3.1 Birth of the Personal Computer

In the late 1970s to early 1980s, computers for individual hobbyists were called micoms.Footnote 1 The TK-80, released by NEC on August 3, 1970, is called the originator of the Japanese microcomputer. However, the TK-80 was sold as a study kit (the TK in the model number means a training kit) to master the 8080 compatible CPU manufactured by NEC and was not a computer made for individual use. The product was a semi-completed product that consisted of a motherboard with a semiconductor, a decimal keypad for direct input of mechine language programs, a LED for displaying results, and an I/O port.

The MB-6880(nickname: Basic Master) from Hitachi was released in 1978, and the PC-8001 from NEC and the MZ-80K from Sharp were released in 1979 as complete PCs with the main unit stored in a case and connected to a keypad. Table 3.1 shows the specifications of the first 8-bit PCs. The CPU is not much different from the next generation of PCs and game-dedicated machines, but the graphics function was weak. The CPU is not much different from the next generation of PCs and game-oriented machines, but the graphics function was weak. It was extremely unsuitable for gaming, and its position was taken over by newly released machines in the 1980s.

Table 3.1 Specifications of the first generation 8-bit PCs
Full size table

3.2 The Early Days of the PC Game Industry

3.2.1 Shops and Magazines

In the late 1970s and 1980s, at the dawn of the widespread use of personal computers, simple programming environments in BASIC language were provided, but the number of people who were able to create and use their own programs was quite small among those who purchased personal computers.

For these people, it is natural that there will be a business that sells the completed programs. In the radio shops and wireless communication equipment shopsFootnote 2 that were selling PCs at the time, programs developed by the store workers or brought in by customers hanging out in the stores were sold in the form of recorded data on a cassette tape. This is exemplified by companies such as Tsukumo Electric and Fuji Audio, both of which have stores in Akihabara. The games were sold in stores, but they also sold them by placing a mail order advertisement in the computer magazines that the users read and sending the payment by registered mail.

Many of these PC games were sold at the level of “made in one night by a shopkeeper who knows a lot about PCs or a young man who hangs out in a store,” and most of them were simple at best, or cheap and lacking in depth at worst.Footnote 3 Because of the lack of game-oriented performance (especially graphics performance), there was a clear difference when compared to arcade games such as Space Invaders (Taito), which had been released a year earlier in 1978. Even so, when there were no other options, the games sold well.Footnote 4 As the 1980s progressed, the graphics capabilities of PCs improved, and the game content became more sophisticated. As the game programs sold became more sophisticated, the production and sales of programs in shops were naturally eliminated. One of the companies that survived by focusing on software development was Hudson, a wireless communication equipment store in Sapporo.

Another source of game software in the early days was personal computer magazines. I/O (Kohgaku-sha, October 1976-present), Gekkan maikon (Monthly MyCom) (Dempa Publications, October 1977–April 1995), and other PC magazines published at the time contained lists of programs, some of which were games. PC users played with the programs published in the magazines by typing them in with their own hands. However, the published programs were long, and it was necessary to enter decimal machine language program printed over several pages. Therefore, there was a demand for cassette tapes with the programs already recorded, and these became available for sale.Footnote 5

In the 1980s, the first issue of Maikon BASIC Magazine (Mycom BASIC Magazine) (Dempa Publications, July 1982–May 2003—known as Bê-Maga) was published, which publishes short (up to two-pages) programs in BASIC language submitted by readers. The magazine received submissions from a wide range of people, from junior high and high school students to adults, and was appreciated by junior high and high school students who could not afford to buy game software frequently and served as a model for live programming. In addition, the magazine was very popular because it included programs for minor computers for which no game software was available on the market. Some of the people who submitted excellent works were scouted by the editorial department and were in charge of transferring arcade games for sale at the Dempa Publications. In the early days of the game industry, many developers were scouted from magazines.

3.2.2 The Birth of Software Companies

As the spread of PCs has progressed, companies from other fields have joined the development and sales of games or have started new businesses. Although there are many companies that have already withdrawn from the game industry, the following section describes those companies that are still in the game industry.

KOEI was founded in 1978 as a sales company of dyes and industrial chemicals unrelated to games, but it also started out as a rental record store. In 1980, Yoichi Erikawa, the founder of the company and famous for his designer name Kō Shibusawa, purchased a PC, which led to the start of PC sales and business software business. In 1981, at the dawn of the company, KOEI released Kawanakajima no Kassen (The Battle of Kawanakajima) for the PC-8001, indicating its orientation toward historical simulations from that time. KOEI established its position with the hit Nobunaga no Yabou (Nobunaga's Ambition) in 1983, selling many types of machines, from hobby PCs for home use such as the PC-8801 and the FM-7 to business PCs such as the FM-16β and the IBM-JX,Footnote 6 and later to Family Computer. In 1985, he released Aoki ookami to Shiroki Mejika (The Blue Wolf and the White Stag) and Sangokushi(The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) to establish his position as a leading historical simulator.

SystemSoft (the game division was taken over by Nippon Ichi Software in January 2020) was established in 1979. Initially, the company sold games as well as utility software for PCs. The Lode Runner (1983), a transfer from Apple II, became a big hit. In 1986, the company launched Gendai Dai-Senryaku (Modern Grand Strategy) and in 1989, Tenka Touitsu (Unification of the Whole Country), which were both successful in establishing its position in the simulation game market.

When Enix was founded in 1975 by its founder Yasuhiro Fukushima, it was a completely different business and had a different name. Fukuyama turned his attention to the booming PC market and changed the business model to PC cams in 1982, at which time the company name was changed to Enix. What differentiated Enix from other PC game companies was that it did not develop games on its own but focused on the business of finding and selling excellent games as a publisher. In September 1982, Enix held the first Game Hobby program contest. Although similar attempts had been made by other companies such as PC shops and PC magazines, the prize money for the contest was as high as 1 million yen for the winner and 3 million yen in total, and many excellent programs were submitted. In the end, a total of 13 titles were commercialized by adding the best program award Morita's Battle Field (Kazuo MoritaFootnote 7), the good program award Door Door (Koichi NakamuraFootnote 8), the best program award Marichan Kiki Ippatsu (Marichan's Clutch) (Tadashi MakimuraFootnote 9), and other prize-winning works.Footnote 10

Nihon Falcom was established in 1981 as a PC introduction advisor company. From the very beginning, the company was involved in game development, releasing games in various fields, and experimenting in the market. After the hit Dragon Slayer in 1984, Nihon Falcom established its position in action RPG. In 1985, Xanadu shipped a total of 400,000 copies. In 1987 and the following year, with the release of Ys and Ys2, the company made a bold shift from a focus on solving difficult riddles to a focus on storytelling,Footnote 11 which had a significant impact on subsequent games, making it one of the top game companies of the time.

Square was founded in 1983 as the software development division of an electrical engineering company owned by founder Masashi Miyamoto's father. Masashi Miyamoto set up a salon in Hiyoshi, Yokohama, with the latest PCs of the time, and gathered students there. One of the students who came was Hisashi Suzuki, who had started working as an assistant at a record rental store run by KOEI, and was now helping with the PC gaming business. Square developed adventure games such as Will: Death Trap II (1985) and Alpha (1986), as well as the RPG Cruse Chaser Blasty (1986), for which the character design and animation were handled by Sunrise. The company placed emphasis on graphics from the time it was established, as evidenced by the fact that part of the screen was animated. Square was established relatively late, and after its first entry into the Family Computer market, THEXDAR (a port of a PC game released by Game Arts in 1985), it quickly migrated to home consoles. As a result, the company was only in the PC game market for a short period of time, which is a little different from other PC game companies.

3.3 Convergence of the PC Market

In the 1980s, various companies entered the business of manufacturing and selling personal computers. At that time, the PC was a very new product that had not yet established a market, and not only companies that manufactured large computers, but also companies from various fields such as home appliances, toys, and start-up companies participated in the industry. The details of the history of the Japanese PCs at that time are not relevant to the main topic of the history of the game industry, so they will be omitted. However, from the viewpoint of the history of the game industry, it is important to note that in the early 1980s, when products from various companies had run their course, the PCs sold could be grouped into three main categories.

The first is an 8-bit hobby PC. These include NEC’s PC-6001Footnote 12 and PC-8801, Fujitsu’s FM-7, and Sharp’s MZ-2000 and X1. This is a group of PCs that individuals purchase for their own taste and entertainment. PCs other than the PC-6001 are assumed to be connected to a dedicated monitor. The screen resolution is relatively high, and computer graphics can be enjoyed, but they do not have the sprite function that is standard in game consoles.

The second is the personal computer for gaming. These include the Takara's game Pacocom which was the OEM of SORD M5, the SC-3000 from Sega, and the MSXFootnote 13 PC from various companies. Although the price of a hobby PC was lower than that of a 16-bit PC, a full set of a PC (main unit + display + data recorder) cost several times the starting salary of a new employee.Footnote 14 On the other hand, game PCs were made available as monitors for home TVs, and the price was lowered to less than 100,000 yen to make them more appealing to general households. Since games are the most common application in many households, a splicing function that allows fast re-drawing of a large number of characters on the screen is standard. Games are mainly offered in ROM cartridge format, which does not require waiting time for loading and is easy for children to handle. For this reason, a slot for ROM cartridges is provided in the main body of the PC.Footnote 15 In terms of performance, the CPU is a Z80, the graphics are equivalent to the resolution of a TV screen plus a sprite function, and the music is mostly PSG sound sources with three sounds that can be played simultaneously. Compared to a dedicated display, a TV has a lower screen resolution and fewer characters can be displayed on the screen. It was not suitable for advanced programming and business operations. For these reasons, PCs connected to televisions were naturally positioned as entry-level PCs or gaming PCsFootnote 16 and were sold at a much lower price than full-fledged PCs.

The third is the 16-bit personal computer. These include NEC’s PC-9801 and Fujitsu’s FM-16β. At that time, there were computers called Off-Coms that were designed to be used in offices, but 16-bit PCs had slightly lower performance than the cheapest Off-Coms and were therefore cheaper. Many 16-bit computers were used for business purposes in companies and universities. Since 16-bit PCs were mainly used for administrative work and scientific and technological calculations, their graphics were highly detailed for drawing graphs, but they were weak in quick screen switching and multi-color display, and only beep sound was used for music.Footnote 17 In the early days, 16-bit PCs were extremely expensive despite their insufficient graphics performance for gaming, so there were few individual hobbyists. In the late 1980s, when the graphics were enhanced and the price decreased, it became the center of hobbyists' for personal computers.

As a market for games, there was competition in each category of PC, with the PC-9801 being the standard for 16-bit machines and the MSX being the standard for gaming PCs. In the hobby PC market, which was the largest of the three categories, the PC-8801 occupied a central position. However, many games developed for the PC-8801 were also ported to the X1 and FM-7. In addition, there were a few cases where games developed for the X1 and FM-7 were ported to the other two models. Reflecting this situation, the PC-8801, X1, and FM-7 were known as the “8-bit trinity.”

Table 3.2 lists the basic performance of the mainstream machines in each category in 1983, when the weakest PCs were eliminated, and the situation converged to some extent. The PC-9801 had a fine screen resolution of 640 × 400, but it was not suitable for gaming because it could not change the screen at high speed and did not have a sprite function to change characters quickly. What was emphasized was the CPU speed required for business operations. In war simulation games such as Nobunaga no Yabou (KOEI) and Gendai Dai-Senryaku (System Soft), the high CPU speed shortened the computer’s thinking time, and play was more comfortable than in the PC-8801 version. The simulation game was also in tune with the tastes of the older generation, which was thought to be the majority of PC-9801 owners and established a unique position in the PC game market.

Table 3.2 Basic performance of PCs for gaming around 1983
Full size table

The internal architecture of the 8-bit trinities is quite different, and the FM-7 even has a different CPU. However, they were almost identical in terms of screen resolution, and the games were ported to each other to maintain homogeneity in visual appearance. The game genres released varied from action, adventure, role playing, and simulation. They occupied a central position in PC games.

The MSX is characterized by many simultaneous colors, but the resolution of the screen is low. Therefore, MSX was not very good at simulations, adventures, and role-playing games that required many characters to be displayed on the screen. On the other hand, MSX had a sprite function, so many action games were sold.

3.3.1 Market Convergence Through Competition and Selection

Check the current market conditions from the rankings in game magazines. Table 3.3 shows the top 10 from the ranking corner of a PC game called “Best Hit 21” published in the March 1985 issue of the game magazine Beep (SoftBank).

Table 3.3 PC game ranking in the March 1985 issue of Beep, a game magazine
Full size table

In 1985, as shown in Table 3.3, the market selection is still in progress. This can be read from the following two points:

  1. 1.

    The medium through which the game is provided is diverse. Specifically, there are ROM-cartridges, an analog cassette tape, 5-inch floppy disks, and 8-inch floppy disks.

    At that time, floppy disk drives were expensive peripheral equipment, and there were still many individual users who did not have them. They stored the data on a cassette tape and read it with a data recorder (or a radio cassette if they did not have one). On the other hand, 8-inch floppy disks were used for the PCs used in companies. However, the volume of 8-inch floppy disks was small, and they disappeared from the business scene when 5-inch floppy disks with the same volume and even larger volume appeared on the market.

    In addition, when the successor models with a standard 5-inch floppy disk drive are released, the game with the cassette tape will disappear.Footnote 18 Except for MSX, which had characteristics close to gaming consoles and was supplied on a ROM cartridge, games were now supplied on easy-to-manage 5-inch floppy disks.

  2. 2.

    There are many different types of machines that are compatible with the games that appear in the ranking. A total of 16 PC names,Footnote 19 including those that do not appear in the Top 10, appear in the ranking.

    In arcade games, where computers are replaced in each game and high-performance hardware appears one after another, the rate of hardware evolution (rate of selection) is extremely fast. On the other hand, in the case of PC games, the rate of hardware selection is extremely slow. This is because, as shown below, the interests of manufacturers selling PCs, users purchasing games, and companies developing and selling games are aligned in their actions:

    • PC manufacturers: To inherit software assets developed in the past, compatibility with previous models is emphasized in personal computers. For this reason, it has been difficult to create bold new models.

    • Users: PCs are much more expensive than home video game consoles and cannot be replaced easily.

    • Game companies: Since most games are developed on a small scale, it does not take much time for the companies to transfer them to other PCs. In addition, since the number of each type of PC in use was not that large, it was not efficient from a profit perspective to develop for a single type of PC.

Thus, in the early days when games for PCs became a business, the number of units sold for each type of machine was small, and it was common to transfer a game to multiple types of machines for sale. As the results of the PC sales competition became clearer and the winners and losers became clearer, the number of PCs on which games were sold was slowly but surely decreased.

The graph in Fig. 3.1 shows how many of the 20 top-ranked game software titles of each yearFootnote 20 can be played on each PC by model name. Data was from Yomigaeru PC-8801 Densetsu (The Revival of the PC-8801, ASCII, 2006).Footnote 21

Fig. 3.1
A clustered bar graph of numbers versus P C game titles. The highest bars are of P C 8801, with the highest value of 17 in 1985, followed by 16 in 1986 and 15 in 1984. The lowest bars are of P C 8001, with the highest value of 3 in 1983 and 1984.

Number of PC game titles supported by model among the top 20 PC game titles of the year

Full size image

The PC-8001 and PC-6001 series, which appeared at the dawn of the PC era, had several games that were transferred to many PC models, but the PC-6001 series disappeared from the lineup in 1986 and the PC-8001 series disappered in 1987. The MZ series appears to have a certain number of machines because it is a collection of several models. However, for each model, the highest number was five for the MZ-2200 in 1985, and MZ series disappeared after one for the MZ-2500 in 1987 and 1988. Other PCs were various, but all of them were ported games that were also sold for other models, and none of them were made exclusively.

The PC-8801 series has the largest number of ranked-in titles. The X1 series and FM-7 series, which are mostly transferred from the PC-8801, also have many titles in the lineup. At this stage, the PC-9801’s originality was limited to simulation games where the CPU’s thinking speed could be utilized.

3.4 Conclusion: Early Independence of Japan’s PC Game Industry

The launch of the PC in Japan was about a year later than the launch of the Apple II in the USA (1977). To that extent, Japan also lagged in the start-up of the PC game industry. However, the influence of the USA, the pioneer, is not as great as it should be. In the Japanese PC game market, some of the hit titles from Apple II and other foreign PCs were transferred to domestic PCs, but more than that, the transfer from Japanese arcade games was active. Most of the titles imported from overseas were action games, while PC-specific genres such as RPGs and adventure games were either not imported at all or were introduced very late.Footnote 22 This was because electronic games existed in Japan before computer games, and arcaded games had also developed. In addition, the early days of the popularity of the PC coincided with the big boom of Space Invaders. The demand for “game center-like action games” to be played on the PC was also a major factor.

Returning to the ranking of 3-3 again, confirm the trend from the appearing title.

First prize was Lode Runner, which was the big hit title of the time. Lode Runner was released for Apple II from Brøderbund, USA, but because of being ported to numerous Japanese PCs, it became a bigger hit in Japan than in the USA.Footnote 23 The game content was an action puzzle, which gained popularity due to the ability to edit the stage oneself.

In second place is The Fire Crystal, the sequel to The Black Onyx (seventh place). The Black Onyx is the first hit RPG made in Japan, and it is a title that played a major role in the spread of RPGs in Japan.

LEGENDS OF STARARTHURFootnote 24 (sixth place) is an adventurer game, Professional Mahjong (eighth place) is a table game, and the rest are action games. Two of the titles are from Arcades, and the other two are from overseas. The remaining three titles are originals. Although omitted for the sake of space, there are many PC-original action games ranked lower than 11th place.

It can be confirmed that the PC game industry in Japan has developed its own unique style of products, which are not mere transplants, while relying on America for game genres and systems, and has achieved its own development. RPGs, adventure games, which are unique to PC games, became commonplace only after they were released for sale on home consoles such as Family Computer.