2013. Yasufumi Ono made comments about the state of Japanese gaming at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto. Currently, Japan controls a mere 30% of the market share in North America and only 13% worldwide. The horn of plenty has become a trombone of self-doubt. Why isn’t the world buying Japanese games anymore? Has Japan lost its touch?

There are several factors at play here. When Japan swooped in to grasp the field mouse that was U.S. gaming, that mouse was dead. Thankfully Japan brought the mouse back to life and became the sole devourer of its innards. Today there is more than one falcon-country eyeing those rodent intestines, namely the U.S., South Korea, and Finland.

Also, Japan doesn’t make the games that western countries presently want to play, games in the “Call of Battlefield: Ghost Ops II” category. Japan makes games more along the lines of Dungeon Monster DX: The Fire! Time was, you could take your Dungeon Monster games and package them so your average Todds and Brandons would buy them. That’s been a challenge Japan has yet to surmount in this modern era. But why is this such a challenge if it wasn’t before?

Instant Connection

When we hear a story, our mind does its best to connect us to the story’s main character. We want to get to know that character so we can become the hero and experience the tale explicitly. In traditional storytelling, this is no easy task. It takes a witch’s brew of situation, exposition, and time to make a character connection with an audience. And few writers ever know what’s going to work in a given story.

Video games don’t have this problem. It’s a unique storytelling medium. The connection a game character has to the player is almost immediate. My go-to storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, best explains why, by summarizing philosophy first put forth by Marshall McLuhan:

When driving, for example, we experience much more than our five senses report. The whole car—not just the parts we can see, feel and hear—is very much on our minds at all times. The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car. If one car hits another, the driver of the vehicle being struck is much more likely to say: “Hey! He hit me!!” than “he hit my car!” or “his car hit my car,” for that matter.

So, in touching and controlling the car, your mind makes the car an extension of yourself. The same happens when playing a game. That touch of the controller and your control over the avatar gives your mind the same connection. The hero is a virtual extension of you. You become the hero as soon as you start the game.

This explains why games with subpar stories can still be great games. Your connection to the experience is immediate and doesn’t require a fantastic story to draw you in. If the game is enjoyable, you keep playing because you like your role as the hero. But what happens when you don’t like the hero you become?

Different Heroes For Different Hemispheres

Back to the Inifinity Ventures Summit (we were talking about that, right?). Some interesting statements were made by Sega/Sammy president, Hajime Satomi. Read below his hypothesis on why Japanese games fail to make an impact in the U.S. And Europe:

Europeans and North Americans like strong people, so the main character has to be a fully-grown, middle-aged man. On the other hand, in Asia, people like stories about middle or high school students growing up or becoming stronger. As you make games for more dedicated players, I think you have to be aware of those differences.

This makes sense when you consider characters from best-selling games in the U.S. from the past ten years: Kratos, Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Niko Bellic, Marcus Fenix, and that hooded guy from Assassin’s Creed. All severely grizzled, middle-aged combat types.

Compare that with some of Japan’s top character picks, plucked from a Famitsu poll of readers’ favorite characters: Link, Sora, Yuri Lowell, Sakura Shinguji, and Cloud Strife. All very ungrizzled and full of youthful optimism for the adventures of life (until they enter the job market).

There is some crossover, of course. Both east and west love Chris Redfield, Solid Snake, Link and Cloud. But there is something to Satomi’s ideas. There is clearly a difference in hero preference between hemispheres.

So if Japan once ruled the western gaming market, they must have created games with middle-aged heroes. Not necessarily.

Let’s Compare Some Box Art!

This is a simple exercise. I will present three games released both in Japan and the U.S. We will observe the in-game pixelated sprites that represent the main character(s) and the art on the boxes for the Japanese and U.S. releases of the game. Let’s begin.

DOWNTOWN NEKKETSU MONOGATARI vs. RIVER CITY RANSOM

The in-game character looks pretty cartoony. Could be any age.

Japanese Box Art:

The Japanese release of the game suggests the characters are young high school students.

US Box Art:

But the U.S. release suggests they are weird 36-year-old dudes! Despite that “River City High School” sign behind them, these two are clearly just there to pick up their kids from baseball practice.

ROCKMAN 2 vs. MEGA MAN 2

The age-neutral Mega Man sprite we know and love.

Japanese Box Art:

Japan gets some great art that actually looks a good deal like our robot friend on the screen.

U.S. Box Art:

America gets a welder with a broken foot and ray gun. He’s a weirdo, but he’s a grown-up combat weirdo!

DRAGON QUEST II vs. DRAGON WARRIOR II

Here’s the in-Game Characters – Japan & U.S.

These in-game characters could be impetuous teens or seasoned adventurers.

Japanese Box Art:

The art for Dragon Quest II features Akira Toriyama’s youthful depictions of the heroes, which have become a staple of the series.

U.S. Box Art:

The American release of Dragon Warrior II is, again, a band of fully-grown adults. These heroes promised each other in college that when they turned 40, they would reunite for a quest to Las Vegas.

Finding Ourselves

So what does this box art comparison mean, exactly? I’ll get to that in a second.

The heroes on our TV screens during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were less defined and more iconic, and thus more easily interpreted. I touched on this in my article about Hello Kitty, so for a more detailed and Tom Hanks-oriented explanation of icons.

But there was another force at play, helping us interpret our pixel friends. That force is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the psychological effect of your mind to favor information that coincides with your preconceptions. Traditionally, confirmation bias is used to describe how we gather information to make rational (or irrational) decisions. Recently, however, a young philosophy blogger named Sam McNerney introduced this idea:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making…With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments… Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Since the pixelated hero images transmit so little information as to what they are, players needed the box art to confirm their bias of what they wanted to see, in this case, their bias of what they think, aesthetically, a hero should look like. Japanese gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is a youngling,” and the box art confirmed their bias. Western gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is muscular manbeast,” and their different box art confirmed their different bias.

Since video games, as we said earlier, offer an instant connection for the player, it is imperative that the player like that connection. Giving players the chance to connect to the heroes they wanted to be helped to ensure they would not put down the controller and, furthermore, keep buying games.

The Beginning Of The End

So that’s it. Everyone was happy, and all it took was paying two artists to do the same job. It’s easier to sell people what they expect than to challenge their perceptions. Unfortunately, this box art trick got harder to pull off as console gaming entered the world of polygons in 1995. Keeping the hero’s in-game appearance ambiguous got a little trickier.

Such was the case with The Legend of Zelda‘s transition from 2D to 3D. For the most part, early polygonal models could still be interpreted by both cultures as the heroes they wanted to be. And so it was with 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. EVERYONE loved this game. The main character, Link, started out as a kid but later grew into an adult. But what kind of adult? A grizzled one, probably.

How old is this adult Link? Fifteen or thirty-five?

When the first Zelda game for the 128-bit Gamecube was announced, Americans eagerly anticipated their powerful adult Link to appear in new, beautifully rendered 12 million polygons per second! It was at this point Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to have Link represented as a very cartoony boy child in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Americans went nuts. Angry nuts! Link had always been an elfin lad since the very beginning, according to the series’ story, but in pixel world and the American mind, he was nice and grizzled. For the first time, gamers were faced with a Link they could not interpret to their liking. Despite The Wind Waker being a gaming triumph, it sold a mere 3.07 million copies worldwide, compared to Ocarina of Time’s 7.6 million.

It was around this time, Japan’s control over the gaming industry began to wane. Of course, it was not solely due to the unambiguous heroes. The Xbox launched with incredible success in 2001, eating away at a large part of the North American market share previously held by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. American video game companies, having learned from two decades of great Japanese games, started making games just as good or better. The spike in popularity that Japanese pop culture saw in 1999 was diminishing by the mid 2000’s, banishing anime from general acceptance back to the cavern of the nerds, which also meant the unmistakably Japanese video game heroes were banished as well (unless they were grizzled).

In our modern era, we have our two camps making games for themselves. American game companies churning out gritty power lunks and Japanese companies churning out sleek action teens. And we like it that way, apparently. Only a small fraction from each side is interested in games from the other.

The Sun Also Rises

2014. In a few months, the next Infinity Ventures Summit will be held in Sapporo and the Japanese gaming industry will gather once again to discuss the future, the past being a non-issue. The truth is, Japan will likely never again rule the video game world as it once did. The special circumstances of an evacuated market and technology that was easily localized is gone forever. Global competition and the advent of mobile/social gaming has changed the industry so nobody knows what to expect anymore. (BIRDS being angry at PIGS?! Nobody saw that one coming.)

But that’s okay. Industries change. When Georges Méliès and the Edison Trust dominated the film industry, it was only a matter of time before other artists from around the world said, “I want to do that, too!” Film expanded until people loved it so much that certain individuals began making films simply as artistic expression.

The Infinity Ventures Summit is a gathering of companies, so their primary concern should be how to sucker people out of money (using video games, hopefully). But games are made by artists, so I hope when these artists gather in May, they will talk, at least individually, about how to move video games forward as medium, how to push boundaries and make something people have never seen before. There will always be success in giving people what they expect. But there is a truer reward in creating something that changes peoples’ minds.

Bonus Wallpapers!

[1280x800] ∙ [2560x1600]

Sources:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Why doesn’t Japan like first-person shooters? Old characters and World War II, says Sega exec, by Casey Baseel
• Confirmation Bias and Art, by Samuel McNerney
• LVLs. Cultural Anxiety Features
• Famitsu’s Top 50 Video Game Characters

Power Pros Baseball is a Konami series of cartoony, arcadey baseball games that’s been published every year in Japan since Bill Clinton took office. Year in, year out, Power Pros faithfully recreated the Japanese league rosters as near-featureless bobblehead-looking guys, with quick, polished gameplay and a “Success Mode” with a storyline and life sim elements. For two years, they tested the waters of the American market, releasing MLB Power Pros and MLB Power Pros 2008. I played these games obsessively, but they never came back. Once I found out I could import them, I gained not only a language practice tool, but a reason to learn as much as I could, so I could play more of that game. At first I could only play individual games, then I learned enough Japanese to navigate a season, and then I learned enough to read and enjoy the life sim and story mode. So, for any of you Japanese students interested in finding games to supplement your language study, here’s a quick guide to importing Japanese video games.

Sony PlayStation 3, PS4, and Vita

I think this screenshot just sold me a PlayStation 4.

The Sony consoles are your best bet for importing Japanese games because they’re popular in Japan and have little to no region lock. Traditionally, game consoles bought in America or Europe couldn’t play Japanese games without some sort of workaround or adapter. Many people still try to find first-run NES launch titles because they have a secret Japan-US adapter inside the cartridge which can be taken out and used for other games. Sony started to reverse that trend when they made the PS3 region-free, so Japanese PS3 games can be played on any region’s console. (PS1 and PS2 games are still region-locked, even when played on a PS3.) So all you need to do to play Japanese PlayStation games is get your hands on the games themselves.

We’ll talk about how to get disc games later on, but the PlayStation has another import-friendly feature: a freely-accessible Japanese PlayStation Store. By creating a new sub-user on your PlayStation, you can sign up for a Japanese PSN account and get access to the same download titles you could get in Japan. After doing that, any demos and free-to-play games are easily available to you, but paying for games is another hurdle. You will need either a Japanese credit card or Japanese PSN cards, which are sold on a number of websites but usually at a 70% markup. Ten dollars of Japanese PlayStation Store credit will likely cost you $17.

Like the PlayStation 3, the PS4 is region-free, so games bought from the UK or Japan or Australia will all work on a North American console. The PS4 doesn’t launch in Japan until February 22nd, but when that time rolls around, there are a few Japan-only games you can import, including the strategic RPG Natural Doctrine and the new samurai-era Yakuza game.

The PlayStation Vita is also region-free, but in this case discs are much easier to deal with than downloads. The Japanese PSN Store isn’t as easy to access on that device as it is on the PS3. It can still be done, it just requires backing up and resetting your Vita.

Games Worth Importing: Summer Vacation 4 (Boku No Natsuyasumi 4) (PSP), Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan! (PS3), Yakuza: Ishin (PS3 and PS4)

Nintendo Wii, Wii U, and 3DS

The Nintendo Wii and Wii U don’t make things so simple for you. Both are region-locked, so by default an American console will not play Japanese games. Importing a Japanese Wii or Wii U can also be frustrating because online features will check your IP Address, so you will need to resort to VPN trickery to do anything involving the internet on a foreign console. There are always a number of fixes circulating for the notoriously hackable Nintendo Wii which can allow you to play games from other regions, but because these hacks are always changing, potentially illegal, and occasionally prone to bricking your Wii, it is hard to recommend any given solution.

Nintendo’s handheld consoles get a little complicated, but they are very good for Japanese study. The original DS is region-free, except for the online DSi store and the DSi-exclusive game cards (all four of them). The 3DS is region locked, so you’ve gotta buy a Japanese one to play Japanese games. We at Tofugu have gone over before why you might want to buy a Japanese 3DS, one major reason being the great library of games with furigana options for those millions of us who are still working on our kanji. There are dozens if not hundreds of Japan-only, text-heavy DS and 3DS games, making both handhelds a terrific choice for an intermediate Japanese student.

Games Worth Importing: Captain Rainbow (Wii), Miles Edgeworth 2 (DS), Youkai Watch (3DS)

Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One

Microsoft’s game consoles have not yet caught on in Japan, so the selection of import games is limited and the selection of text-heavy Japanese games almost nonexistent. The Xbox 360’s region lock operates on a game-by-game level. Publishers can ask that their game be region-free or region-locked. There are very few Japanese region-free games available, and there is no way to purchase DLC for Japanese games outside of Japan due to an IP Address check. Similar to the PlayStation, it is fairly simple to set up a Japanese Xbox Live account and try free games from another region, but you will still face the same difficulties in paying for games because Microsoft Points are region-locked. You can also migrate your account to a new region, but it will be stuck for three months, so setting up a new profile and adding it to your Xbox is almost certainly a better idea. Play-Asia has a reasonably complete list of Xbox 360 games and their region capabilities.

Xbox One will be region-free, contrary to Microsoft’s initial announcements. However, Microsoft have yet to announce when their new console will actually come out in Japan, so it could be a year or so before you get a chance to import anything. Given the sparse selection on the 360, there likely will not be a large array of Japan-exclusive Xbox One games, but at least you don’t have to sink your money on a separate Japanese console this time.

Games Worth Importing: Mushihime-sama Futari (Xbox 360 and region-free!) aaaand that’s about it.

PC and Mac

Japan is very much a console gaming culture, but there are certain niches that live on the Windows PC. Japanese indie games (sometimes called doujin games) are often readily available on the internet, if you can find them, though not many of them work on a Mac. The Japanese indie game scene is often ridiculed for just how many train simulators and pornographic visual novels it produces, but a number of now-famous indie games like Cave Story and La Mulana started off as free-to-download Japanese indie titles.

It can be difficult to wade through everything available on the internet to find these gems, however, so I have another solution for Japanese study through computer games: I go on Steam and do an Advanced Search for games that support Japanese text or audio. That list (currently 185 games long) should only contain games that let you simply switch your language to Japanese, with no hassle of importing or creating a new account or anything. You probably already own a few.

Games Worth “Importing”: Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, Ys, Cave Story

Getting Your Disks

If you don’t happen to be staying in Japan right now, getting your hands on Japanese games can get a little difficult and expensive. The simplest way is to buy from an importer like Play-Asia.com, NCSX.com, or YesAsia.com, but they mark up the price from what you would see in Japan. For instance, the latest Pro Yakyuu Spirits game costs ￥4820 or $48 on Amazon.co.jp, but will run you $65 on Play-Asia. So why not just buy from Amazon.co.jp? You can’t, not directly. Amazon.co.jp won’t ship games, game consoles, or any electronics to a location outside Japan. You have to use a shipping service like Tenso, who can forward your game from their location in Tokyo to your address wherever. But the shipping cost will still be $15-20, so you’re not saving much money for your extra effort unless you buy in bulk.

Buying Japanese video games can be a pain, but it’s becoming easier year after year. Eventually the download options should get better too. Hopefully they will ease up on restrictions and make it easier to buy and download games in the future.

The right video game can be a fun supplementary study tool and a great reward after your language ability has jumped ahead. But most importantly to me, now I can play baseball video games that don’t suck.

If you’re an importer (or wannabe importer), let me know what games you’re a fan of the most. Anything in particular that will help with Japanese studies?

Nintendo is one such magical company of magical products, so we’ll be looking today at their founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi, pictured below.

Before you start thinking that this is a tale of another Walt Disney-esque creator, I should stop your expectations right there. Sure, his results with Nintendo prove his genius, but you’ll have to leave the ウィリー・ウォンカ fantasies aside… that is, unless you want to imagine Shigeru Miyamoto as an Oompa Loompa, and nobody wants that.

Harsh Hiroshi

Look at that whimsical, magical place. You know they’ve gotta have an underground ice cream roller coaster in there!

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. He led the company not only to financial success in the video game era, but was the reason the company made video games at all. It would be easy enough to say that Yamauchi saw the future and transformed his family’s playing card company into one of video games through sheer vision. But it was more of an accidental process than that, and it certainly had nothing to do with whimsy.

Unlike Wonka, who brought prosperity to his company with trippy boat rides and musical numbers, Hiroshi Yamauchi did it with harsh criticism and mass firings. When he was asked to become president in 1949 by his dying grandfather, Hiroshi agreed on one condition: the firing of all other family members at Nintendo. This resulted in only one person, his older cousin, being let go and is also a really roundabout way of telling this cousin, “I hate you.” Immediately after becoming president, Yamauchi faced a strike of factory workers who thought he would fold on account of he was only twenty-one years old. Instead, he fired them all on account of he was the president. This led to a clean sweep of the company during which the young prez fired many long-time employees who had dedicated their lives to Nintendo.

During the video game years of the early eighties, Hiroshi Yamauchi hired his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to run Nintendo operations in America and he was smart to do so. Arakawa wasn’t hired because of family ties. He was a solid businessman with an MIT education and a reputation for successfully managing a Japanese construction firm in Canada. But when Arakawa had a hard time gaining a foothold in the American market with the Nintendo Famicom (Japanese NES), Yamauchi was not hesitant to remark “a more competent person would have no trouble marketing the Famicom in the United States.” Straight to the point, that one is.

Risky Business

Young Yamauchi with Roy O. Disney during a meeting that actually made Nintendo a lot of money, which Yamauchi would later lose on three bad business deals.

The image most projected of Yamauchi was his severity. But as a businessman, he was also shrewd, very forward-thinking and not all that conservative. Certainly by our modern standards for a “forward-thinking” boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi looks conservative, though. There was no ping-pong table in the break room or “bring your shorts to work day.” But when it came to taking a chance on young talent or uncertain ideas, he was certainly not playing it safe.

Yamauchi realized early on that the world of playing cards was only so big. After a recon visit to the world’s largest playing card company (in beautiful Cincinnati!) he was disappointed to find it was a fairly small-scale operation. Upon returning to Kyoto, he took his company public and started a series of risky ventures to bring Nintendo greater success than it had ever seen with stupid ol’ playing cards. He started with instant rice packets, which immediately flopped. Apparently people like waiting for their rice. The anticipation is what makes it taste good. Then he started a taxi company called Daiya, but he quickly grew tired of negotiating with the unions over ridiculous demands like getting paid. Finally, he started a love hotel (which is exactly what you think it is), but ended up being his own best customer and this venture was also a failure.

Though these examples do not display Yamauchi’s business acumen, it certainly shows his bold and non-conservative nature. A conservative businessman would have stuck with playing cards. Actually, at the time he took over, Nintendo was doing so well with its playing card business that there was no reason make a change. But Yamauchi was ambitious and willing to try something different even if it made no sense. Really, if you think about it, it’s the same as if I became president of a greeting card company and said, “Hey guys! I know we’re really successful making greeting cards, but I’d like to take our money resources and start producing cat sweaters.” I would immediately be thrown out the window. But no one dared to throw Yamauchi out the window because he would’ve fired them before hitting the ground.

Whispers of the Art

Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto, two of Yamauchi’s best decisions.

Yamauchi had brought Nintendo to the brink of bankruptcy with his ideas and it was only the 1960s. He was going to have keep the company going until at least 1982 when they could start making the big money. Thankfully, almost every decision Yamauchi made from 1966 onward was successful. As Nintendo transformed into a toy company, he began to display what was arguably his most visionary aspect: his ability to take chances on young talent.

Contrary to the Mr. Burns stereotype we are wont to place him in, Hiroshi Yamauchi recognized brilliant people who had talents he did not, and gave them opportunities to create. He handpicked Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, from his factory floor and gave a job to Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda, despite Miyamoto’s dreamy and incredibly non-businesslike persona. A real stuffy businessman would have turned these two daydreaming ne’er-do-wells away, along with the countless other Nintendo innovators over the years. The book Game Over by David Sheff has the best insight on this:

“Nintendo would, Yamauchi decided, become a haven for video-game artists, for it was artists, not technicians,who made great games.”

Growing Up

So Hiroshi Yamauchi was smart at business and a little harsh. Actually, most sources I’ve read describe him as “notoriously harsh” or “imperialistic.” He was quick to dish out criticism and made his employees compete for his approval. In my research on Nintendo over the years, I have mostly focused on the creators and innovators at Nintendo and only read about Yamauchi as it related to them. This had cemented a picture in my mind of Yamauchi as the uncreative business-oni that sucked money from his hard working, jovial video game creators. Certainly there is a lot of truth to this oni image, but it wasn’t until after his recent death that I discovered a different side of him.

Hiroshi Yamauchi’s father, Shikanojo, abandoned his family when Hiroshi was five years old. Hiroshi’s mother then threw him into the care of his grandparents, who raised him with the same strictness that they used on their employees. During the War, Hiroshi was still too young to fight, so his studies were put on hold for an assignment in a military factory. When he finally returned to his studies, he gained entrance to the prestigious Waseda University to study law, but was forced to drop out yet again, this time to take over the family business.

Shortly after Hiroshi became Nintendo’s president, his father, Shikanojo, returned to see his son. Whether by anger or pride, Hiroshi refused to see his father and turned him away. When Hiroshi was close to thirty, he got word that his father had passed away and immediately regretted missing the chance for reconciliation. He grieved openly for days and regularly visited his father’s grave for the rest of his life. This made Shikanojo the second father figure with whom Hiroshi lost his chance for acceptance. Hiroshi’s grandfather had died regarding his grandson as impudent and foolish, never seeing his years of success. Though Hiroshi’s mother was around, she became more like an aunt than a mother and his grandmother was no different. In essence, between four parental figures, Hiroshi Yamauchi received plenty of material care and support, but little else. His history really helps to explain his style of business.

Retirement And Beyond

Upon his retirement, Yamauchi refused his pension of close to $14 million, stating that he felt Nintendo could put it to better use. It’s not that he was without avarice. You don’t become the 12th richest man in Japan without liking money just a little. But unlike the bloated CEOs who get fired and take a hefty severance at the expense of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi looked out for his company’s and employees’ well-being, albeit firing them / squashing their pride from time to time.

So was he Wonka, Mr. Burns or Scrooge? Really, none of the above. We like it when people in high positions are easy to define. This guy’s bad, this guy’s good, this guy was bad but is now good because some ghosts scared him, etc. I read some comments about Yamauchi shortly before he died and they were all about how he was a vampire and evil and crazy (he did say some nutty stuff over the years). But after his death, articles all over the web were touting him as a visionary genius. The truth is that Hiroshi Yamauchi was a human man. He treated a lot of people badly, got hurt a lot in his early life, made good and bad decisions, donated a lot of money to charity, and gave opportunities to artists that made a lot of us really happy. He was complex and the story of his life is incredibly interesting. And that is perhaps the best and truest way to remember his personal legacy.

Sources Referenced:

• Game Over by David Sheff
• The First Quarter by Steven L. Kent
• http://thepunkeffect.com/?p=11804
• http://www.usgamer.net/articles/hiroshi-yamauchi-the-iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove
• http://www.n-sider.com/contentview.php?contentid=224
• http://www.nindb.net/feature/history-of-nintendo.html

The typical Automatic Mario music video has Mario being ferried across the level by moving platforms, bouncing off enemies and custom blocks that send him flying. Most videos are uploaded to the Japanese video sharing site, Nico Nico Douga.

Melt

Theme song to Doraemon

This next one gets a bit Mario-ception, being a Super Mario World rendition of a vocal version of a song from Super Mario World. Sometimes blocks and other background objects are used to create graphics related to the song. Can you spot the KY in this video?

Western Show on Super Mario World

Even Luigi gets his own 自動ルイージ – Automatic Luigi:

Danjo

Cirno’s Perfect Math Class

Not to be outdone, some videos feature four separate levels playing out at the same time, to cover even more parts of the song.

Little Busters!

There’s even a four screen version of Queen, one for each member of the band.

Don’t Stop Me Now

Interest in Automatic Mario peaked around mid-2008, but there are still a few new videos being submitted to Nico Nico Douga every so often. In closing, I’ll leave you with an eleven minute medley of songs.

Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga Grand Finale

The Early Years: Back in My Day, We Had Pong!

But let’s back up to the proverbial top of the screen. Tomohiro Nishikado graduated from Tokyo Denki University in 1968 with a degree in engineering. The following year, he joined up with Taito Corporation (known as Taito Trading Company at the time), and worked on the company’s electro-mechanical games, the precursor to arcade video games. By 1972 he was working on video games, starting with Elepong, a serious contender for the titles of both Japan’s First Video Game and Most Honest Pong Clone. Other early games include Davis Cup, a Pong-clone with four paddles, and Soccer, a Pong-clone with four paddles and a green background.

1974 saw the release of Speed Race, a personal favorite of Nishikado’s, which, after being licensed by Midway, went on to become the first Japanese game released in America. This relationship continued with Nishikado’s next game, Western Gun. When Midway released the game in America, it was adapted to use a microprocessor, a first for video games, giving it better graphics and smoother animation. Although preferring his original version, Nishikado was so impressed with the technological upgrade that he decided to use microprocessors for all of his future games.

Space: The Next Frontier

Next, we’ll fast forward, or for those using DVD, mash the next chapter button to 1977. Nishikado was inspired by the gameplay of Atari’s Breakout, but, realizing that Taito wouldn’t be making a Breakout clone until 1986’s Arkanoid, set out to make a game with a similar feel. He originally designed the game around shooting planes and tanks, but felt that moving sideways was decidedly un-plane-and-tank-like. Plus, Taito forbade him from using human targets, leaving him with pretty much nothing on Earth to use.

Luckily, Nishikado heard about an American movie coming out (a mostly unknown knock-off of Message From Space, that goes by the name of “Star Wars”), and decided on a sci-fi theme. The enemy aliens were based off of the invaders from War of the Worlds, which presumably means that at least one person has mistaken them for actual invading aliens. The foundation for one of the most influential games of all time had been laid. Nishikado called it Space Monsters. And then Taito renamed it Space Invaders.

I Accidentally an Entirely New Gameplay Concept

Unfortunately, the hardware running games at the time wasn’t quite up to par with the technology of the game’s sci-fi influences. Nishikado would have to create his own hardware for the game to run on, along with the tools to develop it. This would end up being the longest part of development, taking a grueling six months to complete. In contrast, the actual game only took three months to complete, making it one of those rare times when the easiest part of single-handedly creating an entire video game was single-handedly creating an entire video game.

Even with custom hardware, the game was too demanding. There were too many enemies on screen for the processor to handle, and they couldn’t move at the speed Nishikado wanted them to. But, while testing the game, he noticed that as the player destroys the enemies, they would speed up, as there were less of them for the processor to render. He decided to keep it that way, creating the concept of the difficulty curve that is now standard in nearly every game in existence. At any rate, Nishikado pressed on, and in 1978, Japan got their first taste of Space Invaders. And we all know how that went.

Poorly. It went poorly. The game flopped. At least, for the first three months, anyways. The success of Space Invaders began to turn around thanks to word of mouth, and possibly an 80’s training montage (it was ahead of its time, after all). People soon fell in love the little space crabs for the innovative gameplay and competitive value, being the first game that saved player’s high scores. By the end of the year, there were over 100,000 Space Invaders machines in Japan alone.

Space Sushi Crosses Pond, Invades People’s Hearts

In 1979, it was released in America, which was already in its second year of the video game crash of ’77, with the country burned out on years of Pong clones. The space crab invaders from Japan would turn out to be the industry’s saviors, and helped propel gaming into the mainstream. The game was so successful that the cost of buying a Space Invaders cabinet was offset within a month. The 1980 Atari 2600 release quadrupled the sales of the system, and the game, not content with being the first home console game to sell one million copies, would go on to sell over two million.

Space Invaders would go on to inspire the entire genre of shoot ’em ups, and is the game that got both Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima interested in making games. The video game that was inspired by Star Wars had become the Star Wars of video games.

But what happened to Nishikado? Well, not a whole lot, really. He continued working for Taito until 1996, when he left to form his own game company, Dreams. The company occasionally does development on Taito titles, and Nishikado oversaw development of Space Invaders Revolution for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. He was also credited in the most recent Space Invaders game, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, published by Square Enix, Taito’s current owner. Whatever he does, we’ll always remember him for his contribution that helped shape an industry. Who knows where it would be without him. Pong with six paddles?

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Sources:
http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=space-invaders&page=detail&id=2537
http://www.1up.com/features/ten-space-invaders
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2009/05/66479041/1#.UVZxjVcZsoL

Is there Hope for Square Enix?

So the main reason that Yoichi Wada is resigning is because Square Enix has had a really crappy time this generation. Their previous fiscal year was reported as an extraordinary loss. That’s bad.

Final Fantasy XIV was a massive failure, FFXIII sold well but had a generally mixed to poor reception, and the same goes for XIII’s sequel. Even my last hope for the company, Dragon Quest, is starting to crap out with DQX which is a MMO for NO RAISIN. FFXI and FFXIV were lousy! Square Enix! Stop making MMOs! You’re not good at it!

To be fair, it was announced in 2012 that FFXI had become the most profitable title in the Final Fantasy series. While that may be true given that monthly subscriptions really add up fast, it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t like the game and view it as the depressing turning point for the series.

Needless to say, the company’s long overdue for a major change. They’ve lost much if not all of their former glory. Instead of releasing great titles and classics like the old Final Fantasy games, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, etc – they’re dribbling out poorly selling games like Sleeping Dogs, XIII-2, and Hitman: Absolution.

Sure, some games of theirs end up being highly rated and doing well, but I just feel like Square Enix has lost their identity somewhere along the way. Sure, the latest Tomb Raider looks like a cool game and seems to be doing well so far, but that game is only under the Square Enix name because they acquired Eidos, the company that originally published Tomb Raider. Square Enix was even responsible for publishing Call of Duty: Black Ops II in Japan (what?). I know, I was surprised too. This company is all over the place.

Anyway, they need to overhaul the company and refocus and reprioritize and all that other good business stuff. Synergy. Good news is that they are doing just that. Only bad part is that by making all of these restructure changes they’ll be losing about 10 billion yen (over $107 million). That’s a lot of cash.

To make matters worse, Japanese RPG developers in general have been catching some flak for not keeping up with the times and modernizing for a worldwide audience. Stuff like this is part of the reasons that Japanese RPGs don’t make it to America like they used to. Games such as Dark Souls and Monster Hunter are exceptions to the rule here, but on the whole JRPGs are not received as they once were.

You’ve Changed, Final Fantasy… You’ve Changed

“I never realized… how bad of a game we are…”

The Final Fantasy series in particular has taken a plunge. The games are selling less and less copies and Square Enix has been having trouble getting them out in a timely manner. FF Versus XIII was unveiled over 6 years ago and there’s not even a demo yet. FF Type-0 was released in Japan about a year and a half ago but still has yet to see an international release.

For some unknown reason, Square Enix plans to relaunch FFXIV as Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. JUST LET THE GAME DIE, SQUARE ENIX. Seriously. I’m tired of it clinging to what little life it has. They’re also coming out with another FFXIII sequel called Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13. Again, I have no idea why. The other FFXIII sequel was pretty mediocre, why continue down that road? Not enough people like these games for them to keep releasing sequels and spinoffs.

New CEO = New Hope?

Needless to say, the new CEO, Yosuke Matsuda has his work cut out for him. I know next to nothing about him other than he was the company’s representative director before, but hopefully he’s up to the task. He’s got a long hard road ahead of him.

In my opinion, Square/Square Enix started to crap out around the time Hironobu Sakaguchi left the company and around the time Wada became CEO. How much blame should go where and all that is anyone’s guess. Is Wada solely responsible for Square Enix’s troubles? Probably not, but he was the figurehead and he’d lost face as the leader.

Final Fantasy X was the last FF game that I really, truly enjoyed. It was the last FF game released under the Square name before they became Square Enix, and I choose that game as the last reminder of Hironobu Sakaguchi in an attempt to forget that he was mainly responsible for FFXI being a MMO *shudder*

So why are FFX fans rejoicing as I mentioned in the title? Well, some might be holding out hope that with the CEO stepping down, Square Enix might return to the glory days it enjoyed leading up to FFX – but there is another reason FFX fans are happy. FFX is getting an HD makeover.

Aw Yiss, FFX in HD

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev5HrygFUYM']

Since most of this post has been kind of a depressing rant (sorry), I thought I’d leave you with some much happier news. Final Fantasy X is getting a rework. While not everyone likes FFX, I know I do, and I am definitely looking forward to playing it again with some smoothed up visuals.

FFX was the first Final Fantasy on the PS2, the first with significant amounts of voice acting, and also the first to warrant a direct sequel, even if the sequel wasn’t all that impressive (FFX-2 is getting a rework too btw). The HD remaster will be released on both PS3 and PS Vita, many thinking it will come out around June or so. I for one can’t wait to get my hands on it.

So tell me, are you excited for an HD remaster of FFX/X-2? What do you think about Square Enix’s current situation and Yoichi Wada stepping down? Do you see a bright future ahead for the company? Let us know in the comments!