First, there was Kara no Kyoukai -the Garden of sinners-, released as a novel in 1998, made into an anime starting in 2007. Then there was visual novel Tsukihime in 2000, which is due to get a remake one of these years. In 2004, there was Fate/, which you might have heard of. Then in 2012, there was Type-Moon's Mahoutsukai no Yoru (A Magician's Night), a visual novel written by co-founder Kinoko Nasu, featuring art by Hirokazu Koyama and music by Fukasawa Hideyuki.
Koyama celebrated today's 5th anniversary with some tribute art featuring newbie mage Aoko Aozaki, here a high school student in the 90s, later (in her timeline, previously in ours) in Tsukihime and Melty Blood.
The backstory on its development is
The original Mahou Tsukai no Yoru, written in 1996, was the novel that first established the currently known Nasuverse. Nasu and his colleagues thought at that point that he wouldn't be able to write anything better than it for the next ten years. In high school, he was inspired by the first episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion and he thought of writing a novel. Nasu wrote roughly 400 pages and he tried to enter it into several writing competitions in 1996 but it was unsuccessful, and the work was merely passed around by his friends. Nasu tried to send the novel to the Fujimi Shobo publisher but he found it difficult to keep it under 350 pages and left the novel unreleased. In the end, he only printed less than 5 copies of the original draft. Some of the characters from the original story were drawn by Takashi Takeuchi for his old personal website.
After forming TYPE-MOON with Takeuchi and with the successes of his later visual novel works Tsukihime and Fate/stay night, Takeuchi suggested remaking Mahou Tsukai no Yoru so it could be released before their next planned project Girls' Work. TYPE-MOON announced that it was working on the story as its latest visual novel project, with further details of the project to be published in Type-Moon Ace. Unlike TYPE-MOON's previous games, Mahou Tsukai no Yoru is not an adult game.
Takashi Takeuchi illustrated Aoko, Touko and Alice in the Character Material, though Hirokazu Koyama would be the lead artist in the final product.
It was publicly announced in April 2008 and the game was set to be released sometime in 2009, but after several delays, the game received a September 2010 release date. In September, however, TYPE-MOON announced that the release date has been pushed back to winter 2011, and later to sometime in 2011. A free game demo was made available on December 15, 2011.
It was released officially on April 12, 2012.
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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.
