"Most houses were rich in the '80s in Japan, in the bubble," Redon says. Cover after cover is imagination fuel that evokes a breathless "I need to play this." They look so polished it's surprising that back then, you didn't need to sell all that many disks for a game to be a big success. "Enix is a very great publisher, but this is not the history everyone knows," Redon tells me as we flip through the covers of '80s RPGs and adventure games. Many other PC developers abandoned ship for the more lucrative Famicom. The Game Preservation Society exists to make sure they aren't forgotten. Because off the island, Japan's PC games are all but completely unknown. When he begins to talk about Enix, he slips into the role of a storyteller born into an oral tradition, passing down a lifetime of knowledge accumulated in Japan that could only be accumulated in Japan. Any game I point to he can tell a story about, casually dishing out some of the history of who made it and why it's special. The mission of the Game Preservation Society, the non-profit he co-founded several years ago, is to collect, archive, and protect Japan's PC games, most of them made in the '80s and '90s before consoles took over and doomed games like Jesus to obscurity. Like most of the thousands of games in Redon's collection, I've never heard of Jesus until he shows it to me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |