Sword of Moonlight
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This is the de-facto starting point of the wiki. Some good Samaritan, please take it upon yourself to start filling this in.
Also as a reminder to everyone, there is not a Wikipedia article for Sword of Moonlight. Somewhere along the way that should be remedied. Consider this space a proving ground for whatever such a page (in digested form) might look like.
Work in Progress
| Sword of Moonlight: King's Field Making Tool | |
|---|---|
| Genres | 3D first person role-playing game maker |
| Developers | From Software |
| Publishers | From Software |
| Platforms | Windows |
| First release |
1.0 March 16, 2000 |
| Latest release | 1.2 |
| Official website | http://www.fromsoftware.jp/main/soft/som.html |
Sword of Moonlight: King's Field Making Tool is a 3D first person RPG maker developed and published by From Software for the Japanese PC gaming and computing market. The original suggested retail price was 9,280 yen. For this modest sum a Sword of Moonlight owner is ostensibly sold an unfettered license to produce original games -- either unlicensed or with an implicit license -- including KING'S FIELD intellectual property. The user created games are then free to be distributed and or even sold like any other PC game, royalty free and independent of the original Sword of Moonlight software and its minimal end user license agreement, or EULA.
In Japan Sword of Moonlight in hindsight looks like a short lived phenomenon. Today it is difficult to locate any prominent games produced by Japanese users on the internet or elsewhere. It is generally thought that Sword of Moonlight upon release was a boxed product able to be found on store shelves in select retail outlets. Support for Sword of Moonlight was dropped after less than a two year run due to lack of interest from fans or From Software. Many serious bugs in the software were never addressed by online patches. To this day From Software still sells to Japanese residents old warehoused copies of Sword of Moonlight directly out of their offices via mail order at a discount price.
Non-traditional marketing makes importing a copy of Sword of Moonlight an especially challenging task, and due to this the product remained an enigma to collectors and curious parties alike for the larger part of the decade following its initial release. Once the de-facto embargo inevitably broke, the limited number of imported copies were in short order themselves copied, and shared, and translated into English. During this period Diadem of Maunstraut emerged as the first full-featured user made Sword of Moonlight game in the KING'S FIELD mold. Diadem's author would later produce Trismegistus, a puzzle game reminiscent of From Software's Echo Night series.
