Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 461: LIVE ~ The Games That Shaped Japan / Documenting Video Game History

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Live from MGC! Jeremy Parish, Nadia Oxford, Kevin Bunch, and Brian Clark explore the 8-bit games that shaped Japanese design tastes. Plus: Kelsey Lewin and Norman Caruso share their thoughts on documenting the history of games. Recorded by Jason Gares. Art by John Pading. Edits by Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts  

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. Hi, this week at Retronauts, we can actually say Big in Japan and mean it. Well, everyone, thank you for attending this panel. We're taking you back in time many, many years to talk about the 1980s and games that helped influence the design and shape of Japanese games for many years to come. So we're talking about some foundational works here on this panel. And joining me, Retronoff's co-host, Jeremy Parrish, we have another Retronoff's co-host. Hello, I'm Nadia Opscher. I also am the co-host of the Axelbloodd.R.G. Podcast.

Nice to see you all. And to my right. I'm Brian Clark from One Million Power. And even further to my right. And I'm hit a bunch from Atari Arna, the YouTube series. So speaking of YouTube, this presentation was really kind of inspired by the YouTube videos that I've been producing, Game Boy Works, NES works, et cetera, because it's become kind of a running joke that I keep going back to these certain games and talking about how important they were, foundational they were, to the point that I've had to start putting a lost time, you know, it's been zero days since we had a work-related accident connected to Zevius or Hayakio Alien. and it kind of started out as a little bit of a running joke just like any time something came up that was sort of a maze chase game

I would say oh yeah it's kind of a drawing from Hayanko Illian but as I covered more and more of these games I've come to realize that yeah like there are some kind of foundational works that when you look back at Japanese game design of the 80s and when you read interviews with developers from the 80s who are active in that period they just had a massive influence.

It's like everyone played these games or was aware of these games and they helped to shape the games that they created in turn. And so you kind of look at these particular games we're going to talk about today and from those ideas basically, you know,

like this very different form of gaming than we had here in the U.S. or they had over in Europe kind of took shape. And these are kind of where a lot of those ideas came from. But to begin we're actually going to talk about

an American game that was produced in the, or created in the late 70s, at Atari called Breakout. And this game, you know, everyone's played breakout, but it's really surprising how much influence it had on Japanese

game design, including, you know, basically serving as the inspiration for the shoot-em-up genre, which might seem a little counterintuitive. But I don't know, Kevin, this seems to be kind of a pet topic of yours. Do you want to walk us through Breakout? What is about and how it had an impact on Japanese game design?

Yeah, so Breakout, produced by Atari in 176, originally conceived by Atari Interle leading, the original prototype by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozni. That was not the file design, but by Gary Waters. It was distributed in Japan by Masaya Nakamura of Nao They were Atari's distributor at the time. And the game was such a hit that he was not able to get enough stock shipped over from Atari in the U.S. to meet demand. So a bunch of other companies started producing their own plums of breakout.

Eventually he broke his contract with Atari, started producing his own copies just to make up the gap. But it was a huge hit down over there and a huge success. It's certainly the first game to have a... one of the first games, to have a wave format. So you finish off the first wall and then the second one will spawn. It only goes two walls. I clearly, it's not thinking anyone was going to go any further than that. But that was sort of a major factor going forward to sort of the most obvious

things for game inspired by it, and that's Space Invaders. Because Tomuu, Nishikato, Taito, saw break out in a sense. saw a break out in an arcade, and he was just shocked that people were so into this game that looks, well, so old-fashioned, looks like Paul had a long side of game, but people were really into it, and he sort of got his wheels turning, and he thought, well, okay, what did we change the bell into something that was firing bullets? Well, at that point, the wall was just a wall, so we've got to move. So we broke that out with specific targets, and then he had his targets.

start firing back down, and eventually they'll be the space aliens, and then sort of add some pressure, started having them move back and forth and move down the screen. And that sort of built upon the way before I even further, by having different rounds into infinity, more or less. But that's sort of the main step of gradoms in who's Japan.

We also got games like Ardenoid or the bottom. the trilogy that Danco did. I think it's sort of noting, too, that... Wasn't there one on the Game Boy, like Alleyway or something like that? Alleyway was on the Game Boy? I think it's very interesting that because so many companies were getting out of a radio boom, like that's where I said, Gays' first games were their Raygo clones.

And then when the Space Invaders boom busted, a bunch of companies started producing their own games off of, you know, space of the bigger's hardware because they have a bunch of boards sitting around. So, breakout sort of stems out in that way, too. Yeah, it's worth, it's worth mentioning that, you know, breakout is kind of an evolution

of Pong, where you take Pong and turn it sideways and then replace Player 2 with just a wall of bricks you have to hit. And, you know, everyone who was making video games in the mid-1970s made dedicated Pong consoles. That was pretty much, that was

the business for quite a while, for a couple of years. And you didn't really see as many breakout dedicated machines because by the point that breakout became sort of big, the idea of cartridges and interchangeable games and systems became a bigger deal. So you would see some occasionally, but it sort of became its own, really kind of its own genre in Japan called Block Kazushi, is that right?

That's right. And you still see a lot of these games being made, being developed. And, you know, Kevin mentioned Arkanoid, which, You know, that's always been a big hit for Taito, the creators of Space Invaders, to the point that the recent Igret 2 mini-consul or mini arcade machine that they just produced, you can buy an optional add-on that's really sort of built around Arkanoid. It's a spinner, and it's a great little spinner. Like, it has really good feel to it. And you can play, like, a pretty good version of Arkanoid. The arcade... Three different versions. Okay, three different versions. And, you know, they released a special Archenoid controller for the NES

in the Famicom. And then also there was a sequel that only came out in Japan for Famicom that had its, like, an upgraded controller. And then there was the DS paddle. That you could plug into... Just playing this, I played this on the Atari 2600 and just thinking about how I went through all that with the janky control, like a joystick,

and realizing, hey, I actually did pretty good for myself. I mean, you can always play this kind of game with... with a joystick, but, you know, I think Taito kind of seized on it with Arkanoid. And like I said, there was even a DS version that you could plug in a little paddle dial into the slot two of the original DS and the DS light and play a great version of not only Arkanoid, but also Space Invaders, which is, you know, Space Invaders Extreme, which is all part of the same family. It all kind of belongs together.

Anyway, so I mentioned that Pong, turn it sideways, give you, you know, replace player two, you come up with breakout. You turn, as Kevin said, you turn the wall into aliens that can shoot back, and you have space invaders. Now, if you take that another step, and you allow the wall not to just move, but to actually, break formation and fly at you and dive bomb you, you get Galaxia and then Gallagia. And then from one step beyond that, you get the next game we're going to talk about, which is Zevi. So Zevius, if you prefer, it's a whole religious thing. I'm not going to get into it. I just say Zevius, it's fine. But this is one of the biggest, most influential, most significant games ever produced by a Japanese game manufacturer who's created by Namco,

who we've already mentioned. And it's just been something that I've really, like, I've always appreciated the fact that, hey, Zevius was a good game, and it was very, you know, very popular. But over the past few years, I've really come to appreciate the fact that this game was huge. Like when you read interviews with developers from the 80s, so many times they mentioned Zevius,

either as just a thing that got them addicted to video games and started them playing, or as a thing that they saw and said, we have to make a game that's better than this. and it was this huge inspiration just in terms of getting people to play games and to, you know, kind of push their design ideas further and inspire them to move beyond what already existed.

Zevius, I don't know, like I feel like it was not really that big a deal over here. I don't remember anybody ever mentioning it. In fact, finding out how much of a big deal it was, that was mostly through like your videos and realizing how different, and this is something that went into, I'm sure, how different the landscape was for the nostalgic landscape for Japan versus America is supposed to different. I think that's fascinating, really.

Even now when you read, like Yuzo Koshiro, I think, has done some interviews recently with some of like the Kukyoku Tiger collections and things like that. And it comes up in the most unexpected place. It's like any time you ask someone from that era about what they used to play in the arcade, it's always Zevius, like almost 100% of the time. Yeah, so Zevius, if you've never played it, it's, you know, a shooter, kind of like Gallagher, or, you know, it takes away the formation of enemies at the top of the screen and just has enemies sort of move in waves toward you.

And they all have their formations. Most of them have a tendency when they, they'll take shots at you as they come in or they'll just, you know, try to swoop across the screen and distract you. But when they actually cross your line of sight, they'll peel away. So there has to be this element of strategy. They're not really going after you to crash into you like in a lot of shooters. They're kind of being evasin. And it sort of lures you away from playing safe because you have to kind of line up your shots and move aggressively to take out the enemies and get points.

But at the same time, there's things flying at you. There's bullets coming from not only aerial enemies, but also ground-based enemies. And that was one of the big innovations of Zevius was to create two layers of action. Even though it's a top-down shooter, you have the aerial threats, which are very mobile and tend to be evasive. and then you have the ground-based threats which move independently of you but you have two different weapons one that shoots air to air and one that shoots air to ground

and has a targeting reticle that is a fixed distance from your ship so that introduces another layer of strategy because if you want to take out ground emplacements which is where you get a lot of point bonuses and also some of those things are shooting at you you have to time your attacks your little bomb to

correspond to where your target's going to be and you have to think ahead So it's a game that really operates in four dimensions by adding that three-dimensionality because you have to really, more so than even in space invaders or something, you have to think about where is the enemy going to be and you really have to lead them

and kind of think ahead to how they're going to act and then you get to the final boss basically the Andor Genesis mothership at the end of the stage which looks like a big flying aerial fortress but actually you can only destroy it by dropping a bomb into it, which is a little

counterintuitive. And this is kind of the origin of, you know, the Don Maku bullet hell genre. Because when you reach the end or genesis, all of a sudden, enemies just start spawning and flying at you. These don't peel away from you. They come at you and they're shooting, you know, projectiles at you.

So it, you know, has this, like, actual boss attack phase that's very, very challenging. And it all lasts like three or four seconds. But, you know, in that short amount of time, you have to really think ahead and react and, you know, just be on your toes. One interesting thing to mention about it that was designed by a guy named Masanovoendo,

who was working for Namco at the time, but he was the closest thing he really had to kind of like a rock star, like well-known game designer. He did Zevius. He did Tower of Duraga, which I think might be coming up later. I think those were his big hits, but he also did a famicom, one of the first famicom games for Gundam, Zeta Gundam Hops Scramble, which is weirdly like, that was him. That was him. It was weirdly, like, say whatever you want about it, but it was, like,

an early, like, first person shooting kind of game. It has problems apart from that. But, yeah, he was quite well known, and he went on to become, like, an early mover and shaker in, like, the mobile game world. And I think he is the director of, like, the Digital Games and Research Association of Japan right now. My first shoot-em-up original was, I think, 1942 for the N-E-S. I probably should play Zubis.

I played a lot of Zemias on the Semicis. I'm sitting down, because that's what I know. That was a good port. Yeah, it was a good part. One thing that is very interesting and sort of ties into, I guess, those game designs that Zemias have hidden items that if you bomb non-district parts of the street, you'll get like a point bonus and that's sort of instrumental

to doing well on the games. A lot of my man is so big on arcades too like this kind of like secrets, discovering secrets and sharing it with other people sort of thing. Yeah, and I don't think too many games did that before, Zubius.

Yeah, and there are a few other things that make Zubias kind of memorable. You know, for one thing you have a background to it. You're not just flying through the blackness of space. You've got this scenery beneath you and it kind of, it doesn't really tell a story but it's evocative. Like you're going over

what kind of look like mountainous paths and then you go over bases and then you cross over the NASCA lines from Peru which is just kind of random but it really sticks with you and that's become a thing

that you see in a lot of video games just like the NASCA lines the eagle and everything just because people remember that and here's an example of a terrible game that was inspired by Zevius and a much better game

although it's can't really see what's happening there life force so many vertical shooters were inspired by Zevius and it's just a yeah it's just a game that it's a building block

and it's something I've really been kind of surprised by or maybe struck by I've been watching a lot of old vintage 1980s Japanese cartoons over the past couple of years and anytime you have something that's kind of set in the real world or is meant to be like a civilian situation

where people go to arcades they use Zevius as sort of the thing you see on screen. So I'm thinking Megazone 23, Kimmigure-Orens Road, even Macross, Robotech has a sort of Zevius fakery,

you know, a fake Zevius in its arcade. It was just, it's just shorthand, basically. Like if you go to an arcade, you know, once the invader boom was over, it was just the Zevius. Over here, we got the coffee-talk and Tappling of Atari sound effect, they got the Zebius.

That's what I'm about to say. Yeah, we have to stand in. But do we all have the crazy button mashing that actually does nothing? Like, does every, is that cross-cultural? I'd be or something. Yeah, I'm actually glad you mentioned the sound effects, too, because the soundscape of Zevius is another remarkable thing about it. You can't hear it here. But Zevius has this loop.

It's a very kind of annoying loop after a while. It really gets in your head. But it was music in a format that didn't really often have original music. and kind of became a thing in its own right. Like people would remix the music or use as kind of like the underlying loop for their own original compositions. It's what my dad would call.

Turn off that damn game music. It just, yeah, it just hit on so many levels and became a huge success. And, you know, anytime you play a top-down shooter of pretty much any sort, you're seeing the children of Zebius. This sounds like a movie. I like that.

It's a sci-by movie. They did make his envious movie that I'm pretty sure it's lost media right now. Has there been a Zepheus movie? Like 2001, I think. Really? Yeah, that's on my must-watch list.

If you could find it. Triangle shit versus the world. All right, so that's the shooter facet of things. Now we're going to move on to the maze chase and a game called Hayankio Alien, which did come to America. You can buy it on Game Boy, probably out on the floor for like five bucks. No one appreciates it. So it's still cheap.

So we'll grab a copy. Buy them up while they're still, you know, before the world catches on. They always catch on, so watch it. But Heyanko Alien is interesting because it has a sort of unique backstory. I don't know if one of you guys want to jump in and take over here, so this isn't just me ranting for an hour? Yeah, I mean, from what I know of it, I'm certainly not Mr. Hayakio Alien, like Jeremy here.

That's your official title now. Heonkeo Alien's song. Yeah, but it came basically out of, from, Tokyo University students, right? I think it was, wasn't a project or something to that effect that they then kind of ran with.

There's like a game production company that they basically got a pitch to and they picked it out. The original version was for the Apple 2 and apparently was sold and optimized that it took 10 minutes alone. Oh my gracious. That is knowledge.

How long are you willing to wait for your hand on QA land. The answer is probably not 10 minutes. Yeah. You know, it is an early maze chase game. It was one of the big hits of the maze chase pre-pack man in like Sega's head-on. And this one that has different little alien enemies. They're running around the names.

They're trying to kill you, obviously. They move randomly, which is kind of in a way. But it's an early type of I have multiple buttons for different actions. When you fight these aliens is you dig holes. Wait for them to fall in and bury them before they get them. Oh, I think that. That's grim.

Yeah, but it's a very grim game. It's dark. But, you know, I feel that popularized that sort of game design in this, Japan, just not having a one-button game or a little button game right now in Space Invaders. I just want to give a shout out to my favorite Mace Chase game. That's probably Lock and Chase with the Game Boy. It's severely, severely underrated. It's a very good...

It's so weird. It has one of the best soundtracks on the Game Boy. It's just, it's a great Maged Chase game. It's very short, but if you ever want a really good, clever, fun game. It's much much different than the N.S game, but it's definitely one of my favorites of the playing. Yeah, Lockett Chase owes a lot to

Hayanko Illiam, and the Game Boy version owes a lot to Sokobon, which probably should have gone in this panel, but I can't talk about Sokobon anymore. Is there a lot? No, I'm just tired of it. So, yeah, Hey, Uncle Elyan. You know, it's set in Hay-on area of Japan, which is how many hundreds of years ago? Like, oh, gosh, two or three.

I'm probably on the spot. So you're a policeman trying to protect the citizens of Kyoto from an alien invasion, and all you have is a shovel. So you dig holes, alien falls in the hole, you bury it. But this simple sandbox of design really caught off. And it inspired some of the first strategy guides. to be written about video games. It wasn't like full book strategy guides, but there were magazines

that talked about different strategies and tactics, and these have become kind of ingrained in game design. And this, you know, Payanko Alien was eventually overshadowed by the success of games that were inspired by. You know, there was space panic from Universal, which kind of took Hayanko Alien, the top-down view, and put it on the side, and that went on to create, you know, to inspire Load Runner.

But also, you know, games like Pac-Man. Oh, a huge debt to Hayankio-Hillian. There are lots and lots of games that are kind of built in the same style, like Boomer's Adventure and Asmic World for Game Boy, Send a Bad Mystery, a game by Sega. It's just, you know, it's a very influential and mostly forgotten game, although I talk about it so much that anyone who's ever visited my YouTube channel has at least heard of it.

So next, we're going to spend the rest of the panel, I think really kind of talking about the evolution of role-playing games. That's why not easy. Oh, is that why? That's it. So when you look at the really, really huge influential RPGs that

shaped the direction of kind of that genre in Japan, it actually goes back to not a Japanese game, not a game from the U.S., but actually a Canadian game. That's an audience. I was looking at these notes and I realized Wizardby, we're talking about Wizardby,

I had no idea. It started as a Canadian franchise, and then obviously it was bought out very quickly by, like, the second game or something like that. But, yeah, wizardry. It's basically extremely popular, extremely influential maze-crawling game. You select your parties. It's kind of like a tabletop come to life, and put you in a maze to die.

I find it, like, some people find it very archaic, some people find it very difficult to play, but in any case it was a huge huge hit in Japan, especially over the import scene. And if I'm not mistaken, probably were to mouth really picked up from there. And that's partially owed to the gentleman who eventually found a Bulletproof software. What was his name?

Hank Rogers. Hank Rogers. He brought it kind of to the Japanese collective and said, hey, look at this cool-ass game. And sure enough, a lot of developers were like... Sort of. Hank Rogers created the game that we're looking at right now with Blackponics. And that was definitely inspired by Wizardry. But Wizardry actually

have life in Japan, despite not being formally localized for quite a while. You know, game developers tended to be people who were really on the inside when it came to computer hardware. And, you know, you look at the U.S., you look at Japan, you look at Europe,

we all had different 8-bit computers back in the late 70s, early 80s. And so things like the Apple 2 and the Commodore Pet, those weren't really, you couldn't really get those in Japan, but there were always import shops for, you know, the tinkerer and the nerds

who were willing to pay down, you know, the equivalent of $10,000 to get a really cool piece of kit that was from overseas and could do stuff that the home brew computers couldn't. Shout out to your character names there, by the way. Sega-I-D-N-S-G-1K.

Yes, this is the Sega-1,000 port of the Black Onyx. But, you know, people who worked in game development would either see these games running on demo in game shops and be like, oh, I wish I could have. had, you know, the equivalent of $10,000 to afford that, or else they would come over to things like Worldwide Developers Conference and, you know, Apple, Apple Computers, events, and that sort of thing. And they would see these games and just say, oh, I've got to play this

and bring them back home. And that's where games like Dragon Quest came from. People like Yuji Hori, who directed Dragon Quest, just loved Wizardry. And it was just... Yeah, he wanted to basically, Yuji Hori, as I recall, wanted to bring the wizardry kind of gameplay to the masses, but of course, as I said earlier, it's a little bit complicated. So, hey, what if we took this idea,

made the computer do the hard work with all the numbers, and most importantly, give it kind of a manga style to really get younger players interested, and to extend on that, put it on the Famicom, which was a console for younger players, whereas Adults tended to stick to the computers. So that was a major... He basically tapped it on-tap market.

And Wizardry is a very strange series, in the sense that it started in, you know, the U.S. and Canada, and it had several sequels here all the way through Wizardry 7, but it kind of dropped off after a while. I like how you put in the notes. It's still a thing of concern in Japan. It is a thing of concern. Have you played some of those games, they're pretty concerning.

So there were some rights issues and things were sold off, and so the rights to Wizardry are, they're a mess right now. But there are Japanese developers, Japanese studios, who have the rights to create new wizardry games. And I think the last wizardry that was published in the U.S. was wizardry, the Foraken Empire for PlayStation 2. Is that what it was called? It was a PS2 game published by Atlas.

But overseas, there's like a new wizardry game every year. I think there's one that just came out. It's like a mobile game with NFTs or something. Yeah, they just announced an NFT wizardry that has nothing to do with the original. creators, it's just like this company over there saying, oh, let's just run with it. It's a name at this point. Yeah, exactly.

It's like to attach a game to. But despite that, you know, the series continued to thrive over there, at least, you know, in a niche, whereas it didn't hear. And the first person dungeon crawler continued to thrive in a way that it didn't hear. You know, you

saw games that built on it over there, not just the Black Onix, but Fantasy Star is a great example. Yeah, exactly. That's a huge one. And, you know, even though that was on kind of a less popular system over in Japan, it still had an impact. It actually still holds up.

The M2 release of Fantasy Star for the Switch, very much worth of playing, especially since it has the maps. You don't have the maps. They did a lot to fix it up, yeah. But mapping was a very important part of Wizard Green. The game didn't do it for you. You did it on graph paper, and eventually you got to the floors where there were teleporter mazes that would just zap you across the floor.

That's right game. no way to orientate yourself so you just had to kind of guess where am I but this style of game lived on you know with things like Arcana for Super Nies a really big one was Magame Tensei now Shin Megami Tensei

the first 10 years of that series it was all first person dungeon crawlers if you go back and play the original persona that's a dungeon crawler very much in the wizardry style and they still do those occasionally you know a strange journey for DS like 10 years ago

And then Persona Q, which was a crossover between Chenmogame Tinsay and Alice's other dungeon crawler RPG series, Etrine Odyssey, which was extremely wizardry, but it was, you know, modernized. It was a genius, actually, the way you could write basically as a DS series, so you could enter ES, and you could draw your own maps, and that is, that's such a perfect combination of a middle ground, you know, like, you don't have to sit there with a graph paper and your reuse notebooks, and you don't have to guess. It's just like, hey, I can draw this maps while I'm playing. And you know what? It's very satisfying. I'm not a mapper. and I just love Etrine Odyssey. Yeah, and these games have become, I think because of Etrient Odyssey have started to have a resurgence here. At least, you know, they're never going to be up in, you know, the Madden NFL or Call of Duty tier of sales. But at least developers or publishers are willing to localize them

and take a chance on them. So you get stuff like Labyrinth of Refrain or Demons Gaves, which aren't necessarily great examples of the dungeon crawler genre, but it's still like this strain of game design. this, you know, this strand of game design that has survived intact for, you know, 45 years at this point, which is very impressive. There's just something appealing about getting lost

and try and get out without screaming your guts out. Wouldn't panic. And I don't know what Wizarding has NFTs now. It might make it. Might have it big. It could be what it needed. That's just what it's going to need. So moving on to the other side of the RPG coin, you have Origins Ultima 3.

There had been a couple of Ultima games, obviously, before Ultima 3, but they were kind of weird and messy and, like, Some of them had shoot-em-up segments and stuff. They weren't very, like, what you think of as an RPG, but Ultimate 3 was very much an RPG in the sort of... I mean, it's really the foundation of the JRP that we think of as the J-R-PG. Yeah, and thinking about it, see, I never played a whole lot of Ultima, but I know it was on the NES, and it was definitely a little bit more of a complex game. I don't know if any of you remember video, not being undercade,

video power, but I'd always remember that thing, games that gave away. Ultima. Yeah, so Ultima really sort of codified what would become the sort of baseline Japanese RPG in that it had sort of a zoomed-out overworld, and then you would go into towns and it was a much closer view. When you had battles, instead of being, you know, the standard like two sides line up and take turns hitting each other, you had some limited movement around the battle field

to line up against enemies. You were really in kind of an open world and just had to sort of figure things out. There were all kinds of really arcane secrets hidden within the world. Things like the moon gates and the moon phases. There were two moons in the world

and the phase of the moon affected different mystical elements around the world. Which very much became part of Shemugami Tense. Yep. And there were shrines where you could go and make donations for, you didn't know why exactly until you started making donations

and then, you know, that would kind of pick up. So anyway, yeah, that's really very influential. Like the combat system in Ultima, we don't have an example up here, but if you've played games like Lunar or, you know, even American games like the SSI Gold Box, D&D games, or Wasteland, the early fallouts, those are all very much in kind of the ultimate mold. Yeah, shout out to very quickly, Ultimate 4,

which I think really expanded the idea. massive ways of player choice, which, of course, is a huge, huge part of RPGs these days, games in general. Yeah, player choice and player morality really became... There was some of that in Ultimate 3, you know, where some of your actions had impact, but in Ultimate 4, like, it begins with a tarot reading to determine what your, you know, your strengths are based on your personal choices. And you had to become the avatar of goodness, and that was the entire point of the game.

and if you performed bad actions like killing civilians, that would take away and make it much harder for you to become the avatar. It would be very not popular if you don't know killing those things. I mean, when you look at Ultima, you can really see the games by Yasui Matsuno. Yes. The Ogre series, Final Fantasy Tactics, there's a whole lot of that built in. You know, the Ogre series morality plays a huge part into, you know, there's like 60 endings or something in Ogre Battle and Tactics Oghers.

and, you know, it's not always the obvious moral choices that you have to make to get the best outcomes. And now Triangle Strategy on the Switch, the whole thing, is about making choices, and those choices are always very obvious. You can say, I'm going to do the right thing, and everyone says, you dumbass, you did that, this is, like, not as good as you think it is, and that's the whole point of the game, is to get that ending for better for worse. So, yeah, Ultima was extremely important in the kind of shape and design of the Japanese RPG. Final Fantasy Chrono Trigger with the positional

combat system the lunar series the saga series where there's all kinds of things hidden in the world and you have no idea what the hell they do.

That's so ultima. My God. But I do want to talk about a game that helped influence Japanese RPG in maybe a non-obvious way and that is

a graphical adventure called Portopia Renzoku Satujin Jikin. Brian, you know what that means. It is the Portopia serial murder case, essentially. Okay, and this footage is not of that game, but it is of a game for S-D-1000

called Loretta No Shozzo Sherlock Holmes, which is very much inspired by Portopia. Portopia was another one of those games that it was just foundationally important over there, even though no one has ever played it in the U.S. unless they went out and imported it and struggled

through the Japanese tax store, have played a fan translation. But this game was originally created, I want to say in 1984 on Japanese home computers. It was designed by a guy mentioned before, Yuji Hori

for the studio inix. And a year later, you know, it was fairly popular Enix did a lot of these computer-to-consul ports. A year later, Enix had Chunsoft put together the Famicom version, and that became the inflection point of a lot of things. For one thing, it was the first collaboration between Chunsoft and Yuji Hori, which would be important because the following year,

they would create a game called Dragon Quest. But Dragon Quest draws a lot of interface and design elements from Portopia. It's one part wizardry, one part Portopia. And it's kind of hard to

talk about its impact without having played it which I haven't. Brian, have you played it? I have not played it. Surprisingly, it's a pretty big blind spot for me too, but I mean, you have

Sherlock Holmes up here, which as you mentioned is quite influence for it, or from it. And if you, you can almost close your eyes and throw a dart at a board of kind of mid to later 80s Famicom games

and there's like a pretty good chance that they'll be pretty directly influenced by Portopia they're attempting to be an adventure game in any way. So even if you haven't played Fortopia, like there's a good chance that you might have played something that's close enough to it. I mean if we haven't

had a localization of it but if we got Famicom Detective Club localizations. We got a localization. Did we? Yeah, it was on Switch. Good morning to me I haven't like to It was like last year or the year before Yeah Oh okay

Because I know we got the Family Comic Detective Club Maybe it's over my head Okay There's all kind of I'll excuse myself Because obviously I know nothing You're working your way

Through the story And it only advances When you make the right calls Otherwise you just sort of blockade Which is an interesting comparison to You look at Western Text adventures

Or adventure games That they sort of took a different half to the same problem, like how you tell a story, but not have people go line and get off the rails. Yeah, you mentioned Babcom Detective Club, but there's a lot of other games that sort of porphobia DNA. Yeah, Phoenix Wright is a good one. Phoenix Wright. I actually went from playing a classic content adventure text games to play Phoenix Wright. I'm like, oh, this is just the same thing. I've also noticed in the notes, and this is a shout out. Hotel Desk.

Now, that was a great game. I love that game so much. Never played the sequel, but I mean, that style of game kind of had a resurgence on the DS because it was like, you know, like a little novel. It was like a book, and it kind of sad if it didn't stick around for as long as it should have. There's also the game

ZX2 DS game has a detective Arno. It's a really fun, old adventure game can decide. Yeah, another thing that makes, made Portopia so impactful at the time was that kind of like the RPG

the adventure genre was really big on early computers and people wanted to play it here and people in Japan wanted to play it but it was much more accessible because it was all text oriented so if you didn't read and have the ability to parse English that it was kind of tough to make your way through a game

that pretty much just consisted of English text and there were some early in roads made into creating Japan-centric, you know, Japan-focused adventure games. One of the first came in 1982, so the genre had been around for a while, called Omote Sando Adventure, which was basically just like an

amateur program. I think you could type it in from the back of a magazine, but you were basically like finding your way around in a kind of a wizardry-inspired maze that consisted of an office complex in Omotisando in an area of Tokyo. That's terrifying.

I think it takes place in that neighborhood, basically. You have to make it to kiddie land and buy some little kitty stuff. I don't know. The copy machine attacks come in. But that game was, you know, people who were into that genre definitely played it and were inspired

by it. At the same time, Mystery House by Sierra kind of had a big impact too because it was the first adventure game and sort of the Zork style that had graphics. It had, you know, like very crude graphics, but it kind of

showed you the home setting that you were in. And so Yuji Hori drew from those inspirations, those elements, to put together his adventure game. But his adventure game focused around a murder mystery. You were a detective and you were traveling around the town of

Portopia and trying to figure out, you know, the identity of a murderer who was behind the string of murders. And so you would go and you would talk to people, you could take items, you could use items, you could ask questions, you know, kind of all the text adventure type stuff you expect to do. When the game came to Famicom on console, you didn't have access to a full keyboard.

I mean, there was a keyboard for Famicom, but not that many people owned it, and it was cumbersome and kind of ridiculous. So instead, ChuneSoft stripped it down and really simplified it to use a menu-based, like, cursor system where you would choose questions or commands from a menu. And it's kind of like a precursor to the Lucasfilm game's scum engine, although I'm sure Lucasfilm didn't take inspiration directly from Portopia. But that same system became part of Dragon Quest, like the whole window system. And it was just a huge, huge hit and became very popular. It was during that period where if you put a game on Famicom,

it was going to sell a million copies. So, you know, millions of kids played this game, and they're probably their parents, too, and were very, very influenced by it. So when you look at the graphical adventure genre in Japan versus the rest of the world, Japan tends to focus very heavily on police procedurals in a way that the West does not.

And it is because of this influence, or, you know, games about murder. Like anything Goichi Suda has created, like you can see Portopoeus fingerprints It's all over it. Games like Dangan Ropa and Zero Escape, which are actually made by Spike Chunsoff. So it's kind of this, you know,

everything kind of coming together. Hotel Dusk in the last window. Ace Attorney, Jake Hunter, you know, there was the Sherlock Holmes game. I guess thinking about the Redenstein Club. You can understand why Nintendo, which was like just really infamous about censorship back in the day. It was probably not so hot about murder mystery

being released on their console, which is too bad. They made their own. I guess so, yeah, but not for an America. No, but I think that was more of a localization concern in terms of technical concern. I just think it's interesting that how they decided, okay, we can't use a keyboard, how do we kind of strip this down and make it into an accessible menu? And I always like hearing about how developers get around their problems limited by hardware. So, lots and lots of games very heavily influenced by Portopia, and kind of an unusual inflection point for the role-playing genre, but it's there.

And then finally, we're going to talk about the Tower of Draaga, which kind of defined the action RPG. Around the same time as Tower Duraga hit arcades, 1984. He also had Dragon Slayer and HideLyde, hit home computers. But the Tower of Duraga, even though it doesn't look like it, came out in arcades. It was built on Super Pac-Man hardware by the guy who created Zevies. And he was like, I want to make a role-playing game in a maze for arcades. This game is a horrible fit for arcades, but it did have this communal aspect that didn't really exist in American arcades.

Ryan, is that something you or Kevin could talk about, maybe? Yeah, we were actually talking about this yesterday about how there used to be notebooks that you could find in the corner of a Japanese arcade. Some even had them up until about 10 or 15 years ago. I think they're a thing of the past now, but they originated around this time for people to write secrets that they found in

to kind of help other people through these games. Were these, like, official documents, Or just things that, like, people... Literally just a notebook. Yeah, but was it, like, official of the arcade or was it just something, a secret that was passed on from player to player and had nothing to do with the arcade itself? The provider of the arcade posted it.

Yeah, I don't know. Official that I didn't say no. You don't say no. Good enough. So anyway, we don't have a lot of time to talk about this, but it was a moderate hidden arcades and then became, you know, again, because anything you sold on Famicom in 1985 was going to sell a million units,

became really big on Famicom. But also, I think, you know when you had the luxury of playing it at home and with a strategy guide you could kind of afford to play a game that was very challenging and obtuse in a way that was difficult in arcades where everything cost a hundred yen which is like a dollar and you got three lives and they can go really quickly in this game but the tower drug is filled with just arcane secrets every single floor of the 60 floor tower has a secret and there's no way for you to know how to find it until you stumble across it or someone tells you.

Some of them are, you know, very simple, like, kill three of these things, and a treasure test will appear, but some of them are, like, face the north wall and then turn away, or, like, wait until there's 60 seconds or 60 points on the timer and then kill the last enemy or something. It's just, it's always different. And I think this kind of, you know, filled game developers with some bad ideas,

like things have to be obtuse and difficult and unfriendly, but you know the influence of this game is obvious I mean you can look at this and you know you see the wizards appearing and zapping and you see the little slimes you're like well this is Zelda there's darkness you know yeah like Zelda

definitely took some influences from this game but you look at things like Lamulana Deadly Towers was one that was you know I wouldn't say popular on any of us but definitely it was there vexed many children it was present look at Castlevania 2

with the people who actually just straight up lie to you. They don't even give you hints. They just tell you the wrong thing. Milon's secret castle where you had to like throw whatever it was Milon was throwing at random bricks to show things. You're thinking about like, say a game like Super Mario Brothers 3 where how do you find the coin ship? I can't remember the number you're supposed to end the level on, but like you find the coin ship by finding a very specific number. You find the toad house and find this very specific number. And that's all stuff that was also passed down by word and out their strategy guides. Yeah, they're definitely a whole lot from

a draga for the Mario series, all the big buttons and whatnot. And even as new is something like from software games, they whole a lot of that. That communal book is Eldon Rang in a nutshell. So we are out of time, but I do want to say, if you understand these games, breakout, zeviets, Hayanko alien, wizardry, ultimate three, Portopia Rinzoku, Satu Jinjikin, and the Tower Draga,

you have a pretty good understanding of everything that you saw on the NES and Master System and TurboGraphics and Genesis for the next 10 years, maybe beyond. You know, the impact of these games is still reverberating throughout video gaming.

And these are, you know, this is just kind of the foundation. It's the Bible. It's the blueprints. So check out these games if you ever have the time. I highly recommend them. And if you play the Tarragha,

use a game genie for Infinite Lives. And look of us. strategy guide, there's no shame in it, because that's how it was designed to be planned. Anyway, thank you, everyone, for your time, and thank you, panelists, for your time. Thank you. Eliminate clutter and embrace the freedom of hyper-X wireless gaming gear for PC and console. Power through all the great monthly PlayStation Plus games with the Cloud Stinger core wireless for PlayStation. Enjoy lightweight comfort with reliable wireless freedom, so you won't miss plot points when you head to the fridge.

High-quality HyperX wireless products can be found at most fine retailers, as well as online at Target, Best Buy, and Amazon. Or you can shop for them directly at hyperX.com and HP.com. In a world with too many comic book podcast, and not enough deep dives into your favorite superheroes. One podcast stands as a shining beacon in a world of pain and dark. Darkness. Yeah, yeah, darkness. Yeah, lots of darkness. Bunch of dark stuff.

Superhero stuff you should know. That's us. Andrew, why are you talking like that? I'm the movie voice guy now. I'm the new movie voice guy. And it's time for you to listen to superhero stuff you should know. Uh, so we have like unused concept art, unmade scripts, unmade superhero movies all check us out at superhero stuff you should know ben you should do a movie voice guy voice guy voice uh i would but i think we're out of time superhero stuff you should know part of the hyper x podcast network part of the hyper x podcast network i just said that

and we're a show that treats Hunter Hunter and Yu Haku Shoe's author as the center of the universe. Some weeks we do linguistic analysis. The Chinese meaning of this character is to smelt or refine, but so the changed meaning in Japanese it means to temper.

Other times, we get absolutely smashed. So we take one shot every time. Yus Gay uses the ray gun. One hour later. This is the least coherent episode. I think your hiring is hot. Check us out at the HyperX Podcast Network. and embrace the freedom of HyperX wireless gaming gear for PC and console.

Power through all the great monthly PlayStation Plus games with the Cloud Stinger Core wireless for PlayStation. Enjoy lightweight comfort with reliable wireless freedom, so you won't miss plot points when you head to the fridge. High quality HyperX wireless products can be found at most fine retailers, as well as online at Target, MicroCenter, Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, or shop directly at hyperX.com and HP.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 3 p.m. panel, documenting video game history. We're going to document, document video gaming history. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and also here with me on this panel we have. I'm Kelsey Lewin. I am co-director of the Video Game History Foundation. And I'm Norman Russo.

The creator of the game is already on YouTube. Oh, I forgot my bona fides. I co-hosts Retronauts a podcast. So all of us document video game history in very different ways. And so this is going to be a pretty loose, improvisational, like, contemporaneous kind of presentation. I think we're going to have a lot of Q&A, if anyone's interested in asking questions.

But to get started, I thought we could just talk a little bit about how we even got into doing this. Like, what's the inspiration behind this obsession each of us has? And it just kind of go from there. So, Norm, I'm going to let you king things off. Like, how did you become the gaming historian? Well, I am the gaming historian. I'm the only gaming story.

It's true. We bestow those titles of people. And I'm just to both. I started in 2008 on YouTube. I was 20 years old, and I was getting my bachelor's degree in mystery. And so I love history, and I love video games, and I love a show called G4 icons. It's one of my favorite shows, and I just wanted kind of more of that kind of content. So I said, well, I'll try to make it myself.

This might be fun. That's kind of how I got started. And 2008 of YouTube was widely different than what it is today. I got started just getting interested in weird stuff. I was working in a retro game store and was seeing some games I had never really seen before, like Paki and Marlon on the Super Nintendo, which is a game about diabetes and elephants. And I was just kind of curious, like, how does stuff? like this make it out there and that kind of that got me interested in starting to research and

especially when I looked up games like that you know some of the more out there stuff there weren't really people looking into that history so it was just it was an interest in the bizarre and the unknown and the obscure I actually thought Paki and Marlon was tied to Paki and Rocky until just now Yes, they're elephant cousins who have diabetes, yeah. Elephant to New Geh, pretty much the same thing. As for myself, I kind of came at this from a different angle because I'm really old, and so I actually have lived through most of video gaming history and experienced a lot of it firsthand.

Back in 1996, I think, there was this thing called the World Wide Web that people were getting really into, And so I bought this really big book of HTML coding and set up a GeoCities page for myself. And, you know, I'm going to be on the Internet. And I ended up kind of gravitating toward posting stuff about video games. I rediscovered NES games, which had kind of disappeared.

And I saw them in a pawn shop and said, I really liked metal gear. That was so long ago. It was seven years before. But it seemed so long. And so I just started writing about old video games, and then eventually I kind of fell in doing freelance work with sites like GameSpot and the Gaming Intelligence Agency, which I kind of was there for the launch of and contributed to for all the time. And just increasingly focused on old stuff. And then I got a job in the actual Games Press and realized no one in the professional Games Press is really taking anything that's not current very seriously.

and so I kind of made that a niche for myself just because I wanted to write about games that I liked and they just happened to be old. So in addition to reviewing stuff that no one else wanted to review like Game Boy Advance games, I started writing about old stuff and then when OneUp.com and all the magazines associated with

and started making podcasts about their publications, all the magazines, I was like, well, I don't have a magazine, but I do like old video games. So I started a podcast about old video games and somehow I'm still doing that 16 years later. And so everything that I do now, it just kind of revolves around old video games. Which actually kind of brings me to the next question.

You're both so young. How did you... For me, writing about old video games is a lot of it's just reclaiming what it was like to be a kid in the 1980s. But you probably don't remember that. I do not remember the 1980s. Yes, see?

That is correct. I have vivid memories. I think that's the historian part of it, right? It's like I don't know where these came from because I wasn't there, and I found that pretty fascinating because clearly there is like an evolutionary line between where games came from and where they are now. And so in order to get to the now, you've got to learn a little bit about what came before me. So, yeah, it's just a little different.

It's rather good and it's a thought to think it's like a, how did this happen? Where did this come from? Yeah, what about you, North? Yeah, I'm more of a 90s kid, but I had an older brother, and so I felt like I was kind of handed down these older video games, and I kind of grew up all the older stuff, and I think what really got me into the more of the retro scene was I got a job at GameStop when I was in college, and people would bring in these old games to trade them in, GameStop doesn't put them take them, but I would go, I remember this, I remember my

Tennessee, I remember my buddy playing this grown up, and so I would like, I wasn't allowed to do this, but I would buy them like in the parking lot of these people after hours. So I just, I'd say how I really got into and that's kind of how I died in more of the history

and stuff too. Yeah, so, you know, for myself, like I said, a lot of what I write about is stuff that I was there just to witness firsthand and, you know, writing about stuff that I own, when I was 10, 15 years old and it still wasn't 16 bits yet

so if that puts a number on my age but you know it's not just nostalgia it is there is more to it and Kelsey I really appreciate what you said about needing to understand what came before because that was really the sort of ethos that I brought into my work in the professional games press

was that yeah it's cool to write about you know, Destiny or Minecraft or, you know, any of these big games that's happening right now, but you need to really understand what came before it. And it's always interesting, you know, speaking of Minecraft to

play old video games with some of my nephews who are super into Minecraft because they see 80s 8-bit art and they're like, oh, it's just like Minecraft. And they don't mean that it's, you know, three-dimensional that you're building stuff. They mean everything is made of like simple square blocks. And so,

you know there's this just this constant sort of feedback loop I think that feeds into video games and that's why there is so much value in in writing about video game history and kind of servicing that but you know I feel like the privilege of having lived through all of this for me means that maybe I don't have the most the most the tightest methodology about covering video game history I don't have to do as much research and to It tends to be a little more off the cuff. Maybe it's the same for you, and you've just absorbed knowledge over the years. But I'm curious, both of you, like, how much does research and just, like, you know, going to the internet, going to, is LexisNex is still a thing?

He's still a thing. I pay him for him. And newspapers.com. Yeah, newspapers.com is a big one. How much of that comprises the work that you do versus, you know, just the actual hands. on experiencing, you know, playing a video game. Playing the game is maybe 5%. You get that.

People seem to think that all these guys play video games all day. It's like, no, it's really not about the playing when you're doing the research. I mean, obviously, you play the game. You know, I have experienced a lot of games that I've covered, but, yeah, it's trying to get in touch with people that work on the game.

It's looking through these old newspapers. It's looking through these old press releases. It's looking at all these old magazines and how did they cover the game? Who did they talk to when the game was coming out? What was the hype surrounding this game? So it's really just kind of casting a wide minute and trying to understand the context

and what it was like when these things came out. Yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on the story you're trying to tell. But the places I tend to start are, yeah, starting to look at maybe how it was represented in the media because that's, you'll eventually probably want to talk to developers and that sort of thing and get the development side of it, but I find that you can at least start getting a sense of like, what does this game actually mean, you know, legacy-wise

based on what people thought about it in the public and maybe how that's changed over the years and, you know, did it cost more when it came out and then got a massive price cut and, you know, all kinds of things like that. So, I mean, I think it depends on the story. to tell but playing the game and even like remembering time I had with the game doesn't really play much a role in it for me at all other than maybe just inspiring me to start looking deeper into it. So let me ask one of you, if you could, just to sort of describe the sort of work that you do, you know, the outward-facing part of it and also what goes into actually creating that.

Because I think all of us create pretty different things or work on different things. I mean, you know, a lot of what you do, Kelsey, isn't even necessarily creating. It's more like being there as sort of a middleman of information and a resource. for people who are putting out publications. Yeah, I mean, I'm a resource for this guy sometimes. Yeah, I love him to be frank all the time. Yeah, I mean, so what we do with the foundation in particular is we want to be, we want to make people like his life's life a lot easier.

So it shouldn't be as difficult as it is right now to research video game history. You should be able to have access to, you know, the magazines that covered it, to the developers that covered it. or the developers that worked on it and some of the artifacts that they used in the making of it and, you know, really just anything context surrounding the game

itself, because Norm knows where to find the game. He can play the game. But yeah, I mean, we're an archive, a library in archive, so a lot of what we do is really just kind of gathering that stuff and then trying to help researchers who are looking for that stuff. So sometimes it's like

press releases we might have, I think we gave you that lovely facts from Konami for the Laserscope video. Yeah, so in my later video, I talked about every legum on the ANIS, and I did the Laserscope, and I was talking with Frankie Kelston, and said, oh, we got this funny facts about the laser scope. And one of the facts, I guess Konami complained to the manufacturer that the laser scope doesn't really work well if you're like, if you're an adult, you have your head's a little bigger.

And the manufacturer just said, well, it's not made for adults, it's made for kids, and if you have a big head, like, it's named Thomas Wong. Thomas, yeah, Thomas, Tom's, Thomas Wong, it's not going to work. It's just, it's, it was so funny and interesting to see, like, that communication between Kinnah and the manufacturing about, you know, this, this silly little headset for any of us. And it's, you know, it's a funny fact, but, like, what you actually get out of that practically is, like, you know, you might have used.

the laser scope, they're like, this is kind of uncomfortable, and that was my lived experience with it. And it's like, well, did Konami know it was uncomfortable? And it turns out, yes, they absolutely know it was uncomfortable. But you wouldn't know that unless, you know, you had that facts to kind of eliminate that. So with my stuff, I feel I'm more of a, like, storyteller, I guess. but, you know, the word story is in history, so it's kind of that makes sense, right? So I feel like my job is to present the history of video games in, like, a palatable way for a general audience, and that's kind of what I like to do, and how I do that is I try to find anything, anything, everything about the topic,

and then present it in a way that anyone can enjoy it, and that includes, interviewing people involved that includes reading newspaper articles or video magazines I love using visuals like really good visuals in my videos I always bug Frank and Kelsey for these weird

obscure magazines I'm like good EGM number 12 that only covered Sega games I think they had like a Sega magazine for a lot of it was like a it was either a packing or spin-off thing it was like a Genesis special

which But I will say the digital stuff's come a long way. Like when I first started, it was, there was some stuff, but now it's like, man, the Internet Archive has just thrown so much with these old video being magazines and press releases and whatnot. It's all about, like all of you and everyone involved in video games and it's uploading to this and making it happen. So it's really a community effort to get all that stuff up.

Yeah, and there's still a lot to be done with all the digital information. that's coming into existence. I mean, just because this, you know, resources out there doesn't necessarily mean that we know about it or know where to look into it. So as an example of that, last year I did a video series

covering the entire Sega SG-1000 console in its library, and there was very little information about any of that stuff in English that was, you know, confirmed. And even Sega themselves don't actually list hard release dates for all the games. like they say this game came out in 1984 and that's it so there's like a dozen 20 games

that just have you know a year as their release date and I like to put together things chronologically to sort of tell the story of how console platforms evolve and it's impossible to do that when even the people who created the system are like we don't actually know and I reached out through Sega official channels and someone who's really the company is really invested in telling Sega history and getting that story out there And he reached out to the Sagan internal teams, and they were like, yeah, we can't really tell you anything about this console because no one who designed it is still at the company. Like, we just aren't able to give you that information that doesn't exist here. So even the institutional knowledge is there.

But then a few months ago, someone named the Aliens TweetBod. I have no idea that that is. The Alias is TweetBod on the Gaming Alexandria Discord was digging around an old, Japanese arcade industry-oriented magazine called Game Machine and this was published throughout the 80s into the 90s and found a couple of issues

where they had actually gone through and said well here's what's happening on the console side of the business and it had release dates for the Nintendo Famicom and the SD 1000 and the Epic cassette super cassette vision and it actually had them down by dates when those games showed up at retail so all of a sudden you know

here I was on my next to last of 25 videos and this information suddenly becomes available to me that would have been amazing to have when I started the end of the project. It's great because for me, my videos that I put on YouTube, they're pretty much a rough draft. And then I take the scripts and I turn those into books like this where I try to get all the facts straight and anything I screw up on in a YouTube video, the commenters are going to tell me. So there's no question, like, I'm going to get the facts right eventually. I just kind of have to take my loss of the video. But, you know, the information about release dates wasn't much help for the SD1000 videos,

but when I put together the book about that later this year, that's going to be great because I can actually re-contextualize everything and say, like, well, we thought this was a launch game, but actually it shipped a year after the system came out. So now we have a better understanding of kind of where it falls into place and, you know, how these games actually came out, and what the experience was of people who were invested in the system and, you know, went to the stores, went to, you know, their games, their favorite Yonabashi camera or whatever. And we're like, ah, yes, new SG-1000 release.

Excellent. I could finally play Flicky at home. Like now, you know, it just gives us a better sense of what the experience was like to have been there. You know, and it's not telling us how people actually react into these games, but just knowing, you know, the sort of way that things were presented and what became accessible to people is really great. But again, you know, you have to know where to find that information. and there's so much out there

that's just raw and filtered that's really difficult and that's what's great about gaming Alexandria that's really great about the Video Game History Foundation there's a whole lot of that just sifting through this

massive pile of information raw information that's being done and that's going to be a huge, huge help for people like me and people like Norm who are trying to tell stories

and trying to kind of put a finger on things and say, you know, like, we want to understand how it was, now we can have a better understanding of what it was, and every bit of information that comes in helps us to paint a clearer and more defined picture. Yeah, I mean, we have a full-time librarian now with the Michigan History Foundation, which is really exciting and is going to, I think, do a lot to start making some of that

a little bit more discoverable and unsearchable, but I think the point to be taken from this is, like, there's still a ton of stories out there, right the second that haven't actually been mined out of the sources that are floating around there. So there's like infinite video game history stories still to tell, and I truly believe that anyone can do it as long as you're willing to put in the work and like really get, really get curious, really look into things.

Yeah. You are absolutely right about there are a million stories to tell. I remember when I decided I was going to do a video on the youth. And I just did general research first. And I heard seen the Wikipedia article, and it was like two sentences about the U-Force. And I was like, oh, man, this video is not going to be that interesting. And then I got in touch with the guy that invented the U-Force,

Dave Kaepard. And I found out, oh, this guy is this huge prolific inventor that invented all sorts of stuff. Like he invented those lollipops that play music when they eat them and he invented those, I think, called Hit Clips, you know, they played like 15 seconds of a song. He invented that. He was this prolific inventor and he was like, it was funny because I was like, I'm talking about the U-Force. He was like, that was the worst thing I ever invented. But he was so thrilled

somebody was interested in it. And so, yeah, it's amazing that, you know, you read an article and it's two sentences about U-Force and then I ended up making, I ended up making a 40-minute video about it, and there was stuff I had to cut out of the video. So, like, there's just so much stuff out there that we can talk about. So, what would you say are the biggest impediments to your work?

The stumbling blocks are the things that you just can't. seem to overcome that, you know, or maybe systemic or just, you know, personal hangups or something. I don't know. Like, what, what is it that, you know, you wish you could push past and, you know, remove from your workflow? I mean, it really all comes down to, I think, an access thing. There's not a lot out there that is, A, surviving necessarily. I mean, a lot of developers didn't really keep their old stuff. If there was any documentation, like if they actually took the time to make a design document

or something along those lines. They probably didn't keep it. And in a lot of cases, especially in the early days, they weren't really like really, you know, there might not have been like a real good system in place for like, we're going to first make this design document and then we're going to make this document and everything's going to be

sorted really well. So there's not always a good amount of that out there for anything. And then, I mean, you've mentioned this a little bit, but it's like you kind of have to start talking to people. people to really get the stories. And sometimes it also on earths the actual documents and the actual artifacts and just information and stuff that isn't straight from their mouths. I mean, I've gotten photos from people, photos and videos and, you know, in really rare cases, like source code even. That's the, that's like the real meat of learning about what goes on under the game's hood. And you can learn some really interesting things about maybe why decisions were made and that sort of thing. If you have access to that, but There's not a lot of it floating around out there, and it's a vanishingly small amount that we're kind of desperately trying to grab that.

So, yeah, it's really just, I mean, that's the reason I got involved in the foundation in the first place, is I was just a very frustrated historian. I was doing some YouTube videos basically in the same vein as Norm for a while, and I think the part that really broke me was I was working on a, a video about the Super Nintendo Exertainment bike, which is an exercise bike that hooks up to your Super Nintendo. And I was having to mine from like several different newspapers

and random consumer magazines and that sort of thing. Just there would be like a one or two sentence thing. And they all clearly came from a press release, but they were all taking different parts of the press release. And so I was like capturing all of the

like, you know, it's like someone tore up a map and just, like, scattered them to the winds. And so I had to piece this all together, and I did. And it took a really long time, like, several, probably more than 10 hours of research. And just on trying to piece together this press release. And later on, when the Video Game History Foundation was helping out at Game Informer, Game Informer magazine, they kind of have, like, a room that they were just throwing all of the press releases and other stuff. sent into. We went there to go digitize a ton of it. And in there, I came across the press release

for the entertainment bike and just line by line was each one of these. I was like, I found that in this newspaper. I found that line over here. And it was like, I could have saved myself like 15 hours if I just had this press release to begin with. And that was kind of the moment that broke me. I was like, why don't we have access to this stuff? Sometimes I'll talk. find it like an article in a newspaper and then I'll click on another result and it's like that same article but they had it like two more sentences that I thought well it seems pretty important why are they in the other article? You find a lot of duplicates. If I could read Japanese my job would be a lot of this year. That would be really good. I luckily I have some friends that

know Japanese and they're very very kind and helpful of me and suddenly I'll send them stuff and they'll say, oh, this is nothing. This is not worth of this. Or they'll say, oh, this is really interesting. Yes, I will translate this. Yeah, that would definitely help myself. Yeah, I feel like my biggest impediment to my work is me. Mainly, you know, I spend a lot of time working at the Games Press,

doing a lot of different rules, including reviewing. And I kind of feel like any time you spend a lot of your energy, and your career reviewing games, there's this just kind of antagonistic relationship that builds up with the community and with developers. So I'm always very shy about reaching out to developers because I think, well, what if I reviewed a game by them and I gave it a bad score, and now they think that I'm the worst.

They've got your name written on the wall, just waiting for you. You'd be somebody not honest. Some developers have very long memories. Most developers, though, are actually pretty cool. They're like, yeah, okay, that's fine. That wasn't the greatest game. But I always tried not to be super mean about stuff. But, you know, it was much easier when I was working in the press

and I could reach out to contacts like in Japan and say, hey, you know, so-and-so and so-and-so, can you, you know, set us up an interview with them. And they were always happy to, you know, say, yeah, we'll go ahead and do that for you and translate for us. And, you know, I was able to reach out to a lot of very esoteric and forgotten people, you know, at least in the West, who played important roles

and made interesting video games during the 8 and 16th in Iranis in Japan and that's not so easy to do now between COVID locking down travel and just by having moved up to a different part of my career so I'm really trying to train myself to be more active

about reaching out to people but again I do have I guess kind of the privilege of having just been around a really long time and just absorb. Like, I can't remember, you know, people's faces if I haven't met them three or four times, but I can remember a lot of really minute details

about video games. And I don't know what that says about me, but it's very helpful for my work. And so, you know, that's, I guess you take the good and the bad. Can I get onto this, actually? Yeah, please. So when you were saying that you're your own worst enemy sometimes, I definitely feel that because Kilsen,

talked about this before, where you publish something, and then a week later, someone finds something else about the same time, you know, and stuff's updated already. You have to say that history is always changing, that it's always improving, we're always learning more and more about the past, and if anyone out there is wanting to make videos, my best advice is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. like get out there their research is quite literally never actually done

but you do have to end it at some point yeah I I remember watching a documentary it was like the making of South Park I think it's called like six days to air or something and Trey Parker

one of my favorite lines from that was you know they make a South Park episode weekly they have one week to make a South Park episode to end he talked about well you know I can sit this episode and work on for months, but in the end, it's probably only going to be like 5% better. And so that really resonated with me. They're like, yeah, you can't just sit on something for a couple. You got to get it out there. Yeah, I agree. That's why I am glad to be able

to do, you know, work in print because it does a chance to revisit things and say, well, I got this wrong or, you know, I miss this, or what often happens, as you say, like new research comes up, And pretty recently I sent my virtual away history book back for reprints and I had to add something to it or I chose to add something to it because one of the games in there, the very notorious virtual lab, which is just one of the worst games you'll ever play. Bad Game Hall of Fame, a website called Bad Game of Hall of Fame, the proprietor reached out and managed to get in touch with the person responsible for creating that game and did a really great interview that offered a lot of insight. And a lot of that insight was basically things that, you know, I had speculated to my book like this was probably put together in almost no time by someone who had never worked on this hardware, trying to get a rushed out the door before the manufacturing closed on virtual void. And that was absolutely correct. But then there were some things that, you know, some unkind assumptions I made that turned out not to be true. So, you know, added a little erratum, basically, to the next revision of the book just to kind of, you know, clear the air not to say like, oh, I got it right.

but also, like, oh, I got it wrong. And, you know, it's always great to have that opportunity. You know, if I had more time, I would love to just create videos that follow up on previous videos and say, like, hey, here's a catch-all for all the stuff that I got wrong. And I kind of did that with S-D1,000, actually, once I finished the library. I was like, well, hey, you saw my introductory video a year ago.

Now here's what we actually know, and here's all the stuff that I goofed up on and it got wrong. And, you know, I think it's helpful to be able to admit that you're not perfect and to be able to publicly say, like, you know, I didn't get everything right and here's where I messed up. I think having that element of humility goes a long way towards strengthening your work rather than being a sign of weakness. And I think it helps audiences to understand like, hey, you're just human too. and that, you know, it opens up an opportunity for everyone who watches your work or reads your work to kind of become a participant in it and be able to say like, hey, here's some information that you missed or that you got wrong. And, you know, it just is kind of a collective effort, really, in a sense.

Anyway, we have like 15 minutes left, so do you guys want to say anything more or should we open up to a Q&A for the audience? Anyone has any questions? You'd be happy to answer. I have a question over here. countering games and chronological type of content that may not seem to be very interesting or good. How do you find something to pull out of that to make someone interested

in that item? I don't know, actually. I just start writing and, you know, I'm always trying to contextualize things. Not only, you know, like this is what this is, but also this is where this game happened in time. And here's the people

who created this game. And here's Here's how it compares to what's come before. So I feel like when you just look at all those different elements, there's always a story to tell about a game, even if it is, like, the 23rd Famicom baseball game. Like, honestly, I can't stand sports video games, but I always feel like my sports-focused episodes are really, really good. And maybe it's because I'm so disinterested, I'm desperate to find something to say. But, like, I put together a basis-loaded episode about, you know, the NES game a few months

ago. And I'm like, man, I wish all my work was this good. I wish I also liked this game, but it's just, you know, yeah, I think you just have to cast around and say, what is this game's story, even if the story is that there is no story to it. There's something to say. It varies from game to game. Yeah. So for, I guess for Norman, for Jeremy, what's like a dream project that you'd like to cover that you haven't had a chance or the opportunity to cover this for Kelsey, like what is something you'd like to have the time to research or have the time to look into the internet? Do you don't have a go-to answer on this? I never do.

No. something I'm like very fascinated by that I don't suspect we'll ever really see much of surface ever as a game project at Nintendo called cabbage which was there's never been any screenshots there's never been any you know anything other than just a couple little blurbs but from what it sounds like from what it seemed like they've you know the concept they were kind of playing with it were it was the I don't know, primordial soup of things that turned into like animal

crossing and Nintendo dogs and even like the me's a little bit. Like it's just kind of all of these concepts that went on to eventually be used in other Nintendo projects. And I think it would be really cool to have a better understanding of where that originated.

And I don't really suspect that we're ever like, Nintendo's not going to throw open their doors one of these days and just be like, come look at everything in the archive here. But But, you know, I'm hoping that someday maybe someone at Nintendo wants to just step forward and at least provide some context to that part of the story. I mean, we need a lot of asks again, right, guys? That was so good.

That is so important that that happened. It was an amazing resource. Yeah. I sourced a lot and ask a lot. Oh, it's my dream project. Come on. I don't know. I have stuff in my backlog that I

still need to get out there. I, that was like almost three years ago now. I drove up to, three years ago, I drove up to Minnesota and I interviewed the guys that created the Oregon Trail. And I wanted to do a big video about the Oregon, what's interesting about the Oregon Trail is, I think most of us remember the Apple II version with as a visual. and you're going across, you know, the western United States. But, I mean, there's a whole different version of that game before that one.

And so I think most people are familiar with the visual one, but they're also familiar with the people that created the original text version. But then a whole other guy made the visual version. So I talked to him, I talked to the guys that made the text version. I would love to get that out someday. by text version it's like teletype like there's no yeah yeah it's like you travel 30 miles today and then it's you just you would just type like keep going or you know I said oh it started

raining you're delayed a day and then you just get like your next coming that was very basic I mean you wrote it in like two weeks so you know but yeah that was now I would love to finish that one day there's always stuff in the backbook you've given people something to bug you about. Why would you do this to yourself? I'm in grad school right now for public history and I was like, maybe you should sit on this and make this my graduate thesis. It's kind of what

I'm planning to do. I don't really have a single holy grail that I would go after, but what I would really love is to be able to spend like four months with an interpreter just in Japan going to his many developers as I could possibly find

and embed myself at a ghost studio like Tose for a week just to see what it's like there and like to look at their glass showcase all the games they secretly worked on to say oh now I understand like this is the loadstone

but yeah just having that kind of access to people who worked on games a long time ago I find that in Japan especially people who worked on games in the 80s are always amazed when someone from overseas comes and wants to talk to them about it. They're like, why do you care about this thing that I did? This was so long ago, and it was just like a thing that I did, who cares? But you start talking to them, and all kinds of interesting

things came out. Like, I've had so many interviews where I go and I want to talk to someone about one thing, but just because I did a little research and kind of knew some of the other stuff that was tangentially related, I would mention that, and then all of a sudden the flood gates would open, and they were like, oh, well, this is the thing that I really loved. Like, You know, talking to the composer of Castle Baby III about the music, I mentioned, you know, the special chip that was in the Japanese version of Castle Media 3. And then he just, like, lit up and started, like, drawing diagrams of how the sawtooth waves worked and all the new sound jammed. And he just got super, super into it. And, you know, that was a feast for me.

I've eaten off of that for years. And it was just totally incidental to what I was doing. So, yeah, that's what I would love is just to have those opportunities laid out ahead of me and not have any other commitments to worry about just to focus. on that, that would be amazing. So much research could be done. It's just so many anecdotes and so much information. But, you know, it's a lot to ask. I'm going to give anyone who wants to do this research a quick interview tip,

a couple quick interview tips, because they're ones that have been really helpful to me. And you mentioned he kind of lit up and started, you know, it really started like making his memory work in new ways and get re-engaged. And the two things that I've learned, ask. them to draw the layout of their office and ask them where they used to eat lunch. It just kind of sets them back in that, like, it puts

them back in the time that they were working on that stuff. It's like, I don't know, something kind of magic about it. I love it. I have another question over here. So, beginning of your presentation, you were talking about using the way back machine as a point of research,

do you find your able to find a lot of lost video content from the front websites like the old T. Part, TV, game trailers, media's harder media doesn't do quite as well on the way back machine necessarily than like text does they're okay with images

but like video it really depends on where the images came from it depends on how far back you're going to yeah video I've really never gotten anything video but images sometimes you know a little bit about

yeah I mean the way back machine is incredible, incredible resource, but it's not perfect because image hosting stuff goes away and links get broken and it's a very good sort of messy thing that we all rely heavily on. Yeah, even for sites like IGN, they tend to have images and media hosted on separate servers from the content. So, you know, once those servers go away, you may be able to pull up the page, but it's just going to give you a broken image. Right. And I mean, you worked at OneUp. OneUp.com is horrible on the way back machine.

Yeah, it doesn't work a lot of it. It mostly doesn't work. It's only about two years of mic for your loss. Oh, yeah, no, I know. If you go back and try to read, like, review from it, you might be able to get to the front page of the review that was broken up into four pages so that you would keep clicking.

So, yeah, it's very bad. All right, we've got five minutes, so is there another question? Maybe I have the PlayStation shirt. Okay, question will you here? just released a really cool piece of research and history research and as a result of that

somebody came forward and I didn't know it was just enough already through some new piece of information that like blew up your conclusion or something like that would you're reaction to be closer to like oh my god did all this word of this guy blew it up or wow this is amazing right now because there's got

the truth and I can well two things can be true I'm sorry how that would be Yeah I've had a couple I mean I'm sitting on one thing right now Where some new stuff has come up And it doesn't really invalidate the earlier stuff

But it's like there is more to the story That I would like to add on to And that's a good and a bad thing I'm glad that the story can continue But I'm also like I have to do more work now Yeah for me I'm always happy to see more information come out and more factual, accurate information come out.

But also, usually it comes out right after I've published something. I'm like, oh, it's another way I have more work to do instead. Why couldn't have this been, like, two weeks ago? That would have been great. Yeah. So let's do one more question and then call the rap. So I keep seeing this quote going around from Miyamoto, or is that? Bad video game is bad.

Oh, you know what is. So, you know, what do we do or do you have any any of them about reliteration and misinformation? False history. So I used to get really, like, kind of upset about this, about just the amount of bad information that was out there. The one that I always used as an example that upset me was the Gumpet-Ekoy, the inventor of the Game Boy and Game and Watch,

among many other things, you know, Nintendo Luminary, was that he was hired as a janitor. And he worked his way up from janitor at Nintendo all the way to the head of the R&D1. I forgot the story. Yeah. I heard of janitor. Yes. So Gung-Pay-Koi went to electrical engineering college, and he was an electrical engineer.

He was hired to maintain their equipment. And, you know, that's something that bothered me a lot. But, I mean, especially as I've kind of gotten to work with the Video Game History Foundation, I think that it's really hard to get good information. Like, there's not great sources out there. And so are people bad game historians sometimes? But yes, but it's not their fault. You know, like, it's hard to get really good sources

and to get really good accurate information. I mean, the best thing you can do is really just try to debunk things and share it. And, I mean, we're not going to be able to just stamp out misinformation in the world. I think we can all agree. Pat, but, you know, we can certainly do our part in laying out how we came to those conclusions and finding them. I don't know if you guys have

any ideas on how to not make things that are not true go away. I don't think that... I don't know how possible that is. I don't think you can. And I think really the best thing to do is to take a delicate touch, because if you go out, swinging and just say, like, you're all wrong,

why are you so stupid? This is bad information. It's not going to win any hearts. So really the best thing you can do is just put the correct information out there and reinforce it and just make sure that that, you know, the actual facts proliferate. And that's really, I don't know what you can do against misinformation besides just propagate information. Yeah. And history, my favorite definition of history is history is the memory of things said in the past. And so even people that were involved in these things we want to talk about, memory is a thing. Maybe they

don't remember it that well. Maybe they're misremembering. So that's a big part of it too. You have to, you have to, you can't just take people out their words sometimes. Maybe they don't remember it that well. I mean, in one video I did, I talked about the origin of Mario character names. I think Mia Loto has said for 30 years that he created, he came up with the name Donkey Kong. And, you know, I, he's repeated this over and over. And I don't know if it's just easy for him to say that. It makes things easier for him, but like you go to the court records of the Donkey Kong Universal Lawsuit and there's depositions where Mee and Moe was like, I didn't know what you do with it.

So, you know, it's sometimes it's a memory thing. Or maybe it's just five or no longer. But probably, yeah. All right, and with us disparaging one of the greatest video creators of all of the I think that is a wrap for this panel. So thanks everyone for your time. Thank you. Thank you.

You're going to see. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I'm going to be able to be.