Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life

Studios

• • • • Introduction to the 2016 Edition • • • •

Over the past ten years, I’ve consistently fielded a single question from readers who’ve found me through my writing at WIRED or elsewhere: When will Power-Up be back in print? Or, as is usually the case in the last few years, when will it be available as an ebook?

Spoiler: Thanks to the enthusiastic people at Dover Publications, you are now holding it. Now, what will you ask me for? Probably nothing else ever again. I hope that the actual book Power-Up measures up to whatever expectations that you may have built up in your head about it. It was written by a 24-year-old kid who bears little resemblance to the person writing this introduction.

When I wrote Power-Up, the first book written in English specifically about Japanese games, it was because I wanted to show how Japan’s unlikely dominance of the new storytelling medium of the video game had stemmed from the country’s unusually rich history of visual storytelling culture, and give a variety of views onto just how robust and unique Japan’s culture of video games was even from its earliest days.

When I was researching this book, scraping together whatever information I could find, some of the interviewees had rarely, if ever, been interviewed at all before. Since then, a staggering amount of in-depth research has been undertaken, and continues to be undertaken, on Japanese game development and culture, past and present. I certainly hope even a little bit of this was inspired in one way or another by Power-Up.

All this is to say that we do not present Power-Up today as any sort of definitive guide to Japanese games, but as something of a historical artifact of its own, a snapshot of what things looked like from my perspective in 2004. Besides fixing a few minor errors that snuck into the original version, we haven’t altered the structure.

In the new chapter for this edition, rather than attempt to encapsulate a decade-plus of Japanese game history into a few thousand words, I’ve honed in on what I believe to be the most important story of the last decade, one that I think will be told time and time again in the years to come.

Thanks for reading, then and now.

• • • • Introduction to the 2004 Edition Video Games Are Good For You • • • •

Like Nintendo’s Mario, this book has had many lives. The first and oldest bits were written right around Christmas of 2001, the first chapters of my graduation thesis at Tufts University. I submitted it under the title The Cinematic Japanese Video Game that spring. It received highest honors and I graduated with a BA in Japanese. Months later I was off to Kyoto, Japan on a one-year Fulbright fellowship to turn The Cinematic Japanese Video Game into Power-Up.

That’s the version I tell at parties. The truth is that I have been writing this book in my head since I was eleven years old in sixth grade, and I decided that I wanted to be a video game journalist when I grew up. (I still do.) I was born after video games, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember a time in my life without them.

One of my earliest memories is of my father programming a Blackjack game on our then state-of-the-art TRS-80 home computer with its 4K of RAM and cassette tape drive storage. Two years later our whole family would gather around our Atari 800XE to play Frogger and the hundreds of other games we had on floppy disk. At the same time, my father tooled around with an Atari VCS video game system at work and got it to play copies of games that they had burned onto rewriteable chips, just to see if they could do it.

And then came the Nintendo Entertainment System. We got it on Easter morning, 1988. The Action Set with the Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt cartridge, two controllers, and a Zapper light pistol. Super Mario Bros. filled our days until we’d saved the Princess. This was something we’d never experienced with any of our drawer full of Atari games. This was a symphony of colors and music. The game play control was sublime. The characters leapt off the screen.

At eight, then nine, then ten years old I was finally old enough to really start to appreciate what I was experiencing. By then, video games had outgrown the simple shooting and jumping contests that were popular in arcades when I was a toddler. They were vast, open-ended worlds like The Legend of Zelda, filled with exploration and storylines. What I loved about video games at that age was the same thing that I loved about books. At school, I would draw Mario and the rest of the characters from the games in my notebooks, first just pictures with a few words and then full-blown comics, first imitations of the ones I’d read in Nintendo Power magazine and then original stories.

And at some point, probably through ‘behind-the-scenes’ articles in Nintendo Power, I realized that all these games that I loved came from Japan. So my eyes opened to the other forms of Japanese popular culture that had begun to trickle into suburban Connecticut by the early nineties: manga comic books in translation, usually on a tiny out-of-the-way rack in the comic book store in the mall, and whatever anime was on television at the time, mostly heavily edited and English-dubbed shows like Sailor Moon.

I chose Tufts University in large part because of the school’s wide selection of Japanese language and culture offerings. Immersing myself into innovative courses like Japanese Visual Culture and Japanese Film opened my eyes, because I was beginning to realize that so many of the theories about Japanese art that I was learning applied directly to video games. It started to become clear why Japanese video games had become so popular and commercially successful worldwide. My struggle to explain this phenomenon culminated in the chapters that follow.

I am pleased and humbled that you have decided to read this book. Before we begin, some brief words on the research and quotes. Since Power-Up began as a thesis paper long before I had any access to face-to-face interviews with developers, many of the quotes came from interviews published in other books, magazines, and websites. In general I have kept the best quotes obtained in this early research, sometimes because I was not granted a face-to-face interview with the designer and sometimes because my time with them was limited, and I did not wish to retread ground that had already been covered in interviews.

I was fortunate enough while living in Kyoto to come across many interviews with game designers published in Japanese. In the cases where I felt sure that I could preserve the original meaning of the designer’s words, I have printed them in quotation form. In cases where I could not, I used the interviews as a basis for narrating a series of events in my own words. I have footnoted the texts accordingly, especially in cases where a fact might not be considered common knowledge or may indeed be in dispute.

In cases where the quote comes from an outside source, I have used the past tense (…he said). If the quote is from a personal interview, present tense (…he says) is used.

I have tried my best to avoid the use of the first person throughout except where absolutely necessary—for although I want to put Power-Up into context, I want the stories of the developers to come through with minimal editorializing by yours truly.

And yet, just as in previous books on video game culture, it is impossible to escape the fact that my own childhood, adolescent, and adult tastes, experiences, and preferences have highly influenced the format and content of this one. I would like to see more recent games like Final Fantasy VII dissected and analyzed as I have examined the earlier NES versions. But just as authors before me wrote their books about Asteroids and Defender, and I am writing mine about Mario and Final Fantasy, it is up to the next generation to analyze the games they grow up with.

With that out of the way,

Let’s-a-go.

1

• • • • Super Mario Nation • • • •

Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. [They]...are extensions of social man and of the body politic...

As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the action and the reaction of whole populations in a single dynamic image... The games of a people reveal a great deal about them.

—Marshall McLuhan,

Understanding Media:

The Extensions of Man

The preceding quote served as the epigraph to David Sheff’s seminal 1993 book Game Over, a riveting, novelesque portrait of the people behind the rise of Nintendo, the world’s largest video game software publisher and, at the time, the dominant force in the video game industry. Ultimately, Game Over was a journalistic chronicle of international business intrigue and courtroom drama, but the choice of quote revealed that Sheff was thinking, too, about the cultural aspects of Nintendo video games—backed up by later admissions that it was his son’s love for the games that initially drew him to the topic.

There’s only one problem: Sheff was writing about video game culture solely as it pertained to America. And although there is much to say about Japanese video games in American culture, the fact is that the games Sheff was writing about are not products or models of our culture. They are products and models of Japanese culture, the action and the reaction of the Japanese population, presented nearly unaltered for our consumption.

And what consumers we are. Video game sales in the US have skyrocketed from a decade ago—3.2 billion dollars in 1995 to 6.9 billion in 2002, and Japanese-developed games have historically made up a large part of that sum. Many Japanese games, particularly those developed by Kyoto-based Nintendo Co., Ltd., top bestseller lists worldwide. Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. (1985) remains the single best-selling video game of all time, although other Nintendo titles like The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and of course the various iterations of Pokémon have been no slouches.

Throughout the brief history of video games, Japanese-developed titles have set the world on fire—Space Invaders in the seventies, Pac-Man in the early eighties, Super Mario Bros. in 1985, Street Fighter II in 1991, Final Fantasy VII in 1997. And even when a non-Japanese game becomes a breakout hit in the US or elsewhere, it is often heavily based on elements pioneered in Japanese software and released for a Japanese-developed hardware system: Tomb Raider on the Sega Saturn in 1995, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2002.

So the question is, why? Why were Japanese video games so popular worldwide, from the earliest days, with little to no modification necessary? After all, the same thing has not been true for, say, Japanese films. And while Japanese animation and comics are quickly attaining mainstream popularity in the Western world, this is a very recent phenomenon. Only a handful of Americans knew about manga in 1980. Meanwhile, the rest of the country had Pac-Man fever. And it was a fever brought on in part by the infectious, manga-style Japanese design sense of that video game.

Why, indeed? Well, to find the answer we should first ask: what separates the first video games from the video games of today? The immediate answer would seem to be that advances in computer processing power over the past four decades have produced video game hardware capable of superior graphics, and that the advent of the compact disc allows for more complex game designs thanks to its high memory storage capacity.

But this is not the entire answer. It is indeed true that the video games of today are far more technologically advanced than the first commercial home video game system. That was called Odyssey, which was released by the television company Magnavox in 1972 and sold for $99.99. Odyssey could, at best, generate a white line running down the blank television screen and three white dots: two paddles and one ball that bounced between them, a television tennis game. Odyssey played other types of games as well, but all of them featured only a few small, monochrome dots appearing onscreen at once.

Odyssey and later home video games of the time were looked upon as disposable playthings and not permanent additions to one’s home television set. This was, in part, because the earliest game systems were what are called dedicated hardware. New games could not be added to the system; only the games built into the hardware could be played. Furthermore, these games were simplistic, repetitive, and, after a short time, boring. This sort of mentality—that video game hardware would quickly become boring to the consumer—started to shift with the availability of programmable hardware, consoles that featured no built-in games but allowed the user to play new ones stored on separate media.

Programmable hardware helped begin the evolution of a video game machine from a simple plaything to a staple of the home entertainment center, the difference between a music box and a phonograph. Programmable systems also made it possible for game designers to create their work and sell software without having to supply the hardware as well.

Michael Katz, formerly of the video game company Sega, remembered this from the days when more and more video game publishers were starting to pop up in Silicon Valley: There were so many cartridges already available to Atari players from Atari, that we couldn’t imagine that any consumer needed more cartridges. Nobody thought that they [consumers] would perceive any kind of difference in the graphics...and we couldn’t conceive of anyone paying $3 to $5 more at retail for cartridges from a company that no one had ever heard of.¹

Imagine such a comment being applied to another medium: There were so many books available to readers that we couldn’t imagine that any reader needed more books. Nobody thought that readers would perceive any kind of difference in the words, and we couldn’t conceive of anyone paying $3 to $5 more for books from a company that no one had ever heard of.

Nonsense, right? But this made perfect sense when talking about the video games of the time, because a game was a game was a game. Most every video game being sold was a simple shooting or driving contest and there was little to differentiate, in the mind of the consumer, one cartridge from another. Games in the 1970s and early 1980s had no clear ending, but instead just continued with repetitive action for a few minutes until the player lost his last spaceship or crashed his tiny, monochrome car.

Today, game players spend hours immersed in role-playing games like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, puzzling over plot details, intricacies of the worlds they explore, the powers of their characters, and their relationships.

So it is not, in fact, simply that today’s video games are larger and more graphically intricate: it is that the actual content and design—the very makeup of the games—has changed.

• • •

Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called today’s video games virtual play spaces which allow home-bound children...to extend their reach, to explore, manipulate, and interact with a more diverse range of imaginary places than constitute the often drab, predictable, and overly-familiar spaces of their everyday lives.² Jenkins elaborates, showing the various ways that modern-day video game play echoes nineteenth-century boy culture. He writes that nineteenth-century boys would draw on the adventure stories of the day as a template for their own play—reading a book about pirates and then playing as pirates, for example.³

Jenkins then noted that today’s video games depend heavily on fantasy role-playing, with different genres of games allowing children to imagine themselves in alternative...roles or situations.⁴ This description is not restricted to the genre known as role-playing games, which are elaborate story-based strategy games. Even today’s simpler, action-oriented games feature specific characters and unique situations. The characters and scenarios in all of these video games are, therefore, serving the same imagination-igniting function as the adventure books.

Thus, perhaps the most important difference between the earliest video games and today’s games is the insertion of what could be called cinematic elements. Rather than stick figures or spaceships representing the player, today’s games star fully fleshed-out characters with backgrounds, motivation, and perhaps development throughout the story. Games incorporate narrative; they are built around a story line. And most games today include what are referred to as cut scenes or cinematics—sometimes non-interactive, often film-like sequences that set up or advance the story, which is typically a complex, lengthy affair.

Cinematic elements are appealing to game players because they can enhance the game experience. Game designers quickly learned the value of flashy reward screens for a job well done, of giving players concrete goals with set rewards to strive for. If a game has likeable characters, players can become attached to those characters and more deeply involved in the game. And if a game has a storyline, players have a concrete incentive to beat the game: they want to complete the story, to bring closure to the narrative.

This revolution came about as a result of Japanese influence on this American pastime: these cinematic game elements that are so common today originated in Japanese video games of the early eighties. In one of the first books ever written on video games, a 1982 volume called Video Invaders, author Steve Bloom wrote that the Japanese have a ‘comical sense,’ and are great fans of comic books, sitcoms, and cartoons. Taito America’s president, Jack Mittel, explained: ‘They [the Japanese] want more of a story line, more of a Walter Mitty experience that’s like a whole movie...’ ⁵

Even the name of Bloom’s book illustrates the huge impact that Japanese games had on American game culture from the first: the name Bloom chose for his volume, Video Invaders, is a play on the name of a video game developed by the Japanese company Taito, Space Invaders. Bloom goes on to describe the then-new Japanese game Donkey Kong (which would spawn the world-famous Mario series, although Bloom did not know it at the time) as another bizarre cartoon game, courtesy of Japan.⁶

Why Japan?

Japan, wrote Alex Kerr in his provocative book Dogs And Demons: The Fall Of Modern Japan, while maintaining a competent standard in many industries, and intellectual or artistic pursuits, does not lead the way in any single field.⁷ This is not entirely the case. Though Kerr lays out a well-researched case on the decline of Japanese traditional art, architecture, cinema, and technology, perhaps the Japanese video game is the exception that proves the rule.

These bizarre cartoon games were coming from a country and a people in love with cartoons and comics. Frederik L. Schodt, who has written two books and countless articles on Japanese comics, wrote in 1983 that the Japanese consider them to be "an effective...way of transmitting information, and they use them everywhere... Aiding in this explosion in the use of cartoons is the fact that so many people learn how to draw them... For younger generations comics are the common language... [They] live in an age that emphasizes the image...[and] naturally have no bias against comics. They are, appropriately, referred to in Japan as the shikaku sedai, the ‘visual generation.’ "⁸

Not only that, but there were aspects of Japanese design sense that lent themselves specifically to the medium of the video game. Japanese anime characters, heavily influenced by the style of manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, are cartoonish and unrealistically proportioned, even when the stories they tell are deadly serious. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud noted that Japanese manga artists prize abstract, iconic characters, and that abstraction in general is key to identification with the characters in a story. In the book, which is presented in comic form, he draws himself, the narrator, in an abstract style for this very purpose of engaging the reader.⁹

This way of drawing characters, noted J.C. Herz in her book Joystick Nation, "translated easily into early video games, which didn’t have the graphic resolution to represent characters with adult proportions. Small, cute characters had fewer pixels per inch and were easier to use, and so video games borrowed, for reasons of expediency, what manga had developed as a matter of convention."¹⁰

The Japanese believe this style to be mukokuseki, a word that literally means lacking nationality but is used mainly to refer to the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics and contexts from a cultural product.¹¹ Indeed, though Japanese anime character designs lack any ethnically Japanese features, the style itself can hardly be said to lack nationality when it is a unique creation of Japanese artists, completely different from American or European comic artwork. *

*Sometimes, of course, Japanese video games do have certain Japanese ethnic or cultural context. These are usually removed or replaced if the game comes to the US—see chapters 8 and 9.

More generally, the Japanese have a centuries-old tradition of visual culture. One might go so far as to say that the image, rather than the word, has always been at the forefront of Japanese culture. From the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the floating world to the highly stylized visual experiences that comprise the traditional Noh and kabuki theater, from the sexually charged shunga prints that gave way to vivid and chilling gekiga film books that were the precursors to modern manga comics, in every era of Japanese history we find that the most popular art forms were visual in nature.

One might even say that haiku—short Japanese poems that present, in as few words as possible, a vivid image of a seasonal nature scene—are visually oriented. Even the Japanese written language is made up of pictographs that come from representational drawings.

The notion of the image grew up differently in the Western world, where picture books, comic books, and chapter books with illustrations are looked down upon as children’s entertainment. A child who reads books without illustrations is said to be reading on an adult level; an adult who avidly reads comic books would be thought strange. But the shikaku sedai (a phrase that now describes even today’s middle-aged Japanese) privilege the image as a method of communication and so have a love for comics and animation. One result of this outlook, wrote Schodt, is that many talented young people—who in other times might have become novelists or painters—are becoming professional comic artists.¹² And in the early ’80s, as Schodt was writing these words, many of these young people were becoming video game designers.

Their American contemporaries, meanwhile, seemed to have no idea what was going on. In Video Invaders, American game designer Tim Skelly, then of Cinematronics, attacked the Japanese game design philosophy, calling them horrible copiers and adding, most of their games don’t cut it here anyway. I foresee them losing a lot of business here in the States.¹³ In less than one year’s time, however, Cinematronics—and many companies like it—would be the ones losing a lot of business, as the video game market dried up in the United States. It was Japanese companies that would revive the US industry.

Wrote video game historian Leonard Herman, "At one time the United States had been the leader in all forms of manufacturing from automobiles to television and radios. As time passed, Japan...eventually took them over...[but] the only markets that they couldn’t take over were computers and video games. Computers appeared to be the only true American product remaining. Because they were small scale computers, video games were also an American phenomenon...until 1978 when Taito released Space Invaders and Japan quickly took over with an attack all of its own."¹⁴

In 1983, the US video game market crashed. Video games still thrived in Japan, but American companies like Atari, Coleco, and Mattel were not able to keep the industry afloat in the US. Many video game publishers went bankrupt by 1984. In 1985, Nintendo introduced its Famicom video game system in the United States, and along with it a full library of Japanese video games translated into English. In a year’s time, Nintendo had resurrected the dead video game market. American companies like Atari tried to compete but American video games could not stand up to games like Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.

Even today, thanks mostly to the early influence of Japanese bizarre cartoon games, a great many successful games in the US are Japanese. In their January 2002 issue, editors of the popular video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly voted for their favorite 100 games of all time. Of the 100 games listed:

86 had recognizable, distinct characters.

78 had a full story or story elements.

38 were role-playing games built entirely around a story progression.

93 were Japanese in origin.

Why it Matters: Video Games as Multicultural Gateway

This book is intended to be a celebration of the art form of video games with an eye toward the positive aspects of the games. Other such books examining video games have not been so kind to the medium. Academic and journalistic books have attacked video games for being sexist, racist, violent, and ultimately harmful to children. The book that most typified this sense of hysteria was called Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, written by University of Miami professor Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. in 1991.

In his book, Provenzo concluded that society had to eliminate the violence, destruction, xenophobia, racism, and sexism that are so much a part of the world of Nintendo.¹⁵ At the 1993 joint Congressional hearings on video game violence, Provenzo was called upon to testify as an expert witness. He repeated his findings at the hearings, testifying, video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist.¹⁶ After his presentation, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the primary architect of the hearings, asked Provenzo to elaborate on his charge that Nintendo’s video games were racist.

In interviews with children, replied Provenzo, "what I found was that they talked about the ninjas [enemy characters in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games] as being bad. Then [I] asked them about who ninjas were, and they [said they were]...the Japs and the Chinese. It turns out that they perceive Asians, any Asians, as being extremely violent, as being dangerous, as being evil."¹⁷

Taken at face value, this provocative statement seems damning. But the text of his book tells a somewhat different story. In the chapter titled Aggression and Video Games, Provenzo described children’s involvement with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games:

"One child presented a detailed description of weapons such as throwing stars and katangas [sic]. Significantly, despite detailed knowledge of Ninja weaponry, most of the children interviewed seemed to have little understanding of where the Ninja came from or what they signified. A fourth grade boy explained, for example, that he wasn’t sure if the Ninja were Chinese or Japanese, but that the Chinese and Japanese were the enemies because just because they are from Japan they might want to do something different from you. And they are dangerous because they might want to fight with you.¹⁸

Note that this one utterance from one fourth-grade child serves as Video Kids’ prima facie evidence of racism; the only finding that Provenzo offered in the entire book to back up his conclusion that Nintendo games were overwhelmingly racist. Confusingly, Provenzo even noted in his book that for the most part the children he interviewed had little understanding of what race ninja are. What the children did know was that the Ninja Turtles were turtles, and the enemy ninja were robots. It’s far-fetched to imagine that children might even consider robots and sea creatures to be of any particular race.

Regardless of the hysteria that earlier books typified, later research—on the growing manga and anime boom in the US—started to tell a very different story about the perceptions of Asians, and Japanese in particular, that are held by American youth. Dr. Antonia Levi wrote in 1996 that, due to the proliferation of anime in American popular culture, "America’s Generation X and Japan’s shin jinrui will never again be complete strangers to one another."¹⁹ "There we were, happily debating whether to focus education on multiculturalism or Western Civilization, and the kids made their own choice with anime and manga."²⁰

Academics like Levi and Susan J. Napier seem to be generally excited about the prospect of anime creating a generation of American young people who are culturally in tune with their Japanese counterparts. But do Japanese video games count? Napier explicitly made this connection in her book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, stating in her chapter on American anime fans that many of them "often [first] come across anime in computer or video games" which would make an interest in anime quite natural. She did not cite examples of video games with anime influences or those based on anime series, but many of them made their way to the United States long before the manga or anime did: a game based on the adult-oriented spy thriller manga Golgo 13, for example, was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US in 1988, well before the manga or anime.

Frederik Schodt predicted this in 1983: In the years to come, the sheer size and momentum of Japanese comics culture will make itself felt around the world indirectly, through the commercial spin-offs of toys, animation, picture books, video games...²¹ Super Mario Bros. and Final Fantasy were not spin-offs of any particular anime, but the style of the games came out of a country whose booming comics and animation culture gave birth to them. So whether American children—or any of these researchers—knew it or not, Super Mario was a warm-up, an introduction to the unique visual style of the Japanese such that when a generation that had grown up on Nintendo was introduced to Akira or Princess Mononoke, there was something familiar about these cultural imports.

Or, as game designer Keiichi Yano puts it, Video games were the big can-opener. Yano has a unique perspective on this phenomenon: born in Tokyo, he lived in Los Angeles until he was 20, moving back to his native Japan to design new and inventive video games like the critically acclaimed music game Gitaroo-Man. (He is interviewed in Chapter 5 of this volume.) Comics were for kids, animation was for kids to drag their parents to see, but video games were high technology, an exciting new form of entertainment that Mom and Dad enjoyed too.

And there were no major barriers to the enjoyment of Japanese games by Americans. Early Japanese-developed games did not require language translation beyond a few simple sentences. Sometimes they were written entirely in English to begin with. Video games in general were a contemporary American invention, and there was nothing that clearly labeled newcomer Nintendo as Japanese. Early video games themselves were not acquainting American children with the full scope of Japanese culture in any significant way, but they opened the doors.

The results are evident. Many of today’s schoolchildren perceive Japan not as the anonymous enemy but as a great place to be; they want to live there, speak Japanese, and play the latest games without waiting for them to be released in the US. The younger ones love the anime version of the Pokémon video game, the older ones have moved up to Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, and every day another middle-schooler discovers the post-apocalyptic movie masterpiece Akira. Off to college, they enroll in courses on Japanese film and discover Kurosawa. And they want to understand what they’re watching, so enrollment in Japanese language and culture courses has skyrocketed from pre-Nintendo levels.

What exactly is the cultural status of a Nintendo game, asked Henry Jenkins, based partially on American generic traditions or adopted from specific Western texts, drawing some of its most compelling iconography from Japanese graphic art, licensed by Japanese corporations, manufactured and designed by corporations in both the Americas and Asia, and for sale to both Japanese and American marketplaces?²²

It is difficult to know if this question can ever be satisfactorily answered. In any case, the time is right to look at these games and the people who make them. For indeed, the games of a people reveal a great deal about them.

2

• • • • An Early History of Cinematic Elements in Video Games • • • •

Until the serious study and recording of the history of video games began in the early 1990s, most people were under the impression that the first video game was Pong, the simple monochrome table tennis game that Atari released in late 1972. Pong was the simplest of games even by early-seventies standards. Its only moving graphics were two white vertical paddles that moved up and down on either side of the screen and a square ball that bounced between them, and its lone sound effect was the eponymous pong that sounded when a ball bounced off the paddle.

Pong’s simplicity certainly made it seem, especially in hindsight, like it must have been the first video game. But it came chronologically after Magnavox’s Odyssey system, which was available in May 1972. Its high price ($99.99) kept it from success, along with the fact that it was available only in Magnavox stores, where salespeople hoping to make an extra sale gave the impression that it only worked on Magnavox TV sets. As an arcade game that could be enjoyed by anyone for a quarter, Pong was far better received. And in fact, it was greatly improved over the tennis game that Odyssey played; the graphics were higher-resolution, the sound was satisfying, the score was displayed onscreen, and the game play made more sense. * But it was still not the first video tennis game.

* Incredible as it is to believe, Odyssey’s tennis game required that players keep score on a piece of paper. Another way that the game play was enhanced is that the angle of rebound would change depending on where the ball hit the paddle, and the speed of rebound depended on how long the ball had been in play. With Odyssey, the player could put English on the ball after it had been hit by using a separate dial.

Nor was Pong the first coin-operated arcade game. That was called Computer Space, and Nutting Associates, the company where Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was originally employed, produced it in 1971. Computer Space was a game for two players: each controlled a spaceship on the screen and tried to shoot down the other player. Although it was first sold in 1971, it was in fact almost an exact copy of a game called Spacewar written by members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club in 1961 for the PDP-1 computer.¹

And although Spacewar and, later, Computer Space were popular with technology-savvy college students, the public shied away from the complexities of the game itself. Far from being simple and inviting, Computer Space featured complex physics and a lengthy instruction booklet attached to the machine, which explained how to use the various buttons that filled the front of the futuristic-looking cabinet. *

This is all to say that the main reason Pong is often considered the first video game is because it was the first successful video game. Learning from his mistakes, Bushnell asked one of his first employees at Atari, an engineer named Al Alcorn, to create as simple a game as possible. Two paddles, one ball, one line of impeccably succinct directions printed on the cabinet: Avoid missing ball for high score. The prototype Pong machine was placed in a Sunnyvale, California bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern—which also had a handful of pinball machines, jukeboxes, and a Computer Space²—and was an instant success. By 1974, Atari-made Pong machines and many imitation versions could be found in bars and pool halls across the country, and home versions were popular Christmas gifts starting in 1975.

* Ironically, Computer Space was almost exactly like a two-player version of Asteroids, which would become hugely popular in the US less than a decade later.

Pong crossed the Pacific to Japan as early as 1973. Bushnell attempted to open a Japanese office, but found—as most American companies do—that he could not make substantial