Japan didn’t invent the first computer game. That accolade goes to “Space War!”, a game created in 1962 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
“From hardware to software, controllers to culture, no country has had a bigger influence on console gaming.”
After decades of dominance, however, Japan’s cultural clout waned during the early 2000s.
“As the appeal of video games grew larger and larger, it’s not surprising that the culture — and development — would no longer be dominated by a specific region,” explains Harris.
A renaissance, however, could be upon us with Japanese giants Sony and Nintendo both making comebacks.
Released in 2013, Sony’s PlayStation 4 became the best-selling home console of this generation in just 18 months, and so far it’s the only one that can be paired with a virtual reality headset — the Sony PSVR, which has sold over one million units.
Nintendo is also breaking new ground with the Switch, a hybrid between a home console and a handheld device, while its accompanying “Legend of Zelda” game has received widespread critical acclaim.
Here, CNN picks the eight most important Japanese video game inventions of all time.
Space Invaders スペースインベーダー (arcade game by Taito) 1978
One of the first arcade games, “Space Invaders” ignited the video game craze in Japan.
The very first “Star Wars” movie had hit theaters weeks before its release, and that cultural event combined with the game’s simple formula — shoot descending aliens with a laser cannon — made it an instant hit.
“It was such an enormous success that, for a time, it was believed to have caused a shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan — only a rumor, but one that shows how popular ‘Space Invaders’ was,” says Harris.
By the end of 1978, Taito had made $600 million in Japan and installed 100,000 Space Invader machines — with some arcades dedicated solely to the game.
“Space Invaders” introduced the now-common game mechanic of enemies moving faster as the player shoots them, but the popular feature was, surprisingly, the consequence of hardware limitations rather than design preference: as the player shot aliens off the screen, the CPU had fewer objects to render and could therefore process the game faster.
Pac-Man パックマン (arcade game by Namco) 1980
Released just two years after “Space Invaders,” “Pac-Man” entered a market dominated by shoot ’em-ups and pioneered the “maze chase” genre, which has since been imitated countless times.
“If Space Invaders put gaming on the map, ‘Pac-Man’ showed that this medium was here to stay,” says Harris.
In the late 1990s Twin Galaxies, which tracks video game world record scores, visited used game auctions and counted how many times the average “Pac-Man” machine had been played. Based on those findings and the total number of machines that were manufactured, the organization estimated that the game had been played more than 10 billion times in the 20th century.
Its creator, Toru Iwatani, once jokingly circulated the story that the ghost-eating yellow blob was inspired by a pizza with two slices removed, but later revealed it comes from a rounded version of the Japanese character for “mouth,” which looks like a square.
Originally titled “Puck Man,” the name was changed so that in America nobody could cheekily vandalize the “P” into an “F” on the arcade cabinets.
Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (home console by Nintendo) 1983
Better known as the Famicom, this console quickly became a Japanese icon: “It was such a success that by the end of the decade, a Famicom could be found in 37% of Japan’s homes,” says Harris.
