As promised yesterday, more about Hacker International, the Japanese bad boy of 8-bit consoledom.

I (like a lot of NES fans, I suppose) first heard about Hacker from David Sheff’s book Game Over, where he mentions that the company attempted to defy Nintendo’s third-party licensee system for the Famicom, was sued, and went out of business shortly thereafter. The only factual part of that synopsis is that Nintendo sued Hacker, but it wasn’t for anything related to publishing unlicensed FC porn games and it was settled out of court before a verdict was reached. What’s more, Hacker had a very long history — long enough to result in 16 Famicom games, 22 Famicom Disk System titles (more than most legitimate FDS licensees), 13 PC Engine games (seven on CD-ROM), 15 licensed PlayStation releases under the name Map Japan, and even a handful of Windows titles. That’s not bad for a company so associated with 8-bit pornography, as laid out in this screenshot gallery of their FDS stuff (link very not safe for work).

Hacker was founded and led by Satoru Hagiwara, an entrepreneur and former music producer who thought he’d cash in on the personal-computer boom when it hit Japan in the mid-1980s. Their first product was a monthly PC magazine titled Hacker (above), as he explained in a 2005 issue of Game Labo:

“PCs were hitting it big at the time and tons of PC magazines were getting launched all over the place, so I asked a friend of mine who ran a publishing business if he was interested in putting one out. I figured that once we started releasing a magazine, the writers and know-how would come naturally. That’s how ‘Hacker’ got started — it’s a bit of an embarrassing name, but since we were launching after the pack, I went with something that had impact.”

So Hacker International wasn’t meant to be an “underground” outfit in the beginning?

“Not at all. But people who were into that sort of thing were attracted to the name, and they came to us. A lot of our writers were into games, and they came up with a lot of ideas for offbeat and fun products. I created Hacker International to help put those ideas out on sale. At around that time, I had a lot of negative emotions toward the collusion and under-the-table agreements [console game] publishers had with each other. Even so, none of the products we made broke any laws. The music industry ran under a set of well-defined laws, so perhaps that experience affected me a little too, but either way, I didn’t think to myself that we wanted to break the law with our products.”

Following the magazine, Hacker launched a product called the Hacker Junior, an upgrade to FC consoles that added composite-video output and new controllers with turbo functionality. You could buy the upgrade parts yourself, or send an FC to Hacker’s offices and they’d perform the upgrade for you. Nintendo sued to get the product off the market, claiming copyright infringement.

“That was an incredibly gray-market product. I’m not allowed to discuss the terms of it, but we did enter a full settlement with Nintendo. The lawsuit took place long after we stopped producing the Hacker Junior anyway — it took a lot of work to produce for not very much profit.”

Hagiwara was obviously having fun tweaking Nintendo on their home turf, though so his company followed up soon after with the Disk Hacker, a Disk System utility disk that let you break the protection on FDS disks and copy as many games as you wanted, all without any special hardware. The Disk Hacker went through several versions.

“While we were doing the Hacker Junior, we’d have technically-gifted people bring us software. The first Disk Hacker came from that. Our distributors and other people all told us that there was a demand for a backup tool.”

From that came original games, mostly made by amateur hobbyists who reverse-engineered the Famicom in their bedrooms and brought the results to the Hacker offices. Given that most of these amateur hackers were otaku nerds, the great majority of the games they made were adult in nature.

“We had no documentation, so none of the games were all that interesting content-wise. Because they were weak games, a lot of them went down the adult track — we called them ‘semi-adult.’”

The original Disk System games were popular enough that Hacker moved on to FC cartridge releases, many developed by assorted companies in Asia and the US. When the PC Engine was released, Hacker established the Games Express brand to support the console, again in a totally unlicensed manner.

“We established the Games Express brand near the start of the PC Engine’s life. I liked the Hacker brand because it had sort of a bad-boy image, but by that time it was starting to get too associated with criminal behavior, so I felt like it needed to change. Hacker earned a lot of its fans during the PCE days and we sold a surprisingly large amount of games. Although they didn’t do so directly, we did receive thanks from NEC for our games, because they helped them sell hardware.”

Given the PCE’s software lineup in the later years, it’s little surprise that Games Express’s adult releases proved to be such great system sellers. But how did Hacker get away with making unlicensed porn games for consoles all those years? Part of it was that Hacker was extremely careful when it came to tiptoeing around the law, making their cartridges in a way that didn’t break Nintendo’s patents. Another reason: The third-party licensee system Nintendo pioneered was untested at the time, and apparently they weren’t as willing to test out its legality in courts as their American branch was when Tengen broke their NES licensee agreement. Hagiwara brings up another fact, though:

Things changed with the PlayStation, which Hagiwara decided to become a legitimate licensee for. Why the change of heart?

“The biggest reason was that I liked how Sony was doing things. The PlayStation basically destroyed the game distribution scheme that was in place when it launched; they had a stated goal of creating a completely new type of game business, and I was really impressed by that. Once we started developing games, though, other makers got into the scene, you started to see 2800-yen rereleases, and worst of all, I stopped being interested in games. So that’s why we quit the business — I wanted to wrap that up while we could still do so and try something new.”

Hacker and Map Japan closed up shop in 2001, with Hagiwara moving on to other businesses. They leave behind a legacy of…well, porn, yes, but also of thumbing their noses at authority and being the sort of freewheeling, independent geek entrepreneurs that Akihabara was known for all through the ’80s and ’90s. I have to give them a round of applause for that, at least.

I wrote a couple articles today for 1UP about famous gamers in Japan, from Daigo Umehara (who needs no introduction if you’ve seen that SFIII 3rd Strike video — you know, that one) to Tomoki Maeda, a guy who’s won tournaments for both FIFA and Pro Evo Soccer. I didn’t get around to another interview printed in last week’s issue of Famitsu where they talked with Takashi Hattori, a guy who’s really, really, really good at competitive Puyo Puyo.

You can see lots of Puyo tournament footage on Nicovideo; the above video’s an example from 2007. The preferred knockout format is for two competitors to play each other repeatedly until one side reaches 100 victories, which (even if you play as fast as these guys) is at least two hours of nonstop blob toppling. Hattori is the player on the right in this video, and I’ll let it speak for itself. Good Puyo is fun to watch because it’s a constant game of back-and-forth, with one player setting off a massive chain and the other setting off his own chain, the one he’s been preparing for just that moment, offsetting the attack and putting the first player on the defensive. Even if I can’t possibly fathom the strategy involved, it’s great entertainment.

Hattori kicked off his Famitsu interview by revealing how he got into this odd Compile game:

A help-wanted flyer from I’d guess the late 1970s. Those wages don’t seem terribly low even by modern standards, but keep in mind that the dollar exchange rate was always over 200 yen around this time and sometimes much more than that. (The average minimum wage across Japan in 2009 was 713 yen an hour.)

“McDonald’s is creating a hamburger sensation across Japan under its motto of Quality (Q) / Service (S) / Cleanliness (C). It’s an easy place to work, filled with a bright and fun atmosphere.

Crew (male/female)
- Everyone pitches in to run the restaurant. Men mostly handle kitchen work, while women take care of guest relations.
- From students to housewives, everyone is welcome. No experience required.
- You are free to pick your own work period, days, and hours. You can also choose your workplace from any of the McDonald’s in Japan.

Salary: 530 yen/hour plus

Maintenance Men (male)
- Handle store custodial duty from 11pm to 7am.

Salary: 710 yen/hour plus

Variety of Unique Benefits
- Worker’s compensation
- Lockers on site
- Uniforms provided on loan
- Discount movie tickets
- Seaside and other recreational facilities”

The first McDonald’s in Japan opened up July 20, 1971 in the first floor of the Mitsukoshi department store in Ginza, Tokyo. That location closed in 2007 when Mitsukoshi remodeled the building space, but the next one that opened, McDonald’s #13002 in Yoyogi, has stayed in regular business since July 24, 1971. Stop by and see if you can find any gum under the tables dating from before you were born.

Completely out of the blue, I received a preview build of Sakura Wars in the mail the other day. I say “completely out of the blue” because this is the first time I’ve received a preview build of anything since I got laid off from ADV in June of 2008. I honestly didn’t realize that the PR department of NIS America knew my home address. Are they spying on me??!! Wait. Maybe not. If so, they woulda known that my modded PS2 is somewhere in the closet, buried under a bunch of winter clothing, and I have too much work today to dig it out! (I have a vague memory of telling my old PR contacts to send their email blasts to an address I created for that purpose, but man, I haven’t checked it in about a year. Sorry, video-game industry.)

All I can say today about this game is that it has Gemini Sunrise in it. That’s all that needs to be said, right? Hiroi-ohji made an offhand comment half a decade ago about how this character will serve to introduce the series to overseas audiences — apparently he was looking even further ahead than I ever imagined!

The ferret gives the bubble wrap 8.2/10.

“You were never part of it in the first place. Besides, could you really say the game industry had it right, ever? Every hardware maker having their own network? No synchronization between development and sales? Huge gluts of titles; top-brand games all coming out at the same time and eating into each other’s profits? There’s a lot to gain from stabilizing distribution, even if means a little more regulation than what they had before. The industry’s never enjoyed anything like it. A lot of them are looking forward to it.”

Here is chapter seven (“A Well-Adjusted World”) of The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER, a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa between 2002 and 2004. You’ll want to start at chapter one if you’re new to the tale.

The move to regulate and control games and otaku culture, a mission led by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is rapidly approaching its final stages. Secretly, behind the spotlights, the government has acted to take over game distribution, the central core that makes entertainment an economically viable industry. Ryohei Takamizawa, the hero, has made contact with Saeko Kanoura, an informant (?) within the ministry, to get to the bottom of this operation.

Happy readin’.

Akihabara Station, located halfway between Tokyo and Ueno on the Yamanote Line as it crosses the Sobu Main Line. The nearby Suda-cho, with Manseibashi Station (current home of the Transportation Museum) at its center, was once a prosperous neighborhood in Tokyo, but World War II razed the city to the ground all the way up to Ueno. Afterward, the area from Ueno to Kanda became the center of the city’s postwar black market, a position it enjoyed until the GHQ banned open-air markets in the area in 1949 and moved the merchants to a stretch of land by the guardrail around Akihabara Station. This led to the creation of the Kanda Seika Market and the first bout of redevelopment the Akihabara area experienced since the war.

Electronic stores had been a common sight in Akihabara since the Suda-cho days, but due to Korean War demand for precision electric parts and a boom in radio sales after the airwaves were privatized in 1951, the neighborhood soon became just as known for its “electric town” as for Kanda Seika’s produce. As popular demand shifted from radios to TVs and computers, Akihabara established itself right at the center of each boom, building itself up to become one of the world’s most well-known electronic marketplaces.

That’s the basic history of Akihabara they’ll tell you about in the guidebooks. But starting in the 21st century, game shops swarmed over the electronics outlets, accompanied by doujin stores, otaku goods resellers, and even maid cafes. From across the country and around the world, people came to visit this “otaku holy land.” It’s a byway of history that few people know about nowadays.

Getting off the Yamanote Line and crossing the turnstile, I began to wonder when they start playing that Sato Musen theme song in the morning. It greeted me upon exiting the station, the way it always does. I had no doubt that it had wriggled its way into the minds of thousands, becoming the de-facto Akihabara anthem.

“There you are.” A woman in glasses and a business suit greeted me. Her long, attractive hair was the first thing I noticed. It was safe to call her more than a little beautiful. “You look so out of place here, now that it’s back to being a straight ‘electric town.’ I could tell right off.”
“You from the ministry?”
“Yes. Saeko Kanoura, your friend and your enemy. Who’s that with you…?” She turned her eyes to the little girl standing next to me. She insisted on coming along, and every attempt I made to lose her or drive her off had proven fruitless.

“Oh, is she…?”
“My name’s Sana. I’m his sister. We work together!”
“That’s your name?” I whispered to her.
“Maybe.”

“That’s a nice cover; having a kid with you,” Saeko said. “We’d better get moving.” She walked on, apparently satisfied. Maybe she didn’t see the point in prying any further.

“The guy who runs Sofmap 666 sent me to you…” I began.
“I heard. They want to know how far our plan’s proceeded, don’t they?”
“I guess. Something about starting to regulate the distribution of all forms of entertainment? Not just games?”

It was not the most well-advised conversational choice. You never knew who might be listening nearby. That’s why I was surprised to see Saeko answer me, apparently unfazed. “Starting…or finished, I suppose,” she said. “It’s not like we needed any new legislation to enforce it. We’ve made contact with all of the relevant corporations. Now all that’s left to do is wait for them to establish a distribution network that fits our needs.”
“So it’s too late for us to say anything?”
“You were never part of it in the first place. Besides, could you really say the game industry had it right, ever? Every hardware maker having their own network? No synchronization between development and sales? Huge gluts of titles; top-brand games all coming out at the same time and eating into each other’s profits? There’s a lot to gain from stabilizing distribution, even if means a little more regulation than what they had before. The industry’s never enjoyed anything like it. A lot of them are looking forward to it.”

“So the entire culture’s going to be wrapped around your finger?”
“Oh, we’re not doing anything that arrogant. If anything, we should be thanked for lending all of them a hand; for not throwing them to the gutter.”
“Thanked?”
“Of course. Look, the sun was setting on the game business even by the turn of the millennium. Everybody knew it. From 1999 to 2002, the size of the entire toy marketplace remained stuck at around 700 billion yen per year — and yet, after reaching a peak of 186 billion yen in 2000, the game industry shrank down to 150 billion in 2001 and 100 billion in 2002. The toy market’s stayed flat, but games have been in freefall. That’s the truth, and you can’t explain it away with the recession alone.”

“Well, yeah — that’s how it was. But how does that connect to clamping down on our culture at this point?”
“Maybe you won’t believe this, but we love games. We love their culture.”
“Then why are you taking away their freedom?”
“If this was just someone’s side hobby, you could go on about freedom all you want. But if a 100-billion-yen-per-year business wants to delude itself about freedom, then it needs to build a sense of responsibility for itself. It needs to take care of its own business.”
“Its own business?”
“For example, there was a scientist who went on about “Game Brain” and how playing games could affect kids’ nervous systems. The game media didn’t even try to directly address the issue. They just kept going on like they always do, how it’s all the fault of parents for treating video games like a day-care center for their kids. Even if the game-brain theory didn’t have any merit, it still needed to be directly addressed by the industry, with its own studies. They never made a single effort to improve their image in society. Even with the Child Pornography Act — hardly anyone in the industry lifted a finger against it. Video games get brought up as a menace to society time and time again, and the industry responds by dodging the subject, by putting their hands to their ears and waiting for it to go away.”

“You’re the ones who brought the issue to them.”
“Yes. Yes, we did work against them — to lower their position and bring them under our control. But to put it bluntly, they’re getting what they deserved. I don’t have sympathy for any of them. Isn’t is funny, how unhealthy the marketplace is? The industry is shrinking, and yet gamers are expected to pay more and more. There was a time when games were so packed with hidden features and gimmicks that there was no way you could beat them by themselves.”
“But figuring them out is part of the fun, isn’t it?”
“There are limits to the amount of frustration a human being can deal with in the name of fun, you know. That’s what strategy guides are for, but somewhere along the line they became these huge, thick, full-color books, and the prices for them went up, up, up. A game would cost around 5000 yen and the book set required to beat them cost another 3000. It was ridiculous.”

I continued listening to her, unable to decide if she was telling the truth or not. I had no idea what the game industry was like in the age she was talking about.

“Why did strategy guides get so bloated? It all came down to rightsholders. Game publishers make profits off royalties, and the more expensive the strategy guides, the more royalties they make. The same deal with the guide publishers; the same deal with the editors and production houses that make the books. Isn’t it interesting how most people involved with strategy guides were also involved with game magazines? The longer they spend in the business, the fewer positions become available for them to advance into. So they went freelance instead, but most of them just wound up contributing to their old media contacts in the end. And when you’re working in that field, there’s no sweeter business than editing a strategy guide. To get that kind of job, you needed the right kind of contacts. It’s just like how city hall gives a sweet public-works contract to a construction firm in exchange for setting up government bureaucrats with high-paying jobs in the company. The whole thing got more bloated with every year, and it’s always the gamers who footed the bill. You see examples like this everywhere in the chain, between publishers and freelancers and between distributors and sellers. It’s not a bad thing. There are parallels you can see with every industry. But the game industry’s still young; it’s been expanding without any serious thought put into the expansion. And as a result, it’s gotten bloated. That’s the problem. The marketplace had shrunk, but the expenses behind games have grown and grown.”
“Well, didn’t they try to do anything about that?”
“I’m sure they must have. But it’s hard to change the system if your job’s not in immediate danger. It was the same deal with the construction industry. Someone from the outside needed to place pressure on them.”
“And that’s what you’re doing?”
“Yes. As devoted fans of the game industry.”

I was not enjoying this. It was difficult to put into words, but I felt like I was being conned into something I couldn’t agree with. But she was probably correct — at least, from the perspective of her world.

There had to be some other perspective. There had to all kinds of rebuttals to her one-sided accusations. But I didn’t have the knowledge, or the deep-seated love of games, to bring any up.

“Either way,” she continued, “our efforts to regulate and revitalize the game industry have come to a close. We aren’t stupid enough to let people like you stick your hands into this. I’m sorry to tell you, but the days when you were just a bunch of nerds screwing around with each other are over. This neighborhood used to be a symbol of that era, but you can’t linger over the past for the rest of your lives.”

Did she come here to lay down a death sentence upon all of us? Her eyes looked a little too sad for that as she looked over the neon lights of the electric town. “I need to get going,” she said. “I need to say goodbye to the phantoms of Akihabara and their endless pangs of nostalgia.”

To be continued

“So you’re cosplaying and everything whenever you go undercover like that?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off past thirty, but it keeps people’s eyes off me all the same. In fact, it’s gotten me a lot of side benefits. People brag to me; they reveal details; they give me their life stories.”
“What were you dressed as?”
“I’m sorry, sir; that’s kind of a personal question.”

Here is chapter six (“Endless Game”) of The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER, a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa between 2002 and 2004. You’ll want to start at chapter one if you’re new to the tale.

On a visit to the twice-yearly underground Comic Market, illicit used-game broker Ryohei Takamizawa runs into the shadowy owner of Sofmap #666, a “game buyer” he’s known for his entire career. The man is neck-deep in the underground game business, and he has bad news: the Japanese government is set to clamp down on every aspect of otaku culture, from what it can depict to how it’s distributed. If they succeed, then otaku-dom has no future, and Ryohei is sent by the man to meet up with a certain someone and figure out a way to stop them.

Happy readin’.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Good old METI. Before the 2001 Central Government Reform, it was called the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

In this ministry is an office, the Commerce and Information Policy Bureau. The office chiefly handles matters related to information processing, and its importance has steadily grown since the spread of personal computers and the Internet. This has caused it to split into several branches: the Information Policy Department, responsible for government IT policy and the handling of personal information; the Information Processing Promotion Department, which develops and promotes IT systems across the industry; the Information and Communication Device Department, authorized to classify and regulate electric and electronic hardware; and many more. With the power to oversee both the PC and network industries, they have always held a deep relationship with otaku culture, which relied on the Internet as a marketplace and trading post for information. It was a surprisingly deep connection, in fact — deeper than either side really thought.

Video games were also the responsibility of the Commerce and Information Policy Bureau (CIPB), with most of the regulation handled by a subdivision called the Cultural Products Commerce Department. The department’s official charter reads as follows: “To gather and promote the creation and preservation of text, sound, and image data in the area of game software for the purposes of promoting information processing.” You could say, in other words, that they were the go-to people in the government for anything related to video games, though they dealt with far more than that.

With the suppression that the game industry and otaku culture in general has faced growing even more severe in recent years, a great deal of blame has been placed on the shoulders of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, the outfit responsible for carrying out investigations and arrests. But the METI, and the CIPB within it, was the organization that established the laws and policies leading to this action, taking advantage of video games’ unique distribution scheme, a lack of backlash from otaku publishers and creators, and the comparatively weak financial underpinnings the entire industry ran on. The CIPB, in many ways, was the outfit which pulled the strings that led us to where we are today.

In one corner of the CIPB office lies the IT Investigation Department. It is a very young division, and compared to the PSIA, it has gone largely unnoticed, sitting in the shadows while the PSIA’s organizations clamped down on net crime and regulated online speech. Walk inside this department, though, and you’ll see a sight that’ll make you speechless. The latest issues of video game magazines like Famitsu and Dengeki PlayStation, anime titles like Newtype and Animage, and porno-game monthlies like Tech Gian and BugBug line the desks in no particular order. They even have copies of Fanroad and Yu-Ge. Famicoms, Super Famicoms, PlayStations from 1 to 3, and a Dreamcast are connected to TVs, and they even have a PC-9801 and X68000. It’s as if you have just stumbled upon some game magazine’s editor room.

“Wow. Caught ‘em again.”

The department was manned by about three people, but a lone desk stood clean and orderly among the chaos. Behind  it sat a women in a sharp, pressed business outfit, looking extremely out of place in this mess of an office. The rest of the staff were just as properly dressed; that was what made the room seem to strange.

She was the head of the CIPB’s IT Investigation Department, and her name was Saeko Kanoura. Her office examined and researched the people and things that made up otaku culture, this amorphous blob that the government has branded as an antisocial ill that must be stamped out. In order to embed themselves fully inside the otaku ecosystem, to get inside all of their minds and find out what makes them tick, they have structured their office to look as much like one of their rooms as possible. Sometimes they even dress like them.

But they had a far more important task to accomplish than simple research.

“So did you go to the Comiket, Saeko?” asked the woman’s boss from a desk at the other end of the room. She looked up from her PC display and smiled. “Oh? Oh. Yes, I did, sir. It wasn’t anything like it was before, in the end, but it’s pretty neat how they keep the fires burning with all the new issues and things they put out.”
“Wow. I’m surprised they can even find anyone willing to print all that crap. You’d get reported if you used a print-shop copier for it.”
“Yes. One of the groups was bragging about how they all got jobs at a publisher so they could sneak into the office at night for their print jobs.”
“Hah. Poor guys.”

The department’s chief mission: to transform themselves into “fellow” otaku, to investigate the illegal otaku culture bubbling under the surface, and to occasionally lure them into doing something reportable.

“So you’re cosplaying and everything whenever you go undercover like that?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off past thirty, but it keeps people’s eyes off me all the same. In fact, it’s gotten me a lot of side benefits. People brag to me; they reveal details; they give me their life stories.”
“What were you dressed as?”
“I’m sorry, sir; that’s kind of a personal question.”

As she exchanged words with her superior, numbers flashed across her display, one after another. They were IP addresses, groups of four numbers between 0 and 255. It was all the department needed to provide ISPs to have them investigate and find user identities. Send the results of that to the PSIA, and if the man using the computer was unlucky enough, he would have an unwelcome knock on his door within hours.

“We stage these campaigns X number of times per year, and they just keep letting themselves get hooked.” The woman was using herself as a decoy to catch Internet pirates.

—-

Looking back upon the past few decades, one could easily portray the history of computer software as a neverending battle against illegal copying. Video games were roughly the same price as cassette tapes at the very beginning, but prices shot up before long, quickly putting them outside the realm of impulse purchases. PC games cost 7800 to 9800 yen, and even console titles, which cost 3800 to 4800 yen when the Famicom first debuted, went up to the 8000-yen level somewhere along the line without a fuss from anyone. With games as risky a purchase they are (nobody wants to spend real cash on a bad game, after all), the wild goose chase between publishers and pirates continued on for years and years. Back when cassette tape was the main media, all you need was a recorder to make a copy, but floppy-disk titles soon featured elaborate software protection installed within the game. Any protection could be removed with enough patience, however, and it wasn’t long before game rental shops — all operating under the assumed notion you were copying everything you rented for yourself — sprang up, no doubt dealing some damage to the game industry.

The very nature of piracy changed in the late 1990s with the rise of the consumer-oriented Internet. “Warez servers” existed wherever there was a network connection, of course, and Napster made the process easier than ever for music fans. Both of those methods of piracy allowed investigators to track down individual users, but with the rise of broadband and software like WinMX in the early years of the 21st century, copying became a socially acceptable activity for an entire generation. This new wave of software let users trade files without going through a host server, opening up a world of games, music and video at essentially no cost. The brilliant ease of it all attracted an audience that neither knew nor cared about the warez scene. WinMX users could still be traced through the direct connections they made with each other, but new methods, like Winny and Bittorrent, spread out the job of file transferral among a mass of users, not just one, making the user tracking process more difficult than ever. It wasn’t impossible, of course, but it required work, and arresting anyone for it had a miniscule effect at best. The authorities arrested people for it anyway, but the resulting furor on 2ch and other anonymous forums only served to popularize file-sharing software, further hurting their cause.

“Pre-’05 porn games get ‘em every time, I swear.”

With the oppression otaku culture faces today, the role file-sharing software played is more vital than ever. OZ, the program of choice today, encrypts its content on the packet level and does away with Winny’s upload/download delineation entirely, creating an impenetrable virtual space for anonymous users to share files. The IT Investigation Department had neither the manpower nor any interest in trying to break the security in programs like these. Instead, it inserted an IP-revealing virus into game software and anime videos and spread them around the net. Thanks to some government negotiations with the antivirus industry, the virus went unreported by any software you could buy. It was the online equivalent of a bait car, except instead of having the PSIA conduct the sting, it was handled by this all-but-anonymous department — security through obscurity.

Saeko was the one who devised and established this system. Copy culture had spread across the computer scene like a cancer. It was the greatest enemy of any software company, and establishing this plan was one of METI’s most pressing orders of business. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that Saeko’s entire department was birthed from that sense of urgency.

Although Saeko stood at the forefront of the move to suppress and report otaku, she herself was as deep an otaku as any of them. All that mattered to her, though, was herself. She conceived this plan to sell out her fellow otaku, to use them as raw material for her career, and to get the out-of-print or banned pieces of media she was seeking. The magazines in her office, the games and books stored in their closets, were in a way her own collection.

A text appeared on her cell phone. It was from Sofmap #666, and it invited her to meet with a certain man. She had approached the owner of the place in the past, offering his business amnesty from prosecution if he would cooperate with her and fetch the “criminals” and data leaks she desired. It was the oppressed working with the oppressor under the table. To them, the battle was not a direct confrontation, but something that had long been repeated through history.

[To be continued]

I did a lot of testing to figure out how best to port Space Harrier to the Mark III, but the hardware had very strict sprite limits and I really couldn’t show much more than the player and his bullets. If I was going to port this game, I naturally wanted to retain all of the impact of the original at all costs, but if I had rely on sprites for that, the results would’ve been pretty depressing.

That’s when I began coding a system that drew [enemies] directly onto background tiles instead. That let me retain at least a bit of the original’s high speed, and it was ultimately what made Space Harrier possible on the Mark III. But I still kick myself over the square tiles that overlap all over the bosses! I tried really hard to come up with a software solution to this issue, but I just hit a wall when it came to CPU power.

OutRun started out the same way, in that I knew I wanted to recreate the up-and-down motion of the original no matter what. I coded it so that it pretty much redrew the entire screen to create the effect, but it wasn’t everything it should’ve been. It was close, but not close enough. I don’t know if it was my fault or the Mark III’s, but it was probably somewhere between the two of us.

Really, figuring out what game to port to which hardware at which time was a very important thing back then. You had to consider the development skills you had at hand very carefully, especially because the really flashy full-cabinet games like Space Harrier, OutRun and After Burner were coming out one after another that whole time. I pushed myself really hard from a technical standpoint during that era, so the time still conjures up a lot of memories for me.

“You know how I’m helping out with the Comiket down below, right?”
“Uh-huh. That, and how you worked with the closet otaku in Urban Planning to keep it from attracting any attention.”
“Yeah, well, the honeymoon’s just about over with that. I think they’re gonna do away with Comiket, and they’re gonna take down every damn store in this building along with it.”

Here is chapter five (“Like the River Flow”) of The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER, a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa between 2002 and 2004. You’ll want to start at chapter one if you’re new to the tale.

With an economy in shambles and a nation in chaos, the Japanese government has forced peace and goodwill upon its people — a movement that dovetailed all too well with media’s tendency to censor itself, starting in the 1990s. With all the “poison” sucked out of their popular entertainment, how can Japan’s game nerds continue to exist…if they can at all?

Happy readin’.

“Wow. I heard about stuff like this, but it’s crazy how they’re still doing it now, huh?”

My hand was in my pocket, gripping my gun. The girl grabbed my elbow, practically hanging on to it as she looked up at the old Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. Normally the air would be stagnant with the smell of the city slums, but today, there might have been a suggestion of cheer in the wind. Just a suggestion.

You could say this event, held twice a year, toed the line between legal and il- even before the pressure and regulation began. It is no longer the massive event it was, one that occupied enormous event halls and attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. Now it was only for the survivors, those who knew what it meant and who still managed to find themselves a home here. This thing had been watched over by the authorities for years; the fact it existed now might be considered a miracle by some. It was called Comiket, and it was being held in a stifling summer night.

“Whoa, look at this! Space Fantasy Zone for the PC Engine! An arcade board for Navarone from Namco! A copy of Saori, that game they banned! Motoko-hime Adventure? I don’t know that one…”

The girl was a little put off by the “event space” at first — the Tokyo government building’s dimly-lit underground parking lot, scattered with exposed pipes and ventilation ducts — but once she laid eyes on the merchandise, she was right back to her old self. Removing her grasp on my arm, she approached the ladies manning the tables, dressed in cosplay outfits that looked like the traditional dress of some long-lost Renaissance village. Most of the attendees were in their forties and fifties, and I could spot the occasional broker here and there. A girl who wasn’t out of her compulsory school years was more than a little out of place here.

“Hey, is this the first release of Assault Armoroid Angelio Complete?” the girl meekly asked a woman in a maid outfit. “The one that erased your hard drive if you installed it?” The woman was at a loss for an answer. No one could blame her. That was an adult game. It said “18+” right on the box.

“Huh. That’s quite a kid you got with you.”

I brought my hand to the gun in my pocket, turning toward the voice’s direction. “Who’re you?”

Greeting me was the middle-aged guy from Sofmap #666, a man I’ve met many times before. His store was in the building above this underground Comiket. I had heard he was acting as the de-facto go-to man for the show’s Video Game Day.

“So, who is she?” he asked. “She looks pretty well at home here, huh?”

I turned around to find the girl deep in conversation with the maid lady’s boss, talking about how badly delayed LOVERS was and how little effort was put into Colorful Box and other topics that not even I could make any sense of.

“I couldn’t tell you, actually. She was just…there, one day.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, I was looking for you because I’ve got some serious shit to discuss.”

The owner must have thought I was trying to change the subject, but I was more interested in receiving work from the guy than correcting him.

—————

Sofmap #666 was cluttered as usual. I found myself surrounded by great, swaying stacks of small cardboard game boxes.

“You know how I’m helping out with the Comiket down below, right?”
“Uh-huh. That, and how you worked with the closet otaku in Urban Planning to keep it from attracting any attention.”
“Yeah, well, the honeymoon’s just about over with that. I think they’re gonna do away with Comiket, and they’re gonna take down every damn store in this building along with it.”

“Huh?” Helping out my more eccentric clients with their esoteric collections was the most time-consuming part of my job, but the majority of my money came from brokering game deals between ordinary people and store owners like this guy, taking my middleman’s cut for a couple of phone calls’ worth of work.

“I’m getting rumblings about how the police and the Ministry of Education want to step things up. They got something called the Entertainment Distribution Management Bureau in the works. The way I hear it, they want to put all the regulators under one roof and watch over games, manga, anime, and movie distribution with a single department. I don’t know if they’re trying to nationalize us or what, but basically the government wants a hand in every type of media they can get.”
“Nationalize…?”
“They’re probably dreaming of the tax revenue they’d get. You saw what they did with tobacco. The entertainment industry’s finally starting to recover a little from the last round of regulation, too.”
“Yeah, but…can they even do that?”
“Why not? With games, at least, distribution’s always been regulated like a disease. Those companies are already used to playing by someone else’s rules.”

From the late 1990s onward, the video-game marketplace — expanding like a nuclear blast up to that point — found itself plunged into a deep recession in the blink of an eye. Japan itself was on the brink of a recession, an economic collapse, whatever you want to call it, so most analysts simply saw it as another symptom of a national problem.

But that explanation was just a ruse. The game industry’s recession was an institutional malaise, one even less salvageable than Japan’s banking crisis. For one, the business used a disturbingly abnormal distribution system ever since the glory days of the Family Computer. In what other entertainment industry would you ever find the creator of the platform holding complete control over manufacture and distribution of media? This devious scheme continued on even after Nintendo gave way to Sony as the industry leader. With the hardware makers allowed to retain full control over distribution, they arguably took the entire idea of “competition” out of the equation. It was an atmosphere of festering collusion up there with what you saw in the construction industry, and it meant that software publishers only produced titles that the hardware makers would approve of. A small handful of large businesses held a monopoly over game distribution; there was no level playing field to compete on. And yet new platforms kept coming out, pushing development costs higher and higher. The competition-free industry began to wither, and even the big publishers lost the ability to make big moves, only releasing the lowest-risk titles possible. The industry lost its spark, and gamers began to get bored.

Maybe this distribution scheme worked back when games were fresh and the industry was still expanding. Maybe it avoided another video game crash like the one Atari engineered, the way that Nintendo always claimed it did. But with game culture a part of society and the marketplace stabilized, a survival-of-the-fittest glut of titles was exactly what the industry  needed. However, the distributors’ firm grasp on power refused to allow that.

Thus, with such an extreme imbalance of power, it’d be all too simple for the government to flash the whip of regulation, the sweet candy of protection, the sword of financial backing, to take over. That was why, out of all the entertainment media out there, the game industry was the easiest one to regulate and legislate against. It was used to being ruled over and abused.

PC games worked the same way. You were free to release whatever media you wanted, but SoftBank retained final control over distribution for the entire country. Between the late 1980s and the end of the ’90s, Japan’s PC game marketplace crumbled to nothing. The reason was simple: SoftBank was the sole distributor, and the only games SoftBank picked up for distribution were sequels to previous bestsellers. The games they ordered — and the games made for their tastes — grew more and more soulless, and again, the spark was lost. Thus, pornography was the only game genre that survived. PC games may have been fighting a losing battle against consoles in the long run, but it was the imbalance of power among distributors that killed them with barely a whimper.

The powerful allure of adult games allowed publishers to expand the market into a variety of subgenres, but in the end, not even they could escape the rule of EOCS, the organization that placed itself above the distributors. The interesting thing about this industry was that developers were able to keep their production costs low, finding an escape route from distribution tyranny by offering their games as net downloads. The content of these games being what they were, many companies made a far-from-trivial amount of their profits by selling their wares directly to the consumer, ignoring the distributors entirely.

Whether you’re talking about books or movies or whatever, you never see distributors have much control over the content of what they deal in. Look across the game industry, though, and the rule of the distributors extends all the way down to designers’ project documents.

“So the easiest way to put it,” the owner said, “is that the government’s gonna do it all themselves now. The publishers and doujinshi makers are lobbying heavily against it — you know, the idea’s unheard of to ‘em, it’s outrageous — but I get the idea the game industry’s already caved in. Figures, huh? Even the porno game industry didn’t fight for freedom of speech once they started feeling the heat. They went off and created the EOCS to curry favor with the authorities. And, hell, the console makers put more regulations on what you can do in games than even the government would. It’s nothing new to any of ‘em.”

From Yojohan to the Chatterley case, the publishing industry had both a tradition of fighting for freedom of speech in the courtroom. That was their strategy from the start. They saw it as a point of pride, a way to protect their business, and it was ingrained in the culture of the business. It could be said that the history of publishing is, in itself, a history of struggle between government regulation and freedom of expression.

But the game industry never had this history, this way of thinking. Whenever a game like 177 or Saori stirred up moral panic, the industry obediently followed the government’s orders — creating the EOCS, an organization where all the posts were allegedly reserved for retired police officials. Nintendo and Sony’s guidelines were even stricter — in many ways, more so than what creators had to deal with in communist societies. When the Child Pornography Act gathered steam in the late 1990s, the EOCS and adult-game publishers — the main target of the act — hardly even dared to twitch.

“The game industry is a master-and-slave system,” the owner said. “It’s endemic. The console makers kowtow to the government with regulations stricter than what the government would’ve forced on ‘em. The game makers kowtow to them because the distribution system gives them no other choice. And the buyers aren’t helpin’, either. Nobody ever got sued for releasing bad or buggy games. They just want the special-edition bonuses. One thing’s for sure — you ain’t gonna find a industry that’s more manipulable than this.”
“Yeah.”
“Game culture has more of an effect on young people than any other form of media, and the game industry…I mean, us, we don’t take any pride in it.”

I didn’t have any idea what kind of past this man experienced. But I always held the impression that game creators never felt any pride, or responsibility, toward their own work. That game publishers never realized that they were purveying culture through their releases. That gamers never realized the power of words, that they were more than the final, silent receiving point for the industry. From top to bottom, nobody wanted to take responsibility, and the more you dove into game history, the more you realized exactly how deep that went in this business. The creators of Shenmue and the Final Fantasy movie never really took responsibility for the millions they lost for their company, and from this vantage point decades later, the reason behind that was a near-total mystery.

“So. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Well, we aren’t stupid, either. We love game culture, and we want to instill some pride into that culture. Lots of people feel that way — and not just the freaks you were looking at down in the parking garage, either. I can’t leave my store, so do you mind playing middleman for a bit? I need you to meet this guy for me.”

The man handed me a single photograph. It was an interesting one.

Footnotes

Space Fantasy Zone: A Super CD-ROM game made by NEC Avenue for the PC Engine, originally announced in 1993. Produced by Toshio Tabeta, the game (basically Space Harrier with Fantasy Zone characters) bounced around release lists for four years before being formally canceled in 1997. An all-but-complete beta version exists and can be found on the Internet fairly easily.

Motoko-hime Adventure: An adventure game released by Tatsumi Shuppan for the PC-8801 in 1987. It stars real-life Japanese SF author Motoko Arai as she’s sucked through her word processor into the world her characters live in.

Assault Armoroid Angelio Complete: A PC overhead shooter originally released on the cover disc of adult-game magazine Tech Gian. The first version of the 2002 boxed release erased your hard drive if you tried changing the install directory from the default.

LOVERS: A doujin adult adventure game produced by Jellyfish, originally announced for the fall of 2001 but ultimately delayed until October 10, 2003.

Colorful Box: An adult adventure released by SoundTail for Windows in late 2003 and ported to the PS2 by KID the following spring.

“Institutional malaise”: Ohsawa spends the brunt of this chapter discussing the multitude of issues that (in his eyes) have sunk the Japanese game industry:

• A national retail distribution system controlled a small cabal of companies that have the right to refuse what they aren’t interested in. (Parallels can be made to Diamond’s monopoly-like role in the US comic marketplace.)
• Console manufacturers controlling the game manufacturing process.
• Excessively restrictive guidelines placed by console manufacturers on their third parties, stifling innovation.
• Government pressure caused by moral backlashes against sexually-provocative games.
• The game industry’s tendency to fold against all such government pressure instead of more proactively fighting against it.

Yojōhan: In July 1972, general-interest monthly magazine Omoshiro Hanbun published Yojōhan: Fusuma no Shitabari, a pornographic tale that led to one of Japan’s most famous obscenity cases. Japan’s supreme court ruled against the magazine, and the case became an important precedent for defining “obscenity” in the nation.

Chatterley case: Like in many other countries, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in Japan when a translation was prepared in 1952, leading to one of the first precedent-defining obscenity lawsuits in the nation. An edited version was released in Japan following the end of the suit; a fully-uncensored Japanese translation didn’t come out until 1996.

Coming soon: A video game so tough that VideoGames & Computer Entertainment couldn’t even figure out a strategy for defeating the next-to-last boss.

I love that ex-EGM-boss Shoe’s number-one choice is “people.” I can’t stand ‘em either!