What is Lunar: The Silver Star?

The CD-ROM RPG that opened with a song: the Mega-CD's best-selling game in Japan.

Lunar: The Silver Star is a role-playing game developed by Game Arts in association with Studio Alex for the Mega-CD, released in Japan on June 26, 1992 and in North America by Working Designs in December 1993. A farm boy named Alex, who idolizes the dead hero Dragonmaster Dyne, stumbles into the trials of the four dragons; his childhood friend Luna, who heals by singing, turns out to be the hinge the whole world swings on.

Game Arts designed it as, in their own pitch, a different kind of RPG: where disc storage went, they put animation, recorded voices, and CD audio instead of more dungeons. Scenario writer and novelist Kei Shigema was hired to write a game that had not just a story but story-telling. It sold out its entire Japanese production run in its first year and remains the number-one Mega-CD title in Japan, second worldwide only to Sonic CD.

THE MAKING

Studio Alex · 1992

A company named for its hero

Game Arts formed a subsidiary, Studio Alex (named for Lunar's protagonist), to build the game; founder Kazunari Tomi had come from Nihon Falcom. Shigema's liner notes recall developing it in a two-room apartment, sleeping at the office.

A third of it was cut

Time constraints forced the team to scrap nearly a third of the project before release: an early steampunk-flavored draft with airship fleets and mechanical castles survives only in interviews. What shipped is the pastoral, northern-feeling world the team settled on, its towns modeled on Russia and medieval Europe.

Designed cold, on purpose

Lunar's world was given a deliberately northern climate, Shigema explained, partly so the characters could wear more clothes. Kubooka's layered costumes, cloaks, and scarves are the visible result.

THE TELLING

Animation, voice, and song

Kubooka's faces taught the writers

Toshiyuki Kubooka, arriving from Gainax productions like Gunbuster and Nadia, designed the cast and planned the video sequences. Shigema later said Kubooka's sheets of facial expressions clarified the characters' personalities for the writers themselves: one look at Jessica thinking of Kyle, and they knew who she was.

Music as a headline feature

The score, by Noriyuki Iwadare, Hiroshi Fujioka, Isao Mizoguchi, and Yoshiaki Kubodera, was recorded as CD audio; the Japanese opening theme, Lunar, was sung by Mayumi Sudou. In 1992, a sung opening in a console RPG was still a novelty worth printing on the box.

The eight-week translation

Working Designs rendered a script of nearly four megabytes into English in about eight weeks. Their Lunar is famous twice over: for the care of its packaging (an embossed manual, seven different disc-art stamps) and for jokes that exist nowhere in the Japanese text.

Who Made Lunar?Every Version of The Silver Star

What is Lunar: The Silver Star?

THE MAKING

THE TELLING

THE FIRST WORD