What are we talking about

User (and musician) @psych0angel.bsky.social first talked about this picture in his post :

i got this image from a deleted tumblr years ago and i haven't found another image from this shoot, it's a promotional thing for a game called 'magical princess silky lip' and it's taken in jiyugaoka, tokyo just throwing it out if anybody has any idea where i could find more i'd be thrilled

The Magical Princess Silky Pop lost picture

Informations

The text on the image reads シルチーグップの彦どををたずカ選…

Extracted text from the image, reading シルチーグップの彦どををたずカ選…

The game was released on June 19th, 1992. See the japanese wikipedia article that seems pretty complete. Due to the use of a translator app, it is difficult to extract precise information.

What is known

The main character from the game matches the face on the picture.

What is currently being inviestigated

I am looking into archives of the Famitsu magazine, between 1991 and 1995 at the moment, hoping to find other pictures of the same photoshoot. I am running OCR on the archives, and extracting pages containing the japanese name for the game (魔法の少女シルキーリップ). This gives me a lot of false positives as the game appears in the magazine, and in almost every game list there is. I am guessing buying over the internet was not an option in the 90s, so they needed some way of selling by mail.

I will try to implement a image recognition algorithm to run it on those magazines, trying to find where the original image was published.

I will run the sames techcniques on PC Engine FAN magazines, during the same period.

I have access to a copy of the book PCエンジン&メガドライブ発売中止ゲーム図鑑(ゲームラボ選書), PC Engine & Mega Drive Game Pictorial Book (Gamelabo Sensho), but it is slow as hell to consult as I need to have a Japanese VPN and Amazon does not allow me to download the book by any means... I will take a look into it, but having found the page where they talk about the game, no photoshoot is in sight.

Links and ressources

Game page on guardiana