SHIRO! already knows Saturn games are art, and now an arts festival agrees. Red Moon: Lost Days, the first commercial Sega Saturn homebrew game, has been accepted into the ninth ECRÃ Festival of Cinema and Experimental Art.
The ECRÃ Festival is a respected Brazilian experimental art and cinema event that’s heading into its ninth year. Although it focuses on films, this marks the fifth time the festival has opened its submissions to games. It typically receives about 1,000 submissions across films and games but only selects 80.
According to its website, the ECRÃ Festival seeks to stimulate audiovisual culture through experiences that question the notion and production of moving images. By exhibiting films, games, installations, interactive arts, performances and video arts, ECRÃ encourages new formats for the production and exhibition of these works.
Red Moon: Lost Days is a homebrew visual novel with RPG elements released in 2023 by Neuromage Studio that still can be downloaded from its itch.io page for any price you want. It got fourth place in the SegaXtreme 29th Anniversary Sega Saturn Game Competition.
Sansigolo, who programmed the game and wrote its script, wondered what the ECRÃ judges would think when he submitted his game to them earlier this year.
“I think that because it is a festival used to independent cinema, the judges were more open-minded about judging my game,” he told SHIRO!.
When he got the email saying Red Moon had been accepted, he didn’t know what to think — and still doesn’t. “It still hasn’t sunk in for me,” he said. “But so far I’m very happy with this recognition.”
Since releasing Red Moon, Sansigolo finished the first part to a prequel called Red Moon Lost Days 0: Queen’s Dream last December and is now working on a PC mecha RPG set in the same universe called Alette Nightfall.
“This recognition of [Red Moon] having been accepted into the ECRÃ Festival was the last straw for me to realize that I really managed to make a good game project,” Sansigolo said. “All of this came at the same time that I was ‘creatively blocked’ in the development of Alette Nightfall, my computer game. Being accepted at this festival helped motivate me to continue the project.”
The ECRÃ Festival will run July 3 to 27 at the Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna film archive in Rio de Janeiro. Expected attendance is 12,000.
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!