{"id":123,"date":"2014-08-24T07:09:43","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T07:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=123"},"modified":"2026-06-18T00:52:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T04:52:47","slug":"the-untold-history-of-japanese-video-game-developers-impressions-of-the-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=123","title":{"rendered":"The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers &#8211; Impressions of the new book"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Title: The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers<\/li>\n<li>Author: John Szczepaniak<\/li>\n<li>Book<\/li>\n<li>Published in August, 2014<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This book was kickstarted in 2013, last year, and the final book &#8212; or rather, the first volume of it &#8212; finally released recently to backers.\u00a0 The book will be available soon on Amazon, but right now it&#8217;s backers only. I backed the kickstarter, and got my copy (Gold edition cover) a couple of days ago.\u00a0 The book is a collection of interviews with Japanese game developers; the author used the kickstarter money to go to Japan and interview as many people as he could.\u00a0 He had issues, and him and his initial interpreters have been having something of a war for several months now.\u00a0 I won&#8217;t get into all of it, but if what he says is true they&#8217;re awful, but he probably did not help the situation by so publicly criticizing them so harshly.\u00a0 Also, the project was originally supposed to be one book, but this volume is over 500 pages and it&#8217;s only something like a third of the material.\u00a0 I just hope that future volumes cost a lot less than this one did&#8230; they should, with how the interviews are done already.\u00a0 I have not read the whole book yet, but I have read parts of all of the interviews, and have a reasonably good sense of the volume. I won&#8217;t go in to detail about most of the interviews, though; that is best saved for the reader!\u00a0 Because this book really is a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese videogame history.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, despite the problems between Szczepaniak and the interpreters, the book released, or this volume did at least, and it&#8217;s pretty good!\u00a0 He mostly did a good job with the interviews. It&#8217;s quite interesting, and I definitely will want to read the other volumes too.\u00a0 Some of the interviews are about games or things I know about and others aren&#8217;t, but that is obviously the intent, to try to cover anything he can, and not only the popular stuff.\u00a0 That&#8217;s great.\u00a0 Of course, I&#8217;m sure that people from today-popular companies would be less likely to be able to talk to the press like these people do&#8230; there are no Nintendo people here, and this does not surprise me &#8212; Nintendo is, of course, infamously reticent about talking to the press, unfortunately.\u00a0 But he talked to everyone he could, and apart from some &lt;REDACTED&gt; segments (some of which could be quite interesting, such as the one about Vic Ireland&#8230; ah well), it&#8217;s all here in the book.<\/p>\n<p>So who is here?\u00a0 The main focus is on older developers who worked on games in the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s, not more recent projects.\u00a0 This makes sense; the point is recording earlier Japanese gaming history, while the people who made that history are still here. It&#8217;s a valuable and important effort!\u00a0 As some people in the book make clear, many of the Japanese themselves don&#8217;t seem to consider recording this kind of thing to be as important as some Westerners do.\u00a0 There are some cultural reasons behind this, explained in the book, but also videogames are a recent medium, and many do not appreciate their importance.\u00a0 Many of the people interviewed also often don&#8217;t appreciate that Westerners might be fans of them or their games; many of these developers know little of Western fans, even for popular series like Lunar.\u00a0 There are exceptions of course, like Megaman series creator Keiji Inafune who is a noted critic of Japanese game-industry insularity, but most of the rest of these guys are not like that.\u00a0 And it is all guys, unsurprisingly.<\/p>\n<p>Most interviews are with Japanese developers, but one chapter is with a French guy who lives in Japan and runs a game preservation group, which is trying to make accurate backup copies of all old Japanese computer games.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a challenging task &#8212; making archival backups of floppy disks is no easy matter, and floppies do NOT last well at all over time, they&#8217;re already breaking down.\u00a0 Also, huge numbers of games are created for computers, and it is not all well documented like it is for consoles.\u00a0 For console games it is easy to get a list of, or a physical collection of, a complete library, but computer games are an entirely different story.\u00a0 It&#8217;s probably even worse in Japan than in the West, since computers never were as popular as they became here in the West.\u00a0 This means even fewer copies of the games, and trying to preserve all Western computer games before those stupid floppy disks all break down is an impossible enough task!\u00a0 But this guy is trying to do it, and that is very cool, and important.\u00a0 As he says, someone has to record those games while we can.\u00a0 As I said earlier, some of the interviews are with well-known people, like Inafune or ZUN (of Touhou fame), while others are with little-known artists or programmers who worked for various studios large and small.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a mix, and that is great because this book is a real cross-section of the whole industry, not just of the popular console games.\u00a0 This is a much more interesting book than it would be if it was only bigger names.<\/p>\n<p>I should discuss some of the core interviews, but that would be hard without writing far too much.\u00a0 Every interview has something interesting in it.\u00a0 I will say a bit about some of them now, though; I need to, that is the subject of the book!\u00a0 Jun Nagashima of Falcom discusses Popful Mail.\u00a0 He didn&#8217;t know whether there had been a Western release, typically, and the conversation about development is interesting. Kouji Yokota of Shade (and previously Quintet) discusses The Granstream Saga, as well as earlier titles. Good game.\u00a0 You&#8217;d think he&#8217;d know that the Quintet games have a popular following outside of Japan, but not really, apparently.\u00a0 His details about Lunar 2, and the characters he worked on who were changed for the worse in the PS1\/Saturn remake, was also interesting; I love that game, of course.\u00a0 Katsutoshi Eguchi of WARP discusses Kenji Eno and his unique works.\u00a0 Yoshiko Kimura talks about UFO, Rule of Rose, Chulip, and L.O.L., all very unique games.\u00a0 The Rule of Rose development details are great.\u00a0 For the long conversations with Yasuhito Saito, Takaki Kobayashi, and Keite Abe of dB-Soft, they are interesting because they are mostly about old Japanese computer games, a subject about which I know little. are all interesting.\u00a0 So are the rest of them, though!\u00a0 Another great section are the interviews with Masakuni Mitsuhachi (developer) and Kohei Ikeda (co-founder) of Game Arts.\u00a0 Among other things, they discuss the classics Silpheed and Thexder.\u00a0 One of the developers of the original Silpheed actually came to the US to help Sierra work on their PC\/Apple IIGS ports; quite rare, back then!\u00a0 As for Sega CD Silpheed, he describes how, indeed, the game is part-streamed video, and part-realtime polygons.\u00a0 Backrounds are mostly streamed, apart from destructible parts.\u00a0 There are also interviews with several more preservationists, including one man who has a huge collection of magazines and guidebooks for (Japanese) games.<\/p>\n<p>There is one more interview I would like to talk about.\u00a0 It&#8217;s not of a Japanese developer, but the short interview with Steven and William Rozner, makers of the PC Mega Man games, was quite cool.\u00a0 Szczepaniak says that the Inafune interview inspired him to look the DOS game programmers up, and they were willing to talk, something that previously was not the case!\u00a0 I got MM3 and MMX for the PC back in the early and mid &#8217;90s, and have always wondered what the story was behind them, MM3 particularly.\u00a0 This interview had more of it than I&#8217;d heard before.\u00a0 The detail about that MM3 was originally a different game with an early &#8217;90s eco theme made a lot of sense!\u00a0 I wish that he had asked some questions about the MMX and SSFII ports, but John only asks questions about MM1 and MM3.\u00a0 Fortunately the Rozners also talk about those later (1995) DOS ports, as well as the earlier original titles, but there were more questions about the PC ports of Mega Man X and Super SFII that should have been asked. Why the robot ride armor wasn&#8217;t in PC MMX isn&#8217;t mentioned, for instance.\u00a0 Ah well.\u00a0 Anyway, it&#8217;s a very good book, get it!<\/p>\n<p>The only real complaint I have about the book is that is that there are some spelling mistakes here and there; the book needed a bit more copy-editing.\u00a0 Perhaps the most unfortunate was misspelling Kenji Eno&#8217;s job title on the &#8220;noteworthy Japanese developers who have died&#8221; page, but there are more.\u00a0 Oh, and why isn&#8217;t John Szczepaniak&#8217;s first name on the cover and spine, only his last name?\u00a0 It&#8217;s kind of odd!\u00a0 It should say &#8220;Volume I&#8221; on the outside of the book as well, but it doesn&#8217;t, unfortunately.\u00a0 Otherwise, though, it&#8217;s good work.\u00a0 It was worth backing the book, regardless of the drama.\u00a0 Buy this book, and read it!\u00a0 It&#8217;s very interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers Author: John Szczepaniak Book Published in August, 2014 This book was kickstarted in 2013, last year, and the final book &#8212; or rather, the first volume of it &#8212; finally released &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/?p=123\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,188,189,8],"tags":[190,191,192,194,195,193],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews-gaming","category-books","category-reviews","tag-book","tag-books-2","tag-gaming-history","tag-interviews","tag-john-szczepaniak","tag-video-game-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackfalcongames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}