Sound Fantasy

Iwai's friend at Nintendo approached him, to convert his Music Insects concept into a video game in 1993.

[5] The resulting Super NES game Sound Fantasy was completed in 1994 and Iwai left his work at Nintendo in favor of another art residency.

Nintendo made available for perusal the box art and manual for Sound Fantasy, but the game was not present.

[4] In August 2010, an exhibit titled The Man Called 'The God of Games' was shown in Harajuku in honor of Gunpei Yokoi (producer of Sound Fantasy).

As part of this exhibit, Toshio Iwai hosted his own presentation called "The Genes of Gunpei Yokoi Inside of Me" where he displayed his works that had been inspired by Gunpei Yokoi: the Tenori-on musical instrument and the Sound Fantasy music game.

Music games, especially on home consoles, were not popular in the early 1990s, and it wouldn't be until much later in the decade that they gained mainstream attention.

A-type is a rhythm game in the style of Q-bert, where an insect on a pogo must make every block disappear after stepping on it as many times needed.

This game is a Breakout clone with a few new twists added after a few stages, such as four bats controlled by a single player.

[1] Having been inspired by their own independent discovery of the Music Insects art installation exhibit, Maxis eventually approached Toshio Iwai, and his gameplay elements seen in Pix Quartet were finally published in the form of the 1996 PC game SimTunes.

The back of the US box art.