IIRC the game was originally to be published by Hobibox Europe. When Hobibox Europe Folded, they contacted Peter about taking over and publishing the game. Agreeing at first, during localization they found too many problems with the game engine / code, and not being able to contact the original programmers to correct it, they dropped the title. Peter or Lamuness can give the official word on why it was cancelled, but the facts here are as accurate as I remember them.
Yeah, Hobibox Europe announced a bunch of things that never materialized. Unfortunately, I think all those projects are dead now, Sakigake included.
More b-game RPGs would always be nice; it’s too bad.
Sadly, yes, SAKIGAKE could not be released, although we tried to work with the parent company. The staff needed to port the rest of the game were no longer at the company, something that happens.
Hobibox in general has been closing down a lot of their eroge branches down, one after the other, in Japan. Most recently was Meteor, which just called it quits on April 30th. There’s been a lot of speculation as to the financial straits of Hobibox, but there’s hasn’t been any official word from them at all.
Sakigake was a great loss. Luckily for us b-game fans, we got some different games coming along— Raidy 1, and Raidy 2 , and Princess Waltz.
So it should be good to be an english bishojo fan!
Well, for a pure VN, it might actually be simpler in some cases to crack open the source and rebuild it in a new engine. A standard visual novel with no funky extras is not that difficult to recreate if you have the graphics and the script. However, if the company is defunct, you probably wouldn’t be able to get access to uncensored graphics.
A potential project for someone wanting to invest in the English hentai business could be to try and buy up VERY CHEAP licenses for older games that can be easily hack-bash translated and sold as download-only through DLsite and Vmate. Doing it themselves wouldn’t be a good investment of effort for PP, but if someone did produce such games, it could be worthwhile to carry them.
Hobibox is primarily a product distributor (for many companies, including the current Himeya Soft/Caramel Box), so those were probably not their brands.
Of course, that relationship puts them in a position of considerable power. Maybe that’s why Hobibox partners come and go - ending a distribution arrangement would place a brand’s future in question (no retail space unless another distributor picks them up. But who would sign on a company that’s no longer profitable?).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAq-Mp5Lrm0
I finally re-gained my ADSL connection 
, and I’m killing some time with YouTube.
I HAD hoped for a translated version of Sakigake 
, but it’s also true that the downloadable version (from DLsite, at least) has been a commercial failure :o …
http://pro2.dlsite.com/work/=/product_id/VJ001823.html
I’m curious, someone here has played the original version?