Category: Videogames

The other day some colleagues and I got out of work early and went to recall the good old days to 8bit cafe, a very special cafeteria plenty of stuff related to 90’s video games.

Sign at the entrance to 8bit cafe.

Soon after entering the cafeteria we saw shelves plenty of video game consoles (mostly 8 and 16 bit consoles), accessories, video game boxes and tons of really cool stuff capable of evoking nostalgic feelings to a whole generation of gamers from the 90’s. We sat down around a table in the back part of the cafeteria and I started fooling around with a Power Glove that was next to us while we were enjoying the music from the first Zelda for the original Game Boy.

Testing the Power Glove.

Testing the Power Glove.

Our new revolutionary invention! I hope Steve Jobs doesn’t steal our idea 😉

The waitress came and gave us the menu. They had special cocktails with names such as “Doctor Mario” or “Princess Peach Temptation”.

The special cocktails.

Miwa and I decide to try the “Doctor Mario”, and this is what we got!:

These are the four pixelated coasters that we got. Cool!

The capsules part of our Dr. Mario cocktails.

I am not sure what were the cocktail ingredients but they were pretty good. And then the time arrived when we had to take the Dr. Mario capsules: Which one do you take, the red one or the blue one?

I took the red one, but it didn’t work! I will have to keep trying. To honor the cocktails and to make the most out of the capsules effects, we started our gaming session playing Dr. Mario.

There were approximately a hundred Famicom games and another hundred Super Famicom games available. There was also a varied selection of Sega Mega Drive, Sega Master System and PlayStation video games.

The next game we played was Final Fight 2.

Final Fight, great game.

Kawabe’s hands in action; he easily kicked our ass playing Puyo Puyo.

We also played some Mario Kart and Romancing Saga.

And also a couple of Dragon Ball Z battles.

After two intense hours we had to leave the gaming area so that other clients could play and we went back to our table. Next to every table there was a note pad, some color marker pens and some manga volumes that invited you to start drawing. It amazes me how many Japanese people can draw very well. I am pretty sure that the drawing ability of the average Japanese person is much higher than that of a person from any other country in the world.

I think that more attention is given to artistic education at young ages and I guess that being surrounded by manga all the time also helps people getting motivated to practice. My colleague Kawabe told us that during his college years he spent most of his free time drawing manga; however he told us that he never achieved the necessary level to do it professionally.

Kawabe drawing.

Kawabe’s drawing (after just two minutes).

Notice the lower shelf plenty of Game Center CX DVDs.

A Sharp 8bit video game console.

This is a USB mouse; the hat is the mouse button.

A Takahashi Meijin caricature in on of the cafeteria walls. He recommends you to play only one hour a day.

Shelves full of video game consoles and games from the last century.

They even had a Virtual Boy on display, but it was not available to play.

I had a great time at 8bit cafe. What games would you choose to recall the nostalgia from the good old days?

You can also check an excellent article on gaming monitors.

Mexican businessman Carlos Slim has recently been ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest person in the world. In Japan the richest person is Hiroshi Yamauchi, the ex-president of Nintendo, who transformed a small company dedicated to the hanafuda (traditional Japanese card game) card-making business into the biggest video game empire in the world.

At the end of the 80’s and during the 90’s Japanese companies like Sega, Nintendo, Capcom or Sony conquered the planet with their video games reaching a market share of more than 50% of the global market. Japan was the factory of dreams of millions of children around the world. According to a poll carried out in 1995 among children of more than 100 countries, Mario was the most recognized fiction character in the world, even more than Mickey Mouse.

Nowadays Japan is still a video game giant but has lost a lot of the strength that once had. Japanese video game companies have gone from controlling 50% of the global market to just controlling the 20%. The two main causes of this change are the arrival of powerful mobile devices developed by American and European companies, like for example the iPhone, able to run video games of similar or even better quality than that of games developed exclusively for portable gaming machines like the PSP or the Nintendo DSi; and on the other hand the success of Microsoft Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360, becoming the first two successful video game consoles developed outside of Japan.

The Japanese home market is really important for the video game industry. In terms of sales Japan is usually considered as a “continent” along with United States and Europe. In 1993 the consumption of video games in Japan was so high that with a third of the population of United States more games were sold in Japan than in United States. In 2010 Japan is still a big consumer, mostly of turn-based RPGs like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, but in United States eight times more video games are sold, what supposes a radical change from the outlook of a decade ago. Satoru Iwata, the current president of Nintendo, announced in a press conference that the lifestyle of Japanese people is more and more “occupied” and that the people has less and less time to play. Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo is taking measures to create entertainment that can adapt to these new needs of the market but at the same time innovate in new ways like they did with the Wii. In the digital world where borders between television, computer, music player and cellphone are more and more diffuse, it is more and more easy and cheap to compete globally with software products, the rules are changing and Japanese software and hardware developers are having a hard time keeping their status as kings of the video games.

During the year 2009 the video game industry was not only in crisis in Japan, but all over the world. What will happen in 2010? Will the big Japanese companies regain market share with the arrival of the eight generation of video game consoles or they will keep on loosing market against the Android and the iPhone?

Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Other articles published in El País:

• The Galapagos Syndrome
• Casio reinventing itself with every change
• Sony “secret” labs
• Vehicle to Vehicle Communication (V2V)

I took these photos in Aoyama in one of the main offices of SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment), the biggest subsidiary of Sony Corporation. After not such a good start the PlayStation 3 looks like is gaining momentum and sales are going up slowly; however, in my opinion, it is still a little bit too expensive because the production costs are still to high compared to the Wii and the Xbox 360. In the Japanese market the PS3 is lately catching up thanks to RPGs (very popular among Japanese men and women) like Final Fantasy XIII, and games like Resident Evil 5.