Download or read book History of the Japanese Video Game Industry written by Yusuke Koyama and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first one to describe the entire history of the video game industry in Japan. The industry consists of multiple markets—for PCs, home consoles, arcades, cellular phones and smart phones—and it is very difficult to see the complete picture. The book deals comprehensively with the history of the Japanese game industry from the beginning of the non-computer age to the present. The video game industry in Japan was established in the arcade game market when Space Invaders was released by Taito in 1978. Game markets for both PCs and home consoles followed in the early 1980s. The platform that occupies a central market position started with the arcade and shifted, in order, to the home console, handheld consoles, and smart phones. In the video game industry in the twentieth century each platform had a clear identity, and the relationships among platforms were "interactions". In the twenty-first century, with the improvement of computer performance, the platform identity has disappeared, thus the relationship among platforms is highly competitive. Since the "crash of 1983" in the United States, the Japanese game industry has one of the largest market shares in the world and has developed without being influenced by other countries. It reached its peak in the late 1990s, and then its relative position declined due to the growth of foreign markets and the failure of emerging markets such as online PC games. Even today, Japan's gaming industry holds a dominant position in the world, but it is not the superpower it once was. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, game research has become active worldwide. Among game researchers, there is a large demand for research on games in Japan, but there is still little dissemination of research in English. The original version of this book published in Japan is highly regarded and received an award for excellence from the Society of Socio-Informatics in 2017.

Download or read book The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers written by John Szczepaniak and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailed contents listing here: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/books/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-volume-2/ Nearly 400 pages and over 30 interviews, with exclusive content on the history of Japanese games. The origins of Hudson, Masaya's epic robot sagas, Nintendo's funding of a PlayStation RTS, detailed history of Westone Entertainment, and a diverse range of unreleased games. Includes exclusive office layout maps, design documents, and archive photos. In a world first - something no other journalist has dared examine - there's candid discussion on the involvement of Japan's yakuza in the industry. Forewords by Retro Gamer founding editor Martyn Carroll and game history professor Martin Picard.

Download or read book Power Up written by Chris Kohler and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enjoyable and informative examination of how Japanese video game developers raised the medium to an art form. Includes interviews, anecdotes, and accounts of industry giants behind Donkey Kong, Mario, Pokémon, and other games.

Download or read book Japanese Culture Through Videogames written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a wide range of Japanese videogames, including arcade fighting games, PC-based strategy games and console JRPGs, this book assesses their cultural significance and shows how gameplay and context can be analyzed together to understand videogames as a dynamic mode of artistic expression. Well-known titles such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter and Katamari Damacy are evaluated in detail, showing how ideology and critique are conveyed through game narrative and character design as well as user interface, cabinet art, and peripherals. This book also considers how ‘Japan’ has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers, and how Japanese designers have used the medium to express ideas about home and nation, nuclear energy, war and historical memory, social breakdown and bioethics. Placing each title in its historical context, Hutchinson ultimately shows that videogames are a relatively recent but significant site where cultural identity is played out in modern Japan. Comparing Japanese videogames with their American counterparts, as well as other media forms, such as film, manga and anime, Japanese Culture Through Videogames will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well as Game Studies, Media Studies and Japanese Studies more generally.

Download or read book Atari to Zelda written by Mia Consalvo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cross-cultural interactions of Japanese videogames and the West—from DIY localization by fans to corporate strategies of “Japaneseness.” In the early days of arcades and Nintendo, many players didn’t recognize Japanese games as coming from Japan; they were simply new and interesting games to play. But since then, fans, media, and the games industry have thought further about the “Japaneseness” of particular games. Game developers try to decide whether a game's Japaneseness is a selling point or stumbling block; critics try to determine what elements in a game express its Japaneseness—cultural motifs or technical markers. Games were “localized,” subjected to sociocultural and technical tinkering. In this book, Mia Consalvo looks at what happens when Japanese games travel outside Japan, and how they are played, thought about, and transformed by individuals, companies, and groups in the West. Consalvo begins with players, first exploring North American players’ interest in Japanese games (and Japanese culture in general) and then investigating players’ DIY localization of games, in the form of ROM hacking and fan translating. She analyzes several Japanese games released in North America and looks in detail at the Japanese game company Square Enix. She examines indie and corporate localization work, and the rise of the professional culture broker. Finally, she compares different approaches to Japaneseness in games sold in the West and considers how Japanese games have influenced Western games developers. Her account reveals surprising cross-cultural interactions between Japanese games and Western game developers and players, between Japaneseness and the market.

Download or read book Video Games Around the World written by Mark J. P. Wolf and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-nine essays explore the vast diversity of video game history and culture across all the world's continents. Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. Most of the essays are written by natives of the countries they discuss, many of them game designers and founders of game companies, offering distinctively firsthand perspectives. Some of these national histories appear for the first time in English, and some for the first time in any language. Readers will learn, for example, about the rapid growth of mobile games in Africa; how a meat-packing company held the rights to import the Atari VCS 2600 into Mexico; and how the Indonesian MMORPG Nusantara Online reflects that country's cultural history and folklore. Every country or region's unique conditions provide the context that shapes its national industry; for example, the long history of computer science in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the problems of piracy in China, the PC Bangs of South Korea, or the Dutch industry's emphasis on serious games. As these essays demonstrate, local innovation and diversification thrive alongside productions and corporations with global aspirations. Africa • Arab World • Argentina • Australia • Austria • Brazil • Canada • China • Colombia • Czech Republic • Finland • France • Germany • Hong Kong • Hungary • India • Indonesia • Iran • Ireland • Italy • Japan • Mexico • The Netherlands • New Zealand • Peru • Poland • Portugal • Russia • Scandinavia • Singapore • South Korea • Spain • Switzerland • Thailand • Turkey • United Kingdom • United States of America • Uruguay • Venezuela

Download or read book Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents Japanese Video Game Obscurities written by Kurt Kalata and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan has produced thousands of intriguing video games. But not all of them were released outside of the country, especially not in the 1980s and 90s. While a few of these titles have since been documented by the English-speaking video game community, a huge proportion of this output is unknown beyond Japan (and even, in some cases, within it). Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities seeks to catalogue many of these titles – games that are weird, compelling, cool or historically important. The selections represent a large number of genres – platformers, shoot-em-ups, role-playing games, adventure games – across nearly four decades of gaming on arcade, computer and console platforms. Featuring the work of giants like Nintendo, Sega, Namco and Konami alongside that of long-forgotten developers and publishers, even those well versed in Japanese gaming culture are bound to learn something new.

Download or read book Transnational Contexts of Development History Sociality and Society of Play written by S. Austin Lee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the historical background of game development, offline and online gamer interactions, and presents a method to study the health impacts of digital games in East Asia. Focusing on examinations of how video games shape external interactions with the world as well as internal spaces, Lee and Pulos' volume brings together a range of approaches and regions to understand the impact of video games in East Asia and beyond. Contributions range from assessments of Nintendo's lasting technological impact in Japan and globally to analyses of mobile social gaming among teenage girls in Korea, with qualitative and quantitative methodologies set in contact with one another to offer a full spectrum of perspectives on video gaming and its profound cultural impact.

Download or read book Pure Invention written by Matt Alt and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured—and transformed—the world’s imagination. “A masterful book driven by deep research, new insights, and powerful storytelling.”—W. David Marx, author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man and Pokémon, online imageboards and emojis. But as Japan media veteran Matt Alt proves in this brilliant investigation, these novelties did more than entertain. They paved the way for our perplexing modern lives. In the 1970s and ’80s, Japan seemed to exist in some near future, gliding on the superior technology of Sony and Toyota. Then a catastrophic 1990 stock-market crash ushered in the “lost decades” of deep recession and social dysfunction. The end of the boom should have plunged Japan into irrelevance, but that’s precisely when its cultural clout soared—when, once again, Japan got to the future a little ahead of the rest of us. Hello Kitty, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and multimedia empires like Dragon Ball Z were more than marketing hits. Artfully packaged, dangerously cute, and dizzyingly fun, these products gave us new tools for coping with trying times. They also transformed us as we consumed them—connecting as well as isolating us in new ways, opening vistas of imagination and pathways to revolution. Through the stories of an indelible group of artists, geniuses, and oddballs, Pure Invention reveals how Japan’s pop-media complex remade global culture.

Download or read book Pac Man Birth of an Icon written by Arjan Terpstra and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a gorgeous, hardcover retrospective, the first-ever history of PAC-MAN. Full of historical imagery, concept designs, marketing photos and more, the book examines the game’s design philosophy and origins through the artists, designers, developers, and other creative teams who brought PAC-MAN to life. This new non-fiction book will journey from creator Toru Iwatani's "pizza slice" inspiration to the game’s incredible success in arcades and beyond. The book also dives into PAC-MAN’s unprecedented impact on pop culture, with more than 40 new interviews from key players around the world.

Download or read book The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures written by Kurt Kalata and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews of over 300 graphic adventure games, focusing on games from prominent publishers such as LucasArts, Sierra On-Line, and Legend Entertainment but covering games from independent developers as well. Reviews primarily cover games published 1984-2000. Interviews with game creators/developers Al Lowe, Corey Cole, Bob Bates, and Josh Mandel are included.

Download or read book Japanese Role Playing Games written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese Role-playing Games: Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG examines the origins, boundaries, and transnational effects of the genre, addressing significant formal elements as well as narrative themes, character construction, and player involvement. Contributors from Japan, Europe, North America, and Australia employ a variety of theoretical approaches to analyze popular game series and individual titles, introducing an English-speaking audience to Japanese video game scholarship while also extending postcolonial and philosophical readings to the Japanese game text. In a three-pronged approach, the collection uses these analyses to look at genre, representation, and liminality, engaging with a multitude of concepts including stereotypes, intersectionality, and the political and social effects of JRPGs on players and industry conventions. Broadly, this collection considers JRPGs as networked systems, including evolved iterations of MMORPGs and card collecting “social games” for mobile devices. Scholars of media studies, game studies, Asian studies, and Japanese culture will find this book particularly useful.

Download or read book Britsoft written by Anthony Caulfield and published by . This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Arcade Mania written by ブライアンアッシュクラフト and published by Kodansha. This book was released on 2008-09-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arcade Mania introduces overseas readers to the fascinating world of the Japanese gemu senta (game center). Organized as a guided tour of a typical game center, the book is divided into nine chapters, each of which deals with a different kind of game. The tour begins with UFO catchers and print club machines at the entrance and continuing through rhythm games, fighting games, shooting games, retro games, gambling games, card-based games, and only-in-Japan games. Covering classics from Space Invaders to Street Fighter, games that are familiar to Americans in their home console versions (Rock Band, Guitar Hero and Dance, Dance Revolution), as well as the unique, quirky games found only in Japan, Arcade Mania is crammed full of interviews with game makers and star players, and packed with facts about each game, all lavishly illustrated with photographs and game graphics.

Download or read book The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers written by Szczepaniak and published by Smg Szczepaniak. This book was released on 2014 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this book are identical to the version with blue cover. The only difference is the cover and ISBN number. This book reveals more secrets about the untold history of Japanese game developers than ever before, with 36 interviewees and exclusive archive photos. Konami's secret games console, the origin of Game Arts and Quintet, unusual events at Telenet, stories on Falcom, politics behind Enix's game programming contests, a tour of the Love-de-Lic and WARP offices (with layout sketches). Every interviewee is asked about unreleased titles. Foreword by GAMESIDE magazine's editor-in-chief, Yusaku Yamamoto. Hitoshi YONEDA: Japanese cover artist, Falcom, Sega, Phantasy Star II cover Tatsuo NOMURA: Google engineer, 8-bit Maps, working with Square-Enix, Dragon Quest Katsutoshi EGUCHI: Life of Kenji Eno, Real Sound for Saturn, Bitmap Brothers, Gods and Xenon 2, CESA and ratings, Dreamcast creation, Michael Nyman, WARP Toru HIDAKA: Enix programmer, lecturer, Kouichi Nakamura, PC-88 (code, graphics, music), converting Ultima, a changing industry Roy OZAKI & Kouichi YOTSUI: Mitchell Corp, Capcom (rare photos), Pang and Bubble Buster, Strider, Cannon Dancer, Gamshara, Puzz Loop and Zuma, Polarium, Suzuki Bakuhatsu, Namco's System 10 board, Nintendo, Data East, gangsters Masaaki KUKINO: Konami and SNK (office map), unreleased games, Haunted Castle (aka: Castlevania), Asterix, Crime Fighters, Silent Scope, King of Fighters Suikoden Chapter: Yoshitaka Murayama, Harry Inaba, Jeremy Blaustein, Casey Loe, Konami's unreleased games console/handheld, difficulties of localisation Ryukushi07: Visual novels, eroge, doujin, Comiket, Umineko, Higurashi When They Cry, Rose Gun Days, Key, Jun Maeda Kotaro UCHIKOSHI: Visual novels, Pepsiman, Memories Off, Never 7, Ever 17, Remember 11, EVE, pressures of making erotic games, 999, Virtue's Last Reward, Danganronpa ZUN: Touhou shooters, PC-98 versus Windows, office sketches, Taito, Bujingai, PS2 bench-marking, Comiket, doujin, indie, beer Yoshiro KIMURA: Square Soft, Romancing SaGa, Rule of Rose, Chulip, Little King's Story, Love-de-Lic (office sketches), Moon, Lack of Love, Kenichi Nishi, Grasshopper, rare art Kouji YOKOTA: Telenet, Falcom, Game Arts, Quintet (rare photos), Megami Tensei on FC and MSX, ActRaiser, Illusion of Gaia, Gaiares, Lunar: EB, Valis, history of Ys III, Masaki Hashimoto & Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, Granstream Saga Jun Nagashima: Falcom (office sketch), creation of Popful Mail, Ys V on SFC, Studio Alex Yuzo KOSHIRO: Falcom, Sega, Quintet, Ancient, sister joining industry, doujin, The Scheme, music column, studio tour, Joe Hisaishi, origin of Sonic on 8-bit systems, Bare Knuckle 4 Masamoto MORITA: Sega (layout), arcade rivalry with consoles, end of Sega hardware, Die Hard Arcade Akira TAKIGUCHI: ASCII, AX series, Game Arts, Taito deals, MSX prototype, Apple II in Japan, PC-6001, CBM PET Masakuni MITSUHASHI: ASCII, AX series, Game Arts, Silpheed on PC-88 and MCD, cut content, Lunar: EB debugging Kohei IKEDA: Game Arts co-founder (office maps), Thexder, new model of PC-88, shift to consoles Hiroshi SUZUKI: First stealth game, deal with Taito, Lupin III, computers Tomonori SUGIYAMA: Vanguard, Enix, unreleased Saturn hardware, Game Arts, Falcom, Lunar: SSS and EB for MCD and Saturn, Grandia Yutaka ISOKAWA: Namco's desire to launch a console, Enix, Vanguard, Catrap, NeGcon Yasuhito SAITO: dB-SOFT, Data West (maps), programming 177, Macadam Soft, Bounty Arms (PS1), Layla (FC), Rayxanber, Cross Blaim Takaki KOBAYASHI & Keite ABE: dB-SOFT, Agenda, SmileBoom, Riot City, Prince of Persia, SNK Keiji INAFUNE: Mega Man, Mighty No.9, Capcom, Comcept, Akira Kitamura Stephen & William ROZNER: Mega Man 1 & 3 for DOS, Capcom USA, Street Fighter on C64, Mega Man X and Street Fighter II on PC Makoto GOTO: Shubibinman 2, Don Quixote (MEGA LD)

Download or read book Cheating written by Mia Consalvo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-08-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry. The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games, and what happens when they can't always play the way they'd like. She explores a broad range of player behavior, including cheating (alone and in groups), examines the varying ways that players and industry define cheating, describes how the game industry itself has helped systematize cheating, and studies online cheating in context in an online ethnography of Final Fantasy XI. She develops the concept of "gaming capital" as a key way to understand individuals' interaction with games, information about games, the game industry, and other players. Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.

Download or read book Global Games written by Aphra Kerr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.