Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  As a video game genre, bishojo games are defined primarily by their sexual or romantic content rather than play style, but none-the-less a number of connected game genres have evolved from them. There are yaoi, or boys’ love, games that involve sexual or romantic encounters between teenage boys that are aimed at a female audience and are distinct from the bara, or men’s love, games that cater for gay men. Dating simulations, meanwhile, challenged players to develop their characters’ attractiveness or social skills in order to woo virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.[3] Sometimes sex was the end goal, but many focus only on romance such as Konami’s massively popular high-school romance series Tokimeki Memorial. Another branch were the life simulations where players mentor a girl or group of girls, such as the 1991 game Princess Maker, where players dress and raise an orphan girl while training her for a future career that could be anything from prostitute to prime minister.

  For the most part the Japanese authorities paid little attention to the explicit sexual content of bishojo games, but on occasion they tested the limits of the nation’s tolerance. The first to do so was 177, a 1986 game where the goal was to rape teenage girls. Iovoked condemnation in the National Diet of Japan, the country’s parliament, prompting its publisher to remove it from sale. Bishojo games, manga and anime came under further scrutiny in 1989 following the arrest of Tsutomu Miyazaki, a serial killer who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered four girls aged four to seven.

  Before his capture, Miyazaki had taunted his victims’ families by sending letters detailing his crimes and, in one case, leaving the bones of one victim on her parents’ doorstep. After his arrest police discovered that Miyazaki had a collection of more than 5,000 videos, including many pornographic anime films. The discovery earned Miyazaki the nickname the Otaku Murderer, in reference to Japan’s otaku youth subculture. The otaku tend to be obsessed with anime, manga and video games, to the extent that some dress up and behave like their favourite characters in public. Miyazaki’s hideous crimes provoked national outrage and stirred up a wider moral panic about the otaku. In response to the outcry bishojo game publishers formed a regulator, the Computer Software Rinri Kiko, to police the content of their games. The Computer Software Rinri Kiko’s first act was to restrict games featuring incest, bestiality and paedophilia.

  Further controversy erupted in 2009 when New York-based women’s rights group Equality Now launched an international campaign against the rapist sim RapeLay. The campaign sparked global condemnation that resulted in an embarrassed Japanese government threatening a legal ban. Game publishers quickly agreed to stop making such games in the future.

  Due to their sexual content, bishojo games rarely got released outside of Japan but within the country it has been a popular genre, especially on home computers, with best sellers achieving sales of half-a-million copies or more. The genre’s popularity in Japan was such that its influence has seeped into several mainstream games that have been released internationally. The most overt example is Tecmo’s fighting game series Dead or Alive. Its obsessive focus on the jiggling breasts of the game’s female fighters has a clear debt to bishojo. The series’ bishojo connections, however, were shown most clearly in its 2003 spin-off Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, where players could dress the game’s female fighters in a range of skimpy bikinis and buy them presents.

  Life simulations and dating games also influenced Yasuhiro Wada, the designer of the gentile farming sim series Harvest Moon, which first appeared in 1996 on the Super NES. “When I first started out in game design there was a life simulation called Princess Maker, where you ‘grow’ a princess. Due to this influence, I created a very minor game for the PC Engine called Metal Angel,” said Wada.[4] But while the more popular Harvest Moon features elements of dating games, gardening was the stronger influence on the series. “I have never had a job connected to farming but my hobby is to grow plants. I find taking care of living things very comforting, it also teaches you to treasure life,” said Wada.

  Bishojo games often take the form of visual novels, another uniquely Japanese form of video game. Visual novels grew out of the text adventure genre, which first reached Japan when the publisher Micro Cabin released Sierra’s murder mystery game Mystery House in 1982. Mystery House inspired a spate of Japanese adventure games that featured manga-style artwork including the 1983 detective game Portopia Serial Murder Case and 1984’s Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, a game about anthropomorphic vegetables, which was designed to encourage children to eat their greens.

  But as Japan moved towards consoles rather than computers in the mid-1980s, Japanese game designers began to simplify their adventure games reducing the commands to short lists of options to choose from. This reductionist approach eventually led to Chunsoft’s 1992 game Otogirisou, an influential horror game regarded as the original visual novel. Otogirisou reduced the player’s actions to a small number of choices that would influence how the story would progress. Although most visual novels only get released in Japan, one notable crossover hit was the 2001 courtroom drama Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

  While Japanese home computer game makers set about devising new video game genres, Nintendo was gearing up for the launch of its new console. Yamauchi had ordered its designer Masayuki Uemura to create a console that was not only a year ahead of the competition in technology but also a third of the price of the Epoch Cassette Vision. Uemura’s original design for what he called the Family Computer, or Famicom for short, came with a modem, a keyboard and a disk drive, but in order to meet Yamauchi’s price point demands he was forced to throw away most of the features. The end result was a simple cartridge-based console with a controller that took its cues from the cross-shaped directional pad used in the 1982 Game & Watch incarnation of Donkey Kong.

  Once Uemura completed the console, Yamauchi picked three of Miyamoto’s games – Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye – as the console’s launch titles before heading out to proselytise the benefits of the Famicom to Japan’s retailers. The goal, he explained, was not to make money from selling the Famicom itself but from selling games over and over again to those who bought it. “It is really just a tool to sell software,” he told retailers, before highlighting the attractive profit margins to made from selling Famicom game cartridges.

  Yamauchi’s instinct that the Famicom could replicate Atari’s North American success in Japan was quickly proved right. Within two months of the Famicom’s July 1983 launch around 500,000 had been sold. By the end of the year sales had topped the million mark. The Bandai Intellivision and Epoch’s counter-console the Super Cassette Vision faded from view fast.[5]

  But success brought its own headaches. The Famicom’s success had created a customer base of hundreds of thousands of people all desperate for the chance to buy more video games for their exciting new console. The problem was Nintendo just couldn’t produce games fast enough. Yamauchi’s solution revolutionised the video game business. Instead of trying to expand rapidly to meet consumer demand, he opened up the Famicom to other game publishers. In return for allowing them to make games for the lucrative, game-starved captive audience it had built up, Nintendo wanted cash upfront to manufacture the cartridges, a cut of the profits from sales and the right to veto the release any game.[6]

  Many baulked at Nintendo’s demands, but the lure of fast-growing Famicom audience was just too enticing. Hudson Soft, the makers of Bomber Man and Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, were among the first to sign up.[7] Used to selling 10,000 copies of its games on home computers, Hudson Soft watched their debut Famicom release – Roadrunner, a Japanese version of the US platform game Lode Runner – make its way into a million Japanese homes. With those kind of sales it didn’t take long for Japan’s other leading game publishers to agree to Nintendo’s conditions. By 1985 Nintendo had given 17 companies licences to make games for the Famicom.

  One of these companies was Bullet-Proof Software, a game publisher founded by an American called Henk Rogers, w
ho moved to Japan in the mid-1970s to work in the gem business with his father. In early 1983 as the sales of home computers in Japan began to rise, Rogers decided to enter the video game business to cater for the growing number of computer users. “I went to Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronic district, to find out who was going to win that battle in Japan and it was obvious it was NEC’s PC-8001,” he said. In 1983 NEC dominated the Japanese home computer scene, holding an estimated 45 per cent share of the market and there was already a wealth of software available. “There were a lot of games,” he said. “There were platform, shoot ’em up games, there were adventures games, puzzle games. Pretty much everything you could find – even the strategy war games. Every genre that you could think of was there, except role-playing games. There were no role-playing games in Japan.”

  For Rogers, an avid Dungeons & Dragons fan who spent many hours as a University of Hawaii student playing the fantasy game, this was a glaring omission. Role-playing games were huge in the US. Ultima and Wizardry were best selling video games and Dungeons & Dragons was a cultural phenomenon. Yet Japan knew nothing of role-playing as the tabletop games had failed to connect with the Japanese. Rogers figured he would fill the gap: “It was my naivety that made me think that I could actually sell a role-playing game in Japan when in fact I had no idea what I was doing.”

  Drawing heavily on Ultima and Wizardry, Rogers created The Black Onyx – a straightforward role-playing game about dungeon exploration and monster killing. Rogers launched it in Christmas 1983 and watched it sink. His distributor broke its promise to order 3,000 copies and instead bought just 600. Japan’s game-playing public, meanwhile, simply ignored it. “I had blown what little money I had on a couple of pages of advertising that was totally ineffective because people didn’t understand what the hell it was about,” he said. “So, in January 1984, I had burnt through my $50,000 start-up fund. I thought I was dead in the water.” Desperate, Rogers hired an interpreter and started visiting every Japanese video game magazine to explain the concept of role-playing games and how to play The Black Onyx. It saved his company. “I’d create characters for them and say this is what you do and so on and so forth,” he said. “A couple of months later all the magazine reviews came out and they were raving about it. They came out in March. In April we had orders for 10,000 copies, it was like 10,000 copies a month for the rest of the year.”

  The Black Onyx’s success sparked a surge in interest in this new form of game and encouraged many Japanese players to try out Ultima and Wizardry, which were still only available in English at the time. Having familiarised themselves with the genre, Japanese game makers reacted to The Black Onyx in much the same way as they reacted to Mystery House: they absorbed the ideas and remade them in their own way. “From time to time Japan picks up on things that are not part of its culture, like rap, and they adopt it and they love it and it becomes part of their culture,” said Rogers. “The role-playing game was one of those things.”

  The question of Japanese uniqueness was particularly high on the Japanese political agenda around the time The Black Onyx was released. The nation’s bestseller lists regularly featured Nihonjinron (‘theories of Japaneseness’) books that advocated a belief in Japan’s cultural uniqueness and, in some cases, superiority. These books often promoted the idea that one of Japan’s unique traits was its ability to absorb the cultures of other countries and make them part of Japanese culture. Nihonjinron writers could well have cited the way Japanese game designers’ absorbed and reconfigured the role-playing game as evidence of their theories.

  Enix game designer Yuji Horii, who created the Portopia Serial Murder Case adventure game, led Japan’s reinvention of the role-playing game with his 1986 game Dragon Quest. Unlike the designers of the first wave of Japanese role-playing games, which adhered rigidly to the Wizardry template, Horii wanted to make something different. Something Japanese. He rejected Wizardry’s attempts at realistic visuals and hired Akira Toriyama, an artist who had worked on the popular Dragon Ball anime series, to give his game colourful visuals that were more in keeping with the manga and kawaii artwork that was popular in Japan. He recruited TV show theme tune composer Koichi Sugiyama to give the game’s music a more Japanese feel. Rather than using the music to reinforce on-screen action as is common in American and European film, TV and games, Sugiyama created a continuous score that changed to reflect the overarching atmosphere of the game.

  For the in-game text, Horii drew on the rhythms of haiku, the Japanese poetry that focuses on economy with words, to give the text a jaunty sound when read aloud. Finally Horii tailored his game to the Famicom, making it easier to play by reducing the reliance on statistics and complex controls of American role-playing games. The biggest problem with US role-playing titles, he opined, was that they were “very unkind toward the player”. The final result bore only a passing resemblance to the US games that inspired it. The game dripped with Japanese influence and focused on the character development and resource management aspects of role-playing. Horii had created the first truly Japanese role-playing game.

  Dragon Quest marked a major fork in the evolution of role-playing games, creating a divide between Japanese and North American visions of the genre.[8] If anything that divide has only widened over time as Japanese developers increased their emphasis on story and team management while Americans and Europeans sought to free players from the constraints of pre-defined narratives.

  Dragon Quest became a sensation in Japan; a video game with a cultural impact comparable to a major Hollywood blockbuster with more than two million copies of Horii’s fantasy epic flew off the shelves. Famicom sales soared as people bought Nintendo’s console just to play Horii’s adventure, which formed the blueprint for the rush of Japanese role-playing games that followed soon after.

  Among the first to explore similar territory to Dragon Quest was Square’s Hironobu Sakaguchi. Like Horii, Sakaguchi was introduced to role-playing via US games. “My first experience of role-playing games came when I played the English version of Wizardry and Ultima on the Apple II,” he said. “I was not attracted by the story of the early Wizardry, but I liked the system and worldview.” His response to Dragon Quest was Final Fantasy, a darker game with an undercurrent of angst as opposed to the more light-hearted adventuring of Horii’s game. “I brought the life of people and the colliding of people’s passion into the games,” said Sakaguchi. “I wanted people to feel these passions more actively by playing roles in the games than by audio-visual works and novels, in which you feel them passively.” Released in 1987, Final Fantasy also became a commercial and critical success.

  Soon every Japanese publisher was producing a role-playing game. Nintendo released Mother, a role-playing game set in suburban America that replaced swords with baseball bats and healing potions with hamburgers. Sega came up with Phantasy Star, which took place in a world that blurred the lines between science fiction and fantasy, for its Master System console.

  But not everyone in the Japanese game business was impressed by the creations of Horii and Sakaguchi. Nintendo, despite its involvement with Mother, was particularly lukewarm to the genre. Yamauchi described role-playing games as being for “depressed gamers” who sit in dark rooms, while Miyamoto professed to a “fundamental dislike” of their emphasis of pre-defined stories and level-based advancement. Not that this stopped Miyamoto from raiding the genre for inspiration. His 1986 game The Legend of Zelda adapted many of the conventions of role-playing into an action game format. The concept of character development, for example, was reinvented as extra abilities or weapons that players obtained as they progressed through the game.

  The Legend of Zelda’s biggest influence, however, was Miyamoto’s own childhood. As a child he lived in Sonobe, a village 39 miles outside of Kyoto, and would spend his spare time exploring the local countryside. With The Legend of Zelda he sought to recapture the excitement and awe he felt as a child while wandering the countryside and never knowing what he would disco
ver. He wanted players to experience the freedom of exploration and to encounter “amazing things”. The result was a world on a microchip where players could take different routes to complete their quest, discover hidden passageways behind waterfalls and encounter strange creatures. Miyamoto’s game was also a coming-of-age story, a tale of how an ordinary boy overcomes his fears to defeat an evil army. It was a motif that would become standard in many Japanese role-playing games.

  Japanese role-playing games would become the country’s most popular type of video game, a popularity exemplified by the pandemonium that greeted the launch of Dragon Quest III on the 10th February 1988. Nearly a million copies were sold on launch day as fans of Horii’s series clamoured to lay their hands on a copy of the latest instalment. In an outrageous affront to Japan’s disciplinarian school system, many children skipped school to buy their copy. Police took 392 truanting children and teenagers into custody, in what a National Police Agency spokesman described as “a national disgrace”. Elsewhere there were reports of children stealing copies from their classmates and instances of attempted shoplifting. The disorder prompted Enix to promise the Japanese government that it would only release Dragon Quest games on Sundays or bank holidays in future.

  The huge success of Dragon Quest III confirmed Nintendo’s dominance of the Japanese video game business.he home computers that once seemed to be creeping ahead were now regulated to the sidelines, destined to be dominated by the bishojo titles that Nintendo would not allow to be released on its console. The Japanese public had also ignored the Master System despite Sega’s hopes that its popular coin-op games, such as the ninja-themed Shinobi, might help it challenge Nintendo.