Multimedia artist Toshio Iwai’s amibtious game has never been released until now.

Toshio Iwai is a multimedia artist best know for his cult classic Nintendo DS game Electroplankton, but his relationship with the game company goes back more than a decade before that to the 16-bit era.

Iwai was originally brought on to develop a game to sell with the new Nintendo mouse. That game was titled Sound Fantasy (and Sound Factory in America), but it never saw the light of day. Until now.

A prototype copy of Sound Fantasy recently surfaced online and was bought by user KiroBomber and promptly released online. Now you can find ROMs of it online to download and watch clips of it below. Though Mario Paint has become an iconic music tool, there’s a creativity to Iwai’s musical games that seems remarkably ahead of its time.

One game, for example, involves drawing lines on a canvas as small bugs wander along the screen. As they cross the line they create a beat or tone depending on the color and can be herded to walk in straight lines to create melodies. Surprisingly, the experimental duo Matmos acted out this same method live with their 2006 song ‘Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith‘ where they allowed snails to freely move through lasers set up to a theremin. As in the game, when a beam was crossed it would trigger a change in tone.

Though we can’t link to a site to download Sound Fantasy, it is widely available. Watch new footage from it below.