The Mystery of Sindbad Mystery
2026 has been the year of the SG-1000 for me. I played Champion Baseball, which stinks, but then tried out Ninja Princess, which was so completely awesome that I decided to go all in on Sega’s first home console. I wrote posts about Ninja Princess and Safari Hunting, but there have been quite a few SG-1000 games that I’ve played since that have not received write-ups for one reason or another. The Castle was fun, though I didn’t finish it. Home Mahjong is pretty awesome for a mahjong game of that vintage, and it also came with a plastic thing you could tape to your TV screen to prevent screenlooking! Incredible stuff. I actually really like GP World as far as Pole Position clones go.
I didn’t have too much to say about any of those games really, even though I enjoyed them. Sindbad Mystery, on the other hand, I feel compelled to comment on. Yes dear reader, it’s the SG-1000 port of frickin Sindbad Mystery that really gets me going these days. A reminder that I am currently in my 20s and not in fact 65 years old.
Sindbad Mystery, for those who don’t know, is a Sega arcade title from 1983. The game was ported to SG-1000 a year later, where it evidently did not make a huge impact. It’s a perfectly fine game; as previously established on Candy Corn Soldiers, I love a good maze chase. You control the titular Sindbad who has come to Treasure Island in search of a magic lamp, and that search takes the form of a pretty complicated maze chase game. Sindbad Mystery came out pretty late for a maze game, so it’s no surprise that it combines a whole bunch of previous maze game innovations into one. You can push a boulder around to squash enemies, there is verticality to the stages which all have multiple floors, and you can dig holes like in Heiankyo Alien or Lode Runner.
But the most noteworthy feature of the game is the map. The “dots” in this particular maze game are question marks, and each question mark you pick up reveals one tile of the map on the side of the screen. Once you have revealed the entire map, the magic lamp will appear and you can grab it and move on to the next stage (three in total before the game loops back around again). Sounds simple, right? Well, complicating this matter is the fact that once you have revealed the lamp, an evil skull spawns in and will hunt the player down with great speed. This skull is far more dangerous than normal enemies and you desperately need to rush to the lamp before it gets to you. Okay, so is that it?
Well, according to most sources online, yes. Sindbad Mystery is canonically a decent maze game that combines a few existing mechanics together with this new map innovation. But hang on a second…why the map? What is the point of this minimap that shows a zoomed in area of the playfield where the lamp will spawn? Does it serve any purpose, or is it supposed to just be a graphical representation of a treasure map which then spawns the lamp because this is an arcade game from the early 80s?
This map system is the reason I just had to write about Sindbad Mystery. Not because the game is amazing, or because this mechanic is amazing, but because somebody needs to correct the historical record. I don’t want to besmirch the hard-working and talented retro games writers and chroniclers that have come before me, because all of them are smarter and more talented than me, but seemingly every major source on the (English language) internet has completely missed how this map mechanic works, and it is driving me CRAZY.
Pretty much everyone will tell you the same thing that I just wrote above: You gotta collect all the question marks and then grab the lamp before that damn skull grabs you. Look up any video of the game, and that’s how the players operate. Blog posts, reviews, old text guides, that’s how they explain the game. But that is not how Sindbad Mystery works. The map that you are revealing throughout the stage is a literal map, which is why it shows a zoomed in part of the play area. The map is telling you the general area of where the lamp is, and you are supposed to dig up the lamp before getting all the question marks. When you dig up the lamp, you get bonus points for every question mark that you haven’t grabbed. And this completely skips over the skull enemy. So you are clearly incentivized to use the map and dig up the lamp ahead of time.
This game was released not only in Japan, but also in Australia. It has an English manual. The manual explains this mechanic. How did it get completely missed by so many people? I can’t answer that question, but I can tell you that this sort of thing just bothers me. Is it important that people know how Sindbad Mystery actually works? No, obviously it’s not important in the grand scheme of things. But I think we as retro game likers and chroniclers do have a responsibility to chronicle these games accurately. I say it half-jokingly because this is about such an insignificant topic, but the historical record of this game really is wrong! Most people who are going back to the SG-1000 are going to learn about this game from a source that completely misses the main mechanic of the game, and that’s just kind of a shame.