Before ProSeka, and even before Project Diva skyrocketed in popularity, the world of Vocaloid games was made of fangames. Since her debut in 2007 fans around the world, but specially in Japan, started to create some games featuring the virtual diva.
It was near the end of 2010 when I stumbled upon one of those fangames. One that now I can’t seem to find anywhere. Funny enough it was a game extremely easy to find, you just needed to type on google “Hatsune Miku game” and it would appear. And no, it wasn’t that weird PC port of the first Project Diva.
The game I’m talking about was a 3D action game featuring Hatsune Miku in a 3d space with a 3D model (meaning it wasn't a pixelart game or similar), going level to level fighting shadow people? Polygon people?… can’t remember very well, but it was a type of generic humanoid enemy. In fact, they could also be robots. But her weapon was a leak and the objective was to defeat all the enemies before going to the next level.
Sounds pretty generic, right? Because it was. At least for its time. During the late 2000 and early 2010 it was pretty common to see 2D fighting games, metroidvanias or MegaMan inspired games, usually using neat pixel art. But this one looked like it was made in Unity but without being Unity. Just a generic 3D action game like a hack & slash.
Now, why I would be looking for a game like that? It wasn’t even a great game so where’s the value in finding it?
You see, this game had music. No, not original music, but Vocaloid music that I assume was popular at that time. Ievan Polka was literally the music of the menu screen. So yes, the real reason of why I’m trying to look for that game it’s because I’m actually looking for one of the songs used in the game.
Why would it be so hard to find this song? Because unlike now where everyone knows who Hatsune Miku is (probably), in the late 2000 she was still something new. New as a character and new as software. People was still trying to grasp the concept of a computer singing, let alone a voice with an anime avatar. Miku was still a niche thing who was just starting to gain popularity, specially in the west.
A (probably) underground song lost in time. And looking in YouTube isn’t easy either. You see, before 2011 it was weird for Japanese people to use YouTube, Yeah, they have accounts but their main video site was Nico Nico Douga. NND was YouTube but for Japanese audiences and you needed an account to use the site (now it’s not required to watch videos). If a song was popular enough someone, sometimes the same author, would re upload the song to YouTube. That's why some old Vocaloid songs have a weird "sm code" in their description. That’s the NND url.
Once a month was upload to NND a Vocaloid Ranking which showed ther most popular Vocaloid songs in the platform. Usually the songs featured in those rankings would end in YouTube. But sometimes the only reason why a sound would get reuploaded was because a western used found the sounds cool and reposted by themselves.
Which means the song I’m looking for, since it wasn’t exactly a song you can call a “classic”, was either a song that never leaved Nico Douga or was reuploaded by a random user and now it’s there sitting in a corner of YouTube.
Of course I had tried to look for playlists of very old Vocaloid songs and, at the moment of writing this, I haven’t had any luck. Worst thing is you can’t even look up YouTube videos by the year anymore which difficult my search.
Which brings me back to the old fangame. If I find the game then I definitely will find the song. It’s in the gamefiles after all. But without the game I must search for the song itself and, at the time of writing this it’s a very hard task. I’m literally looking for a song written between 2007 and 2010 in 2023. A song more than 10 years old lost in the vast ocean of the Internet.
And all because the song it’s still stuck in my head to this day...