/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5500242]

Why did Japan dominate the early video game industry?

[Anonymous No.5500251]

They didn't. They dominated 3rd gen and up.

[Anonymous No.5500256]

The best western developers were PC developers, best Japanese developers were on consoles. It wasn't til gen 7 when PC developers started moving multiplatform that the playing field was leveled.

[Anonymous No.5500264]

Because SEGA

[Anonymous No.5500267]

>>5500251
i think 3rd gen still counts as early
>>5500256
but why did western developers move to PC? why were there no popular european or american consoles after atari fell?

[Anonymous No.5500270]

video games are for manchildren and after Japan was castrated post WWII, there was a huge market.
Naturally, as lazy millennials took over in the west, video games became more popular.

[Anonymous No.5500310]

>>5500267
>but why did western developers move to PC? why were there no popular european or american consoles after atari fell?
Because Westerners are lazy and stupid. It's a lot easier for a no-talent hack to create a game that looks good than it is to create one that plays good.

[Anonymous No.5500316]

>>5500310
t. shitskin

[Anonymous No.5500321]

>>5500242
Because you only care about Nintendo and kids

>>5500267
Because PCs are better

[Anonymous No.5500350]

>>5500242
If you mean the 3rd gen and up home console market then it's because most of the US home console makers that dominated the 1st and 2nd gen markets went bust in '83 and Japanese companies, who already dominated the arcade market, simply moved in.

[Anonymous No.5500353]

>>5500310
The Japanese developer asks "How can we make the best game possible and sell that game based on the merits of its game play?"

The Western developer asks "How can we make the most amount of money while doing the least amount of work?"

The Western gamer has a similar mindset. The Western gamer asks "How can I be rewarded in a game while giving the least amount of effort."

This is why there is nothing but garbage games on the store shelves.

[Anonymous No.5500413]

>jap games
>>>>/v/

[Anonymous No.5500421]

>>5500413
Retro games ARE japanese games. western "retro" """"games"""" may as well not even exist. Deal with it, nerd.

[Anonymous No.5500427]

>>5500353
Au contraire. Japan has mountains of lazy shovelware that never gets released internationally.

[Anonymous No.5500432]

>>5500353
>The Western developer asks "How can we make the most amount of money while doing the least amount of work?"
Rings true for arcade development and modern games. Don't tell me you actually think that's the case for 90s PC development.

[Anonymous No.5500459]

>>5500421
play quake 3 casual

[Anonymous No.5500584]

>>5500242

Because there is only lame shit coming out of the west.

[Anonymous No.5500592]

Sega was founded by three white men and was owned by an American company until 2004.
Atari, Magnavox, Mattel, and Coleco are all American.
Nintendo was the outlier.

[Anonymous No.5500618]

>>5500432
>Rings true for arcade development and modern games. Don't tell me you actually think that's the case for 90s PC development.
There are exceptions to every rule. There were a handful of PC developers back then who
innovated and put some heart into their work. But the reason they got into PC game development in the first place was because they weren't very good at making fun, simple, addictive video
games like the Japanese were making. That requires a level of intellect, creativity and hard work that few Westerners possess.

Western developers couldn't compete, so they dropped out of video game development to make simulations with pretty graphics on the PC.

Why simulations? Because you don't need much creativity to make a simulation. You just reproduce something that already exists.

Take a game like Doom, for example. It's an entertaining experience, especially back in the
early 90's when it came out. But it's really not much of a game. There's no addictive game play mechanics or scoring system. It's just a guy with a gun in a series of rooms full of monsters. They run at you, and you shoot them. It doesn't take a brilliant mind or a lot of effort to come up with something like that.

[Anonymous No.5500659]

>>5500618
PC gaming originated with games like Colossal Cave Adventure that students played on mainframes at universities. This had nothing really to do with anything going on in Japan.

[Anonymous No.5500669]

>>5500270
I mean, USA has been castrated by their Israel overlords for centuries now, before the WWII. I'd say that's one of the reasons USA couldn't produce good video games. Video games require samurai levels of skill to develop a good one.

[Anonymous No.5500673]

>>5500353
Japan is where free to pay mobile games are making the most money
Japan is where they are still making yearly sequels for games with ps3 era engines
Japan is where visual novels are popular
Shut the fuck up Wapanese faggot your kimono is too tight

[Anonymous No.5500675]

>>5500673
>Japan is where free to pay mobile games are making the most money
Because westerners aren't even playing games anymore, but the west was the pioneer in shit like f2p mobile and facebook games.

[Anonymous No.5500680]

>>5500251
This. The Atari shock never hit Japan, and they were making consoles, unlike Euros who concentrated on computers.

[Anonymous No.5500686]

JRPGs haven't evolved past the 80s Ultima format while WRPGs have evolved in many interesting directions since then.

[Anonymous No.5500692]

I would argue arcade culture had a lot to do with it since no other country in the world has as big or important of an arcade industry as Japan.

[Anonymous No.5500693]

>>5500686
But there's many japanese Action RPGs, while the west has slowly devolved into making west-style Visual Novels/Choose your own adventure interactive experiences rather than actual RPGs in the past decade or so.

[Anonymous No.5500748]

why /v/niggers need to start east vs west wars here?

[Anonymous No.5500756]

I find it funny how we call 1983 the "video game crash" while the Japanese call it the "Atari shock".

[Anonymous No.5500761]

It was harder and more expensive to get dev kits from japan. You had more freedom developing on PC. They thought consoles were toys after the Atari crash. Microsoft later came in with Xbox to accommodate the hacker mentality of the western developers in the console industry and allowed easy porting from PC to console using DirectX. So it was more like the Japanese reviving an dead fad, making it commercially successful for a decade before western companies picked it up again.

[Anonymous No.5500784]

>>5500675
Mobile shit has always been rampant in Japan since waaaayyy earlier than in the West and it comprises an even larger portion of total gamers than in the West.

[Anonymous No.5500787]

>>5500756
Because that's literally what it was.

[Anonymous No.5500791]

>>5500756
the japs prolly weren't aware of all the US born videogame companies that went bankrupt

[Anonymous No.5500795]

>>5500784
Fine, but the west is still guilty of platforms like Facebook, so.

[Anonymous No.5500820]

>>5500795
Facebook games are, and always have been, a complete non issue. They're just regular old web game/flash games but with an embedded social media feature.

[Anonymous No.5500828]

>>5500242
Coz their games were better.

[Anonymous No.5501848]

>>5500353
The Japanese publisher stops making video games because pachinko is more profitable.

[Anonymous No.5501986]

>>5500242
The Japanese economy was strong. Arcade games and home PC systems were popular. On top of that Japan has a strong tradition of graphic design. So when the NES was launched in the west there was a lot of talent available for producing games that could now reach a world market.

[Anonymous No.5501991]

>>5500242
They still do

[Anonymous No.5502214]

>>5501991
Their consoles do but not their games, not here at least.

[Anonymous No.5502282]

>>5500820
so basically "japan bad, west good"

[Anonymous No.5502385]

>>5500618
>It's just a guy with a gun in a series of rooms full of monsters. They run at you, and you shoot them. It doesn't take a brilliant mind or a lot of effort to come up with something like that.

Are you retarded? They run at you, shoot at you, fly at you, ambush you, things crush you, ad it had kickass weapons and amazing level design.

You're just a fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.5502480]

>>5500267
>but why did western developers move to PC
>>5500310
I know this is just bait and that you're stupid, but this isn't the answer.
The better answer is that western developers:
a) More experimental and focused on simulations and trying to model reality (sports games, flight simulators, tabletop RPGs, FPS)
b) Had less funding per project.
c) Foreign hardware with strict licensing model.
d) Artistic taste and willingness to find and pay for artists was all over the fucking map.

Meanwhile Japanese Devs:
a) More focused on incremental refinements to already successful games and "fun" game genres (side-scrolling platform games, top-down action games, JRPGs).
b) Had more funding for the big-name projects especially those tied to hardware sales like Mario and Zelda.
c) More familiar with the hardware and willing to adapt to console's licensing rules.
d) Anime culture provided a stable artistic baseline and a lot of artists with a baseline of talent. Furthermore, Japanese art styles like Chibi translate very well into low-resolution sprites

If you aren't a complete retard and know anything about how hardware works, you should be able to recognize how the optimized features of game consoles appeal to a developer that wants to make a side-scrolling platform games while computers are more appropriate for devs do something no one has ever done before.

[Anonymous No.5503692]

>>5500242
The American industry become over-saturated by mountains of garbage and the bottom fell out, only to crawl back up and suffer under cheap IBM clones never meant for anything more intense than Tetris.

Europeans were confined to cheap microcomputers working on low-budget software made by people who knew a lot of neat hardware tricks but nothing about game design.

[Anonymous No.5503702]

>>5500675
>but the west was the pioneer in shit like f2p mobile and facebook games.
Both invented by the Chinese, actually. F2P was made to deal with extreme levels of piracy and the prevalence of cybercafes. And the first major social game was Happy Farm, which Farmville copied.
>>5500784
Japanese phones were more advanced than those you could get elsewhere up until the iPhone and they spend an inordinate amount of time on public transit and they need something to do.

[Anonymous No.5503707]

>>5500242
Because Japan is better than US.

[Anonymous No.5503713]

>>5502282
Nah, Japan is far better than the West. You're just a dumbfuck weeb that demonizes stupid shit like mobile games and facebook games for no good reason.

[Anonymous No.5503714]

>>5503702
And even before phones handhelds were incredibly popular for the same reason. And it's also why so many PSP and DS games are structured so that a "round" takes about the same amount of time as the average commute or lunch break.

[Anonymous No.5503728]

*makes weebs upset

[Anonymous No.5503768]

>>5500267
Because the only way for a new developer to get into the console industry is for the stars to align just right. Had Nintendo not decided to stick with carts for the N64, the Playstation might have ultimately flopped. The same goes for Microsoft embracing the overlap between PCs and consoles back when Nintendo was adamantly refusing to, Sony wasn't willing to commit to the idea just yet, and the Sega had backed out of the market (had Sega not rushed out the Dreamcast, they likely would have been the first to introduce things like a built-in Hard Drive).

[Anonymous No.5503845]

>>5502480
>Foreign hardware with strict licensing model.
Also less access to certain advanced hardware (third party Famicom mappers, FM chip in the SMS, etc) because it was too expensive to bring to North America.

[Anonymous No.5503847]

>>5502480
You forget that Japan is also much smaller than the US and there was less geographical distance between parts suppliers and game studios.

[Anonymous No.5503850]

>>5502480
>Meanwhile Japanese Devs:
>a) More focused on incremental refinements to already successful games and "fun" game genres (side-scrolling platform games, top-down action games, JRPGs).
>b) Had more funding for the big-name projects especially those tied to hardware sales like Mario and Zelda.
>c) More familiar with the hardware and willing to adapt to console's licensing rules.
>d) Anime culture provided a stable artistic baseline and a lot of artists with a baseline of talent. Furthermore, Japanese art styles like Chibi translate very well into low-resolution sprites
e) Arcade culture. Japan has a more well-developed arcade culture than anywhere else and most of the great game developers were arcade giants with big budgets, hardware manufacturing facilities, and top-tier programming and artistic talent. There were a few exceptions like Square who were not arcade companies; these devs mainly got started in the early 80s with JPC games.
f) Japanese work culture. People are willing to work 16 hour days perfecting a game or a piece of hardware.
g) Japanese text takes less space to store which was important in the cartridge era with limited space.

[Anonymous No.5503851]

>>5502480
And Euro gaming?

[Anonymous No.5503870]

>>5503851
a) Europe didn't have their own homegrown consoles or arcade hardware. They did have home computers although about half of those were actually American-developed hardware.
b) Budgets were really low and most devs were simply a publisher who would take any game made by a teenager in his bedroom and publish it.
c) Games were usually clones of popular arcade games or LOLsorandumb concepts
d) Publishers wanted games released at a high rate and expected them done in <3 months. A good presentation was considered more valuable than gameplay or content (ie. the game could be total garbage, but we only care that it looks nice in magazine screenshots)
e) Most 8-bit software used cassette tapes, which limited game size and ability to allow saving of progress. On the 16-bit machines, people kept making the same kinds of games with a bit better graphics because they simply didn't know how to do anything different.
f) Audiovisuals in games were usually extremely tacky with bright flashy colors and loud music because of demoscene culture, so many programmers knew how to do crazy-ass hardware tricks and cool music, but didn't know how to design a game because most were literal teenagers and the development schedule expected by publishers was too short to allow developing anything too complex anyway.
g) Due to people in Europe not having Americans' disposable income, 8-bit computers lasted at least 4-5 years longer commercially there.

So the end result was a game like Flimbo's Quest which was an absolutely uninteresting, bland collectathon that mostly served as a vehicle for a parallax scrolling routine or sound engine the programmer wrote.

[Anonymous No.5503881]

Only weebs hate games like doom, quake, half life, duke nukem 3d, system shock, fallout, thief, system shock, deus ex, ultima.

[Anonymous No.5504308]

>>5500242
Because they saved it big time after America fucked it up big time. Coincidentally, America is fucking it up again.

[Anonymous No.5505405]

The big box PC game was a US invention, King's Quest and Summer Games were two of the earliest ones made by a team with a large budget instead of one guy.

[Anonymous No.5505453]

>>5500251
3rd gen is the first gen worth giving two shits about.

[Anonymous No.5505512]

>>5505453
You shut your whore mouth.

[Anonymous No.5506193]

>>5503850
>Japanese text takes less space to store which was important in the cartridge era with limited space.
It's more compact but you need a larger character set even if you're using pure kana

[Anonymous No.5506197]

>>5504308
No, this time the US and Japan are untied in driving it all into the ground. Europe, as always, is a non-factor.

[Anonymous No.5506667]

The sega master system was strictly speaking a more powerful and better designed (hardware—wise) device, but it got shit games. NES had good games.

[Anonymous No.5506701]

>>5500242
the atari failed due to mass produced clone games. the lack of ram and processing power left few options for diversity in game play mechanics

with the failure of atari and many developers of atari games nintendo entered the ring. there were still american developers but it wasnt the same. each phase of the videogame industry (generation of consoles) yields companies exiting stage left. the bulk of those no name companies who made atari games vanished

[Anonymous No.5506710]

>>5500242
>early video game industry
Video games didn't start in the mid 80s, lil zoom

[Anonymous No.5506836]

>>5500242
They made all the best arcade games of the first 2 gens then after the crash were the only ones in the console market until the Xbox. PC was kind of weird in the early days, though with America, Europe and Japan having their own shit that they liked.

[Anonymous No.5507280]

>>5506667
I know this to be true based on graphical and audio abilities (especially after I learned about Japanese FM synth later in life), but as a kid playing NES JRPGs with deep menu systems, I never encountered anything like it on SMS. The closest was Phantasy Star, which was impressive in some ways and simplistic in others. SMS seemed like a better system, but only for arcade ports. The barren controller made it feel cheap to me, as did the build quality and toyish design of the SMS2, the version of the system I bought new for dirt cheap.

>built-in game and pause button on the console, how quaint, like a Chinese toy

>>5506701
>with the failure of atari and many developers of atari games nintendo entered the ring.
That's the story of the NES in America, but the Famicom was released in Japan months prior to the Atari crash. They threw their chips in even before they watched Atari fall.