Tsukihi Minty (or つきひミンティ in Japanese) is a homebrew game created by the ominously named Lucifer Corporation in 2005.

The game is based on Quinty for the NES, with the added peculiarity of featuring characters from the 2000 visual novel Tsukihime.

While it is quite well made, and it can be fun for a few minutes, there’s not much that is remarkable about the game itself.

More interesting is how it was distributed. This is a homebrew game, but unlike all the other homebrews of the day, it was not uploaded on some scene website and shared for free.

This is the one homebrew game you had to buy. Out of over 2,000 homebrew games for PSP, this is the only instance of a commercial release.

Comiket release

At first, the only way to play Tsukihi Minty was to buy it at Comiket 68.

The Comiket is a trade show of sorts for fan works, held twice a year in Tokyo.

PSP owners who attended the Summer 2005 edition of the event had the opportunity to purchase the floppy-disk edition (FD版) of Tsukihi Minty.

The game could then be transferred via USB to a homebrew-capable PSP - which at the time was a limited subset of all the systems.

I have no data on how many Tsukihi Minty disks were created, but it was most likely a very limited amount.

This is almost certainly the rarest commercial release of a PSP game. I couldn’t even find a picture of the disk online.

So, what kept people from copying the game from their computers, and spreading it all over the internet?

The creators had come up with a DRM system of sorts. No details are available on the implementation, but it was contained in a file named T2.DAT.

The real Homebrew Store

After the Summer 2005 Comiket, the developers of this game pioneered another method of distribution - digital sales.

Starting from October 2005, the game became available for purchase online. 315 yen would get you the full game.

For the occasion, a free trial version was also released. This is the version that survives today. If not for the demo, I would never have learned about this game at all.

The digital version included some bug fixes that were missing from the floppy-disk version.

To avoid disappointing their earliest customers, the developers released an installer app that would trade the original release for the new one.

This DRM-protected installer survives, and is available here.

Tsukihi Minty continued to have physical releases, featuring at later events such as “蒼月宴” (Sogetsu Feast?) in November 2005, Comiket 69 in December 2005, and Comiket 70 in August 2006.

These later releases came on a CD-R, as the game had grown too large to be housed on a floppy disk.