced by their rightmost column. This means that over time blocks converge in the lower left of the play area.

The user-created graphic sets were all sourced from the amazing Vector.co.jp, extracted from all manner of esoteric vintage archives, organised and packaged as a single compressed disk image to make using them much quicker and easier. Download it at Macintosh Garden.

Tips: you can browse the folder as a GraphicConverter slideshow to more quickly and easily figure out which you’d like to use or install. The easiest way of using a graphics set is to double click it and it will open MaciGame with the new graphics loaded. A few images may not have the correct SaMe creator code so may need to either have that set, or be loaded manually using the game menu.

Thanks to Izumi Okano for letting me know about this archive of user created graphics, and also my Patreon supporters for allowing me to preserve this type of content.

DiscMaster

User created graphics can be found and viewed in DiscMaster using this search: http://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?format=pict&detection=PICT%2FSaMe which indexes and makes browsable all of my Japanese CD-ROMs as well as many more uploaded by other people.

My Favourites

As well as recovering the infamous Panty Cat graphics set—which was removed after version 1.74 of MaciGame—I also discovered all manner of beautiful, clever, and some times brain-melting graphics.

Tile sets with 16 cells allow tiles that change their appearance based on matching neighbours. That means melting faces, multi-headed xenomorph, water pipes, DNA sequences, impossible key chains, mutant fish bones, weird blobs with faces, intertwining branches, mole burrows and more.

A small selection of my favourites are below: