On February 24th, 1997, a friend of told
René-Gilles Deberdt
that she was addicted to Taipei. He replied that he could program something
better in less than a week. On March 1st he released the first playable
version of what would become Kyodai Mahjongg.
Originally he had planned to call his game Lunatic Shanghai. This brought him some trouble with Activision, and started a long and interesting Usenet discussion about the origins of the game. In the end he settled for the name Kyodai instead. It means huge, gigantic. A kyojin is a giant.
Gigantic Kyodai indeed is. It represents the next generation of Solitaire Mah Jongg games, after Taipei, after Nels Andersen and Ron Balewski. Even the oldest still available version (1.21) has background music and should have an 800×600 desktop for best display.
When I first came across this game, I thought it was from Japan. It had a Japanese name, the icon was the kanji for east (東), the author's name was given as Naoki Haga. Well, it isn't, but it does a good job in pretending to be.
The versions you can download below are, in spite of their numbers, all quite early. 4.75 was released in July 1998. Over the years Kyodai has developed into a DirectX 3D game, one of the few, BTW, that like Dungeon Keeper II support EBMB (Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping). The old 16-bit version 1.21 has meanwhile become freeware.
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