The Castle

The Castle is an action game, originally developed and published by ASCII Corporation in 1985 for Fujitsu FM-7 and Sharp X1 computers. In this game, players must help a prince named Raphael to collect all the items in Glocken Castle from the demon king Mephisto, while avoiding dangerous obstacles, enemies, and the possibility of getting crushed. Raphael also needs to rescue magical forest fairies to make Princess Margarita appear.

Sega brought The Castle to SG-1000 in 1986, as one of the very last games released compatible with the system. The game is iconic for using a custom cartridge mapper that includes 8 kilobytes of RAM while having 32 kilobytes (256 kilobits) of game data. Due to The Castle being released when the Sega Mark III was already available, it is one of the games that is not advertised as Gold Cartridge, but rather, as Sega Cartridge, which means it could be playable in all Sega systems made at the time: SG-1000, SC-3000, Othello Multivision, Pioneer TV Video Game Pack SD-G5 add-on and Sega Mark III, as well to Japanese and Korean variants of Sega Master System, released a year after. The SG-1000 version also features a speed-up feature: By pressing the Left button on SJ-200 or the 1 button on other Sega controllers, everything in the game speeds up, including the music.

A revision of the original game, called Castle Excellent, was released by ASCII in the same year for MSX computers and NES under the Castlequest name. Castle Excellent was not released in SG-1000 officially by Sega or ASCII, although unofficial conversions of the MSX version was been made for the SG-1000 in Taiwan and for the Sega Master System by fans.