Of course, I’m referring to the homepage for the Aiseikai Hospital in Saitama prefecture, a small facility mostly specializing in ob-gyn work. (Clicking on that link may or may not trigger security blocks on your PC. Viewer beware. Totally worth it, though.)

Featuring MIDI music, a wealth of nonsensical imagery alongside  their office hours and photo tours, and a vivid, psychedelic design straight out of 1998, Aiseikai’s page has been notorious among Japanese net users for years now, in part because it’s  remained doggedly impervious to change for over 16 years. However, sad news trekked across the net today: The hospital chief’s son reported on Twitter that his dad intends to close the site within the next two months, triggering a firestorm of nostalgia on 2ch and other forums.

Aiseikai’s site has often been cited by Western Web designers as a classic example of Japan’s zeal for garish, cluttered, eye-destroying websites, despite being the culture that gave us finely-crafted paintings, Zen gardens, and an art style that emphasizes saying the most with the least number of strokes. It’s true that a lot of Japan’s web-dom is still stuck in 2005, sticking with Flash and tables and designs optimized for gara-kei feature phones. (Uniqlo is an oft-cited exception.)

Time, however, apparently waits for no ghost website, even if an entire nation’s worth of nerds adore it for nostalgia’s sake. I fear that he’ll just replace it with a boring old WordPress setup and it’ll look just like every other listless, yawn-inducing website. It’s the passing of an era.

ED: It turns out this post references a blog post from 2008 and is therefore probably really inaccurate. Never mind. Apologies for not noticing that. Original post follows below.

Continuing my coverage of themed drinking establishments in the Akihabara neighborhood of Tokyo, I was recently alerted to the existence of Game Bar A-Button, a pretty tiny joint that deals in arcade games, rare game media, Japanese craft beer, and nerd camaraderie. Or, at least, you’d figure as much looking at their page — it’s easy to picture the sort of combo bar/arcade concept that places like Portland’s erstwhile Ground Kontrol have pioneered in the US.

However, a negative review on a blog has attracted some attention around the Japanese Internet as of late (ED: Even though it’s from 2008; maybe I should have noticed that first before posting):

“The thing that surprised me about this place is that there’s no conversation. If you’re at a counter-style place, like a sushi restaurant or a bar, conversation with the staff is part of the package alongside the food. I went here with my friends this time, but we just talked amongst ourselves the whole time. Normally you’d have someone from the bar at least say hello — I’ve worked at a bar before, but having someone silent on the floor is unthinkable. 

Even if you’ve never worked in food service before, you can tell the difference between a good bar and a bad one once you go to a few. I wonder if the owner and the staff just haven’t been to bars too often? It’s silly to start a bar without knowing what makes the essence of one. This being Akihabara, I imagine a lot of customers will be walking into a bar for the first time, so maybe they won’t notice anything is off. If they can keep themselves going with those kind of customers, then they can just dismiss me as a whiner, but for a bar themed after video games, I want to support them. However, as someone with food-service experience, my anger won out in the end.”

16SHOTS over in Shinjuku has a bit better of a reputation. Both are really small joints, though, to the point where they probably couldn’t fit more than around 15 customers at a time. Visit at your own risk.

FUN is halfway done! Here’s a quick recap of what I played in episode 3:

Section 1
- Feed My Disease — Comix Zone (Sega, Genesis) — Howard Drossin
- The exciting “crossing a sewer” music – Energy (NCS, PCE)
- Stage 1 – Drill Dozer (Nintendo, GBA) — Go Ichinose, Satoshi Nohara
- Stage 2 – Gods (Accolate, Genesis) — Jason Page
- Village – Tengai Makyo ZERO (Hudson, SFC) — Toshiyuki Sasagawa
- Stage 1 – Kuru Kuru Kururin (Nintendo, GBA) — Atsuhiro Motoyama
- Stage 2a – Golden Axe III (Sega, Genesis) – Naofumi Hataya, Tatsuyuki Maeda

I wrote about Energy long ago. The music still rocks, but not as much as the job Jason Page did revving up the soundtrack of Gods for the Genesis. The original Amiga was a lot more plodding and “Amiga-y” in the bad definition of the term.

Comix Zone gets some love these days, but it sure didn’t at the time, despite the fine job that Drossin did with the Genesis’ sound chip. No FM game sounds like this.

Section 2

20 minutes of Sorcerian, the PC88VA version.

I don’t think it can be emphasized enough how influential this soundtrack was to a generation of computer enthusiasts in Japan. Yuzo K. got his start writing music articles for computer mags, and by the time this game came out, he was already a major celebrity in the business. Music disks came out for the PC88 from amateur groups and they all sounded a lot like Yuzo. In that was I suppose he was kinda like the musicians in Future Crew for people of my generation. (Speaking of people I haven’t played yet…)

Section 3
– World Wide Connection – Shock Troopers 2nd Squad (Saurus, Neo Geo) — Masahiko Hataya, Masaki Kase
– Battle – Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire (Nintendo, GBA) — Go Ichinose, Junichi Masuda
– Europe in the Middle Ages (Receiving) – Gain Ground (Sega, arcade) – Katsuhiro Hayashi
– Stage 5 – Sunset Riders (Konami, SNES) — Motoaki Furukawa
– Village – Fury of the Furries (Kalisto, Amiga) – Frédéric Motte
– Main – Mousin’ Around (Midway, pinball) — Dan Forden

Sega arcade composers had an odd yet endearing habit of creating tunes that had no hope of looping before the player would finish the stage it played in. Stages in Gain Ground run a variable amount, but never more than about three minutes, a bit under how long this tune runes. (More to the point, if you spent that long on any individual Gain Ground level, that most likely means you’re screwed anyway and your game is about to end.)

Fury of the Furries is not a fetish game, but instead an innovative French platformer that sort of foretold the gameplay mechanic that The Lost Vikings used a bit later. It became Pac-in-Time on the SNES and also had a PC port, but the Amiga version wins out music-wise I think.

Section 4
– Title – Ottifanten (Infogrames, GB)
– Field – Hourai Gakuen no Bouken (J-Wing, SFC) — Hitoshi Sakimoto
– Little Joke 1 — XTD (Amiga)
– Title/Field – King Breeder (Artec, PC8801) — Hitoshi Sakimoto
– Battle tune 2 – Hippodrome (Data East, arcade)
– Desert town – Romancing SaGa 3 (Square, SFC) — Kenji Ito
– Sweet and Sour — PRI/Oxyron (C64)

Sakimoto did a lot of random stuff, didn’t he? I should write about King Breeder sometime (it’s not porny).

Click above to listen/download!  (Or consult the RSS feed or iTunes page)

Here is episode 3 of FUN with Kevin Gifford and His Pretend Pals, a limited-time podcast run by me. I play lots of old game/demo/computer-generated music running the entire history of the genre. Throughout the show, I also cut in (about once every 15 minutes) with commentary about the game industry, favorite artists, and the plight of the hourly worker in Central Oregon.

Features this time around include:

• An intro
• Some more singing
• A look at the best FM music ever composed by Yuzo Koshiro
• Me discussing the time I went out to the deserts surrounding Reno and shot up a photocopier
• Me creating the world’s first audio Commodore 64 crack intro
• The wistful farewell song
• And more

This is a free podcast and by all means let everyone know about it, because FUN is best when it’s shared, right?

A full annotated tracklist will be released tomorrow!

Inside a maid cafe in Den-Den Town, Osaka (Vitalie Ciubotaru)

I know many people think that Japanese nerds are all perverts who see women as desirable yet inherently inferior to themselves, but the full story is a bit more intricate than that. I say this because Sankei Biz reported a couple days back that less than half of all the maid cafes that set up shop in Akihabara over the past ten years still exist.

Maid cafes aren’t an easy to make money with because they work with a completely different cost structure from normal cafes. They have to cover the inventory costs for food, rent, utilities and so on, but also must devote a larger chunk of their budget to employee wages. To a maid cafe, the “maids” are a vital business resource, and the cafe needs to retain at least a certain amount of them at all times. As a result, wages are always difficult to keep in check, and running the cafe like a regular one results in reduced profits and even losses. Once cafes begin to have trouble keeping up with expenses and fail to pay their staff, rumors begin to spread quickly and the business never lasts long afterwards.

As more than 2ch commenter noted in response to this article, part of the issue is that Japan doesn’t have the tradition of tipping at restaurants. It’s not something you run into at all. As a result, Japanese guidebooks to the United States have to explicitly explain the concept to readers, reminding them that while a tip is “a symbol of your appreciation for the service provided” (the way a free Japanese-language Seattle tourism brochure I have bumping around puts it), it’s not something to be considered optional, either. As a result — for better or for worse (I know a lot of food-service folks here who’d say “better” by a longshot) — the maids get their full wages paid by the company, and the company’s only recourse for the higher fees popular maids may ask for is to try and make it up in prices and get customers in and out of there as quickly as possible. Hence why your average cup of coffee in general isn’t cheap at traditional, non-Starbucks kissaten and never, ever goes below 500 yen at maid cafes.

The most surprising part of the article to me: Even though maid cafes are on the decline, there’s apparently still 132 of them in Akihabara as of the start of 2012. I don’t know where they all fit. (Ko Ransom on Twitter informs me that the number is likely for all maid-oriented joints, like massage / “refresh” places, not just traditional cafes.)

A related article from Searchina that came out at the same time covered American tourists’ responses to cat cafes on travel review sites. The article’s conclusion: While they had good things to say about the courtesy and kindness of the staff in letting them in and dealing with the language barrier, visitors “wondered if the cats there were really happy”. As a 2ch poster put it: “The cats in places like that are like the girls at cabaret clubs, right? None of those girls are happy while they’re on the clock either, so…”

A thread from the “online game viewing party” forum on Japan’s 2ch.net:

1 ：2013/05/01 19:00:46.85 ID:u1Nj6wW+
Me, now: “This game isn’t over yet? God this is so long”

5 ：2013/05/01 19:10:46.03 ID:dEaw0fld
Then: “I wanna get home and pick up where I left off!”
Now: “It’s too much of a pain to start this up…”

3 ：2013/05/01 19:07:44.01 ID:fFcgu7yI
I still feel like it’s not enough it it takes less than 50 hours to get through the main game if it’s offline. Usually it feels like I finish games in 20-30 hours.

6 ：2013/05/01 19:16:05.63 ID:QtM0g32Q
For offline games, I buy them and finish them in 1-2 days.
Afterwards I read the game’s official thread to check out other people’s impressions and sell it the next weekend.
If I wait around for DLC, then the selling price goes down and/or I lose interest anyway, so I don’t bother keeping most games

7 ：2013/05/01 19:33:23.03 ID:Nvaymm2b
I can’t get enthused about playing a game unless I have a cute girl as a companion

8 ：2013/05/01 19:35:55.56 ID:gGBX3W13
There are a lot of gross otaku like you now, aren’t there?

33 ：2013/05/01 20:53:50.79 ID:gMwfxyF3
>>7
I hear you!
When I was a kid I laughed at that, like “No way there’d be a girl with eyes that big”, but now…

11 ：2013/05/01 19:47:50.29 ID:swSLUq74
Then “Hey, how do I get through that section? …Oh, really? Cool, thanks!”

Now “Sigh… Google, Google…”

44 ：2013/05/02 01:19:11.61 ID:TGZdZAnG
>>11
That one definitely applies to me.
Something about looking up anything I don’t get on google and plodding my way toward the goal makes it seem like work…
I don’t HAVE to look it up, of course, but in the end I can’t help myself

14 ：2013/05/01 19:57:12.19 ID:vPfLM96k
Then (student) -> I don’t have any money to buy games. I’m bored…
Now (salaryman) -> I don’t have any time to play games. I’m tired…

15 ：2013/05/01 19:57:57.41 ID:c8lUoOSf
I get deep into it for two or three days, but if there are a lot of days in between when I don’t play, it gets hard to start up again

13 ：2013/05/01 19:55:33.13 ID:8vqupHk/
Instead of how quickly you finish it, I think whether or not you want to keep playing over and over again is more important.

22 ：2013/05/01 20:08:53.70 ID:PIXlZsG7
Then: “15 hours to beat? That’s way too short, I’m buying something else”
Now: “15 hours…? I bet I can get to the end of that, let’s buy it”

38 ：2013/05/01 21:52:38.07 ID:0AKyn2EH
For an RPG, I definitely want 50 or so hours, and that’s without bonus crap like “collect all the items” and so on.
Having story branches and stuff is all right, but I hate games that make you go and do the same thing two or three times over before you see everything.

40 ：2013/05/01 22:09:00.38 ID:6zrPZaiH
I think Persona is about right in terms of RPGs I’ve played recently

27 ：2013/05/01 20:20:56.29 ID:DJCpmumF
I’ve played nothing but Forza lately.
Killer cost performance!

34 ：2013/05/01 21:16:36.29 ID:sgcLluzP
It’s pretty rare for there to be an FPS I want to keep playing in singleplayer.
Even if they’re made to be fast-paced, they all seem to just drag on around the middle.

39 ：2013/05/01 22:01:02.21 ID:oqFmzDKy
>>34
Even if it’s well-made, no, I don’t like FPS campaigns.
I don’t give a shit about any of the stories on them, and there’s nothing fun about killing computer opponents

41 ：2013/05/01 22:10:45.99 ID:0AKyn2EH
For FPSes, the CODMW series is the only one there I got into the story as I played, though multiplayer was still the main draw.

Lately, though, there just aren’t too many RPGs, huh?
Even if one does come out, it’s nothing but remakes or dinky little portable games.
I guess they’d take a lot of time and money to make, but I wish they’d come out a lot more often, like they did on the PS and SFC.

43 ：2013/05/01 23:49:01.58 ID:41ihfdlY
lol, there don’t need to be that many.
Not like I’d have the time anyway.
There’s just too much entertainment compared to before. Just having the net around gives you enough fun.

36 ：2013/05/01 21:35:43.53 ID:unlhnJtj
“The main character’s female? Forget it!”
But now…

37 ：2013/05/01 21:38:39.29 ID:vAC6EO09
In games where you can pick what kind of character you have, I’ve gone from picking handsome young men to middle-aged-looking dudes

45 ：2013/05/02 01:22:29.22 ID:7spXqg/h
Me, now “Oh, wait, I already bought that”

52 ：2013/05/02 02:13:11.15 ID:K0iN4+Td
Bioshock Infinity (PC version)
The first game I’ve wanted to play through again in a while

57 ：2013/05/02 05:56:13.40 ID:etX3NtKu
My backlog’s to the point where I’ll never get through it, which worries me.
I don’t have any drive to start playing PS2 games at this point, and ever since I started playing PC games, the PS3 titles have started to pile up too.

And yet whenever something interesting-looking comes out, I can’t help but buy it off Amazon.

67 ：2013/05/02 10:55:59.41 ID:Xo+YymHC
Please don’t set up individual trophies for every difficulty!
Just have it so it’s possible to get them all if I go through the hardest mode

73 ：2013/05/02 11:23:03.24 ID:chnNzWT8
Pretty much the only games where I wanted to enjoy singleplayer more or get DLC for the offline modes were Fallout 3 and Trials HD.

84 ：2013/05/02 20:27:30.45 ID:etrs30gj
Then: “Here’s the last boss! Let’s do this!!”
Now: “Just die already…”

81 ：2013/05/02 15:40:57.25 ID:8KEpkShH
>>1 back then: Liked games
>>1 now: Gotten sick of games period, but can’t/won’t do anything else, so he plays games off of sheer momentum

So he thinks it’s the games’ fault and he bitches about how much better games were in the past. If games annoy you, but you wind up picking up the controller because otherwise you’re just staring blankly into space, it’s time to rethink your life.

76 ：2013/05/02 14:27:49.35 ID:0FOjzOo2
Then “This game’s terrible! Gimme my money back!”
Now “Oh, man, this is gonna be fuckin’ hilarious”

Now that Episode 2 of FUN is out, it’s time to fully examine the playlist. Read on for names, titles, details, and endless rambling.

Intro
- Crocket’s [sic] Theme — Mad (Scoop Designs)
- Title music – David Beckham Soccer (Rage Software, GBA) — ?

Rage Software paid £1.5 million per year to license Becks’s likeness back in the day. This, among other financial extravagances and the general failure in selling games they exhibited after the turn of the millennium, led to their liquidation in 2003. Thus they became just another rung in the great, towering ladder of publisher bankruptcies that defined much of that decade of the UK games business.

There are around 20 to 25 covers of “Crockett’s Theme,” one of Jan Hammer’s signature synth tunes for Miami Vice, available for the Commodore 64. Quite a lot of them were composed while the show was still on first-run TV. Until now I had no idea the show’s official run went on until May of 1989; I thought it was a lot shorter-lived for some reason. This means that Miami Vice and Cops were premiering new episodes at the same time for a few months — and the first season of Cops was shot entirely in and around Fort Lauderdale, FL, so even their subject matter overlapped a bit at times. That’s what I call “Must See TV” (especially after a night at the bar).

Segment 1
- Circuit Race – GT Advance 3 (THQ, GBA) – Eiji Kaneuchi
- ? (sound test #8A) – J.League Pro Striker 2 (Sega, Mega Drive) — ?
- ? – Tecmo Super Bowl (Tecmo, NES) — Keiji Yamagishi
- Intro – Namachukei 68 (Konami, X68000) — Yuji Takenouchi
- Main theme – Indianapolis 500 (Bally, pinball) — Chris Granner
- Main theme – Banzai Run (Williams, pinball) — Brian Schmidt
- Title – Kore ga Pro Yakyu ’90 (Face, PCE) — ?
- Main theme – Konami Hyper Soccer (Konami, NES) — ?
- Menu theme – Ski or Die (Konami, NES) — ?
- In game theme progression – Miracle Nine (Sega, Mega Drive) — Naofumi Hataya

I could fill hours with just this genre alone, but that’d get boring for anyone apart from me.

Once Rob Hubbard and crew stopped doing the music for EA Sports games on the Genesis, US makers lost their ability to compose good sports-game music — or should I say, they no longer saw it as something necessary to the game, much like how nobody who engineered hardware for Atari consoles thought that sound was at all important. They kept on remembering in Japan, though, fortunately.

Konami Hyper Soccer did show up on “coming soon” lists in Japan circa 1991, but wound up being a very late-era Euro-only release instead. Ski or Die is US-only. Neither have credits, so I can only guess at who did the really rockin’ synth-drum music for either.

Segment 2
Soccer Kid (Amiga) soundtrack — Matt Furniss

See if you can count how many different instruments Furniss has the steel drum substitute for in this series of tunes. I can’t get enough of it for some reason. It also helps that Soccer Kid is a legitimately good Euro-platformer.

Those of you who want more soccer-themed action can always look up Go! Go! Beckham! — Adventure on Soccer Island, released for the GBA by — wait for it — Rage Software in 2002, inexplicably in Europe only.

Segment 3
- Main theme – White Water (Williams, pinball) — Chris Granner
- Stage 2 – Ordyne (Namco, arcade) — Shinji Hosoe
- Flower Garden – Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair (Sega/Westone, arcade) — Shinichi Sakamoto
- Dungeon theme – Might & Magic (Sammy, NES) — Masaharu Iwata
- Theme 2 – M.C. Kids (Virgin Games, NES) — Charles Deenen
- Main theme – Kings of the Beach (Konami, NES) — ?
- Title – Knight Lore (Spectrum 128k hack) — Grigori Bologov

Looking back, I sure stuck a lot of music from pinball games and Konami NES sports games, huh? It’s not my fault it’s all this catchy. US gamers may know Monster Lair’s music best from the remixes Jun Chikuma produced for the TurboGrafx-16 CD release, which honestly I never liked very much compared to the original arcade / Genesis soundtrack.

M.C. Kids rocks. It’s totally what the cool kids play. Charles Deenen has done audio tech stuff at EA for the past ten years, but I still love his work on the 8-bits the best. He produced more than a couple memorable tunes for the Dutch C64 demoscene in the early ’90s, although he didn’t work all that often on commercial games until later.

Segment 4
- City map 2 – Police Quest I (Sierra, PC/Adlib) — Robert Atesalp
- Frontpage Issue 6 — Marco de Jong (Hithouse) — C64
- Car tuning screen – F1 Sensation (Konami, NES) — ?
- Menu screen – Game On (June 1993) (C64) — Thomas Detert
- World map – Final Fantasy Legend II (Square, GB) — Nobuo Uematsu, Kenji Ito
- Ikari Intro Tune — ? (based on song by Thomas Detert)
- Frazze — Antii Hannula (Flex)

I think Sierra’s Adlib work deserves a lot more respect…at least, with this game, which does a great job imitating slide guitars and the background music of a lot of Hill Street Blues episodes.

The Game On tune is a cover of a song from Lethal Xcess, an Amiga/ST shooter that came out in 1991. The soundtrack was by Jochen Hippel and was ripped and used in about eight million crack intros in the following years. Catchy, isn’t it? Detert is on my short list of composers to do a special look at, but I don’t want to have too much C64 stuff in here…

Click above to listen/download!  (Or consult the RSS feed or iTunes page)

Here is episode 2 of FUN with Kevin Gifford and His Pretend Pals, a limited-time podcast run by me. I play lots of old game/demo/computer-generated music running the entire history of the genre. Throughout the show, I also cut in (about once every 15 minutes) with commentary about the game industry, favorite artists, and exactly what I think about E3 and where I’d like to see it shuffle off to.

Features this time around include:

• An intro
• Some great singing
• An extended look at the music behind the greatest sports game ever made
• Music generated by SIDs, AY-9-3-8912s, Yamaha YM2151s, Amigas, and much more
• An exclusive reveal of the location of McDonald’s Treasure Land (it’s closer than you think)
• The wistful farewell song
• And more

This is a free podcast and by all means let everyone know about it, because FUN is best when it’s shared, right?

A full annotated tracklist will be released tomorrow!

I love McDonald’s nostalgia almost as much as I love Cooper Black.

800 yen for a Big Mac with small fries/drink is pretty dang expensive. The yen was a lot cheaper back then — around 230 yen to the dollar — but according to the Internet and people I’ve talked to, the prices were still high enough that most people thought of going there as a special occasion, not like now where it’s a stop on the way to work for a pretty hefty number of train/foot commuters.

The current Big Mac set goes for 650 yen in Japan, which (with a buck being about 100 yen now) makes it just a bit more expensive over there than here. I think. It’s surprisingly difficult to find information on McDonald’s prices by US region online, and my car’s low on gas and I don’t feel like going out and checking my local one just for the sake of this nostalgia post. Apologies.

Picture stolen from Weekly Playboy (Eigo Shimojo)

I mentioned in Episode 1 of FUN that Masayuki Uemura, chief hardware designer for many of Nintendo’s consoles, did an interview with Weekly Playboy magazine in Japan last week to commemorate the Famicom’s 30th anniversary. (I said that the Famicom came out 1982 in the podcast; it was actually July of 1983.)

As Uemura explains in the interview, he began work on the console that became the Famicom in 1981, not long after Donkey Kong hit arcades:

“I was in the arcade-game development department, and the president at the time [Hiroshi Yamauchi] sent us a missive to ‘make something that’ll let you play arcade games on your home TV’. I, personally, really didn’t have any prospects of success.”

Why not?

“The Game & Watch series was flying off the shelves at the time, so I figured Game & Watch was where our company was going to go for a while to come. Just the fact you could carry those around and play whenever you wanted, I thought that was huge. What’s more, they were taking more and more people away from my department to work on Game & Watch, so my team only had three people in it. So we were given this mission when it was already like we were fighting a losing battle. I still have my notes from the early stages of the project, but it’s filled with all of this pessimistic stuff, like ‘I don’t see any future in this’.”

So Uemura and his gang of three got to work, starting by examining other home consoles of the time. Given this was 1981, you could guess what he looked at first.

“The Atari 2600 was a big hit in the US at the time, so I thought I could just use that as a reference and coast on the project a little that way. But, unfortunately, the 2600 wasn’t any sort of good technical reference for us. So we got all defiant and decided we’d make a machine so high-quality, it’d live up to the arcades.”

Were there any surprises or particularly difficult points in development?

“We had trouble finding a chipmaker willing to work with us, and once we did, there were bugs with the graphic display because of issues with the chip designs we worked with. Also, development began with the goal of getting the sale price to be 10,000 yen or below, but that was just too hard costwise; it was looking to be more like 20,000 or 30,000 yen. We pared it down to the barest of features, though, and released it at 14,800 yen.”

The Famicom famously sports a garish white-and-red color scheme that many people (including myself) claimed was because those were the cheapest colors of plastic available in bulk at the time. But Uemura emphatically denied this in the interview:

“That’s actually an error. It’s the opposite, in fact, because originally we were going for a cheap steel casing for the unit, but it was too flimsy so we had to switch to a stronger plastic. The dark red color was simply an order from the president. He had this dark red scarf that he liked to wear a lot; it was just a color that he liked. For an executive like him, the external design is one of the easier ways to put his mark on the project, so to speak. That’s the truth of it.”

Where the name “Family Computer” originally come from?

“I came up with that name. We didn’t really have a marketing department, so the developers got to name their own projects. Terms like ‘personal computer’ and ‘home computer’ were popping up in the media pretty frequently at the time, and I realized one day that ‘family’ hadn’t been used yet. It evoked this image of families sitting around the kotatsu and playing games with each other, so I thought Family Computer would work well.”

This was abbreviated by the Japanese media to “Famicom” almost immediately, although Nintendo still officially called it “Family Computer” right up until it dropped support for the console in 2007.

“Actually, as I was discussing this name with my family, my wife said ‘Why don’t you just call it the Famicom? You know that’s how Japanese people are going to abbreviate it anyway.’ I liked that a lot, so I proposed that as the name of the console, but my boss turned me down. His reasoning was along the lines of ‘Famicom? I don’t know what that means. Family Computer is a lot easier to understand’. ”

The 69-year-old Uemura now serves as senior hardware advisor on Nintendo’s board, as well as a research professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. 30 years after the Famicom was launched, he views the system as offering a fundamentally different experience from modern consoles:

“With all the limits the specs forced on them, developers had to deal with some pretty basic graphics as they worked hard on their games. But I think players were able to fill in the gaps with their imaginations. For better or for worse, modern consoles offer movie-like beauty in their visuals, so in a way the creator’s really forcing too much of their own image on players. With the Famicom, every player views the world presented to them in a different way.”