“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]

“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.

The publishers, meanwhile, throw millions into each project, the price of staying ahead in the industry. There is simply too much at stake for both creator and consumer to do anything creative. No. Games aren’t creative works of art. Deep down, both sides of the bargain know that games are products of precise engineering, like a car or your washing machine.

Here is chapter four (“The Blindfolded”) 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’.

It was kind of a special day. That was expecially so for gamers, who could be forgiven if they had been restless since morning. It was no exaggeration to say this day had become a yearly tradition, one that the TV and newspapers actively covered, giving it all a festival atmosphere.

Today was the launch of the latest game in the series. That series. It only comes but once a year.

It seems ridiculous to explain which series. This has continually been the most popular game in Japan since the age of the Family Computer; it established the fantasy-RPG genre in the country and still proves its most resilient hit.

“Wow, this is crazy!”

When I finally managed to peel my anemic body out of bed in the morning, I was rewarded with the sight of a young girl half-smirking at the TV, a box of Koala’s March in her hand. Great. Her again. I paid her no mind as I pointed my body toward the kitchen to brew some coffee. There was no point trying to deal with her. Age-wise I suppose she’s around twelve or thirteen. If you were a man of that particular persuasion, you might say she was cute, but I am not. The girl shows up at my place on occasion, thumbing through the inventory of old games and consoles I keep for my work and borrowing them without asking for permission. I don’t know her name, or where she comes from, and I don’t feel like asking. But she was a game addict, just like they used to have, and she was occasionally good for information. That, combined with the way she cleaned my games and consoles meticulously before returning them, was why I haven’t attempted to stop her.

“Can you even believe this? These people don’t even know the guy’s name!”

Finally realizing I was there, the girl turned around, nimbly pointing at the TV screen. On it was the name and face of the game designer who launched the series that spawned today’s release. The TV station was interviewing the young men and women standing in line outside a big-box store. “Huh? Who’s that?” “I dunno him.” “Did he program it or something?”

“Well, yeah,” I responded. “Nobody cares about the people who make games. They never did.”

“Oh, come on! He did more than just this series! He established the command-based text adventure format during the early years of the computer industry. He’s contributed more to the history of games in Japan than almost anyone else! These people are so stupid!”

I had trouble figuring out why a girl who’d look more natural carrying a randoseru on her back was so concerned about the distant past.

“You know how a lot of people compare games to movies,” I said, groggily pouring out some instant coffee. “But the biggest difference between them is whether they’re sold off the creator’s name or not.”

This was a personal peeve of mine. Partly it was the fault of the designers themselves, too happy to let their publisher’s name enjoy first prominence instead of take responsibility for their own work. There was once a self-proclaimed genius designer, an oblong fat man who drew attention for portraying his rudderless, dead-on-arrival work as “multimedia” before disappearing, but one could hardly say that his titles contributed anything of value to game history.

“Ahh, what was his name…? E…something.” Not even this freakishly nerdy game girl could remember. It couldn’t be helped, I suppose, given that his games were so boring that anyone who played them would be hard-pressed to remember what they were even about by this point.

“If you look at it from the game designer’s point of view,” I said, “I suppose gamers are a bunch of blind idiots.”

To be brutally frank, video games had never been sold based off the creator’s name — or, for that matter, the content. To be brutally frank, once you establish a brand name for a series, then it will always sell on a continual basis, no matter how much the hardcore fans slam it. Every time another game in the Final Fantasy series comes off the conveyor belt, all of the core gamers trample upon it mercilessly. And yet it still sells — and the sales figures only went up from VII on compared to the first six games, despite the way they treat those 2D titles like sacred scripture.

The Virtua Fighter and Tekken series are another example. They retained most of their popularity despite the fact that the staff behind the second game in both series — the titles that built those brands — was long gone. In fact, the main staff from both franchises came together to form a single developer, Dream Factory, but their Tobal No. 1 failed to find major success, and the makers’ names faded into oblivion soon afterward.

Gamers never attach themselves to creators; they follow series names, the brand of the games they play. That was one of the ironclad rules of the industry. In fact, once a company establishes a brand and makes a “promise” to their user base, it’s more secure for them to keep following that promise, releasing conservatively-designed, me-too sequels and freshening up the “promise” with whatever the latest in graphic technology allowed. It is that kind of world.

Perhaps video games aren’t art after all, the way that novels or comics or movies are. As a form of media, they are remarkably inaccessible, requiring a 2-30,000 yen machine and several thousand yen per game to experience. The publishers, meanwhile, throw millions into each project, the price of staying ahead in the industry. There is simply too much at stake for both creator and consumer to do anything creative. No. Games aren’t creative works of art. Deep down, both sides of the bargain know that games are products of precise engineering, like a car or your washing machine.

Self-proclaimed “creators” who failed to understand that point were left to be swallowed up with their work by the raging storm of the expanding industry, no matter how much they complained or touted their innovation. Or maybe movies, novels and comics were only beginning to follow the same path now. In this day and age, the CG staff of any movie studio on the planet can create anything with the technology they have at their fingertips, just like with games. Novels and comics are all about division of labor these days, with several authors working on the same series without anyone raising an eyebrow. From The Five Star Stories to Guin Saga to The Heroic Legend of Arslan, there are more cases of publishers finishing up series with other authors, after the original creator grew too old or too disinterested to keep writing, than I could care to count. Sometimes, new authors entering the mix even led to drastic improvement in the series.

Perhaps the job of “creator” is no longer necessary at all in this industry. There was a time in video games when content completely failed to be relevant to the users buying it. The girl-games and otaku-oriented anime of the late 1990s were never rated based on their innate qualities — all they needed was a set of easily-recalled characters to base merchandise on. It didn’t even matter if everyone knew the game or anime was bad. The worse it was, the more useful its “infamy” became. Being so-bad-it’s-good was just as much a selling point as being good. Sister Princess and the Di Gi Charat lineup were ample enough evidence of that. With the proliferation of the Internet, Flash, and easy game-making tools, there was even a time when publishers aimed to produce “material” that would be used and abused online as much as possible.

Creative work turned into engineering processes; creative work turned into remixable comedy material. The role of creator — or, at least, the sanctity of the title — had plainly become less and less important by the time the 21st century rolled around. And since this process had made the creator unimportant in the grand scheme of things, the identity of the man behind the game launching today had become lost to society.

“Besides,” I said, putting my thoughts into words, “the customers don’t need to care about who’s producing the entertainment they consume.”

“Yeah…I guess. Did you know that more people think that The Lord of the Rings is a movie series that spawned some novels instead of the other way around?”

Even that was about as much recognition as J.R.R. Tolkien received these days for his work. Keep making sequels, and that’s what happens. Maybe it was like that as early as the first film. I don’t know. Nobody cares that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is based off real Chinese history; people are amazed when they discover that Oda Nobunaga actually existed. How would these people respond if you told them that Japan and the United States fought a war against each other once?

“Doesn’t anyone dream about anything anymore?” the girl asked. “Or are these people so stupid that every day’s like a dream world to them?”

“They’re out there. People chasing their dreams into the past, into their games, whatever. That’s why I can do the work I do.”

“No wonder he retired.”

The great game designer on the TV screen had left the industry a while back, chifing at the restrictions placed on him and longing for the days when he was free to create whatever he wanted. He tried to deny to the media at the time that any more games from his series would be sold. The publisher sued, claiming the intellectual property rights were with them. They had to; the series had been the supporting beam of their finances for years. Despite the exasperation the general public had over the disagreement, the affair was settled out of court, the series left the creator’s hands, and the sequels kept coming.

The core gamers slammed the new games at first, proclaiming that the series couldn’t possibly exist without the man, and they keep slamming it with every installment. But the staff consists entirely of people who had played all the games in the series, intensely, since childhood. They may not be crafting classics, but their output isn’t that bad. All the public cared about was exploring the world the game weaved, as long as it was an enjoyable process. Some titles in the series had key staff leave midway; some were rushed to the market before they were fully complete. But no matter what anyone said, the continual release of the series had taken the form of an unbreakable promise to the consumer.

Besides, after the original designer left, the series found release far more regularly in the marketplace, stabilizing sales and making both the publisher and the general public happy. That promise had taken a somewhat bitter form for him.

“Oh! Hey, phone!”

My cell phone was snatched up off the table before I could respond. I took it back from her, increasingly jealous of her reflexes.

“Yeah.” The girl stared at me with her expectant eyes, hoping it was some kind of work. I nodded and spoke up so she could hear me. “You got someone who wants Karuizawa Yūkai Annai? Funny how that’d pop up today. I’ll take a look around.”

I closed my cell phone and got to work.

———-

Footnotes

The command-based text adventure format: Before his involvement with Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii created a series of three graphical text adventures for computers, starting with Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken in 1983.

The history buff sighed. “What does freedom of speech mean, anyway? Is anything okay as long as you claim that it’s fiction? Or as long as the opposition groups don’t find you? Either way, the developers never bothered facing facts. Any form of entertainment’s going to offend someone, somewhere out there, but they kept on revising and recalling their work whenever any crap popped up. That’s why we’re all in this pile right now.”

Here is chapter three (“Taboos”) 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.

In a collapsed Japan where all the “poison” has been removed from mass media, the otaku culture of the past finds a way to survive in the wreckage. Ryohei Takamizawa’s job is to find rare and out-of-print games for his nostalgia-happy clients. What’s he up to this chapter?

Happy readin’.

——-

The battle was over soon enough. I lost, but I wasn’t thinking about winning in the first place. “That move’s called the Stun Palm of Doom,” began the player, far too eager to give me a beginner’s lesson for my tastes. I responded by drawing the gun in my pocket on him.

The player stared down the gun barrel, the look on his face betraying his surprised confusion. “I hope you appreciate me putting up with your little show,” I said, placing a finger on the trigger. The move was all it took to crush the player’s pride, a pride that was nonexistant outside of the electrons that run down the circuit boards.

“Tell me what I want to know. Now.”

——-

It seemed like I was a breath away from finishing the job. One phone conversation with the history buff was all it took. He had the first edition of Teitoku no Ketsudan, and he was willing to negotiate. The way he put it, he would be happy to consider my request as long as I could trade him for the first pressing of Dai Koukai Jidai III. The fact that money wasn’t enough for him annoyed me a bit, but I placed a call back with the guy I knew at Sofmap #666, and he said he had the game.

This was all going far too well. I had a bad feeling about all this good fortune I was encountering — a feeling that later proved extremely accurate.

——-

“Hey. Thanks for coming.”

The man lived inside a regular-sized house in the middle of Kanda, the sort of place that some people would say “Why do you hate your country?” if they realized he occupied the space entirely by himself. His silver hair looked dyed, and the black-rimmed glasses he wore were apparently inspired by a 20th-century historical novelist he liked. Judging by the books, swords, pieces of armor, games, anime DVDs, and so forth stuffed into his cramped study without any rhyme or reason, it was plain what kind of person he was.

The sheer scope of his obsessions made me convinced that the uneasy feeling in my stomach was all too justifiable.

“Eh heh heh… Wow. You got it. You know, Dai Koukai Jidai III, the first version, that’s somethin’ special to people like us. You know what I mean? You don’t look like you do. There are craploads of games set around the age of Columbus, like this one and The Atlas, but there’s a taboo to all of ‘em. None of ‘em can touch it.”

“A taboo?” I couldn’t have cared less about this topic, but I couldn’t afford to rile him, either.

“Slaves. You got me? Slaves. One of the main trading commodities of the Age of Discovery. Millions of black slaves, on a one-way trip from Africa to the West Indies. Ironclad, historical fact. But even in the 20th century, when they still had a concept of freedom of speech, it was still a huge taboo to simulate it in a game.”

He didn’t give a rat’s ass whether I was listening or not. Nothing excites people like these more than showing off their knowledge and their collection. But these days, they’ve got noplace, no one to show off to. Now he had an audience, and I guess he had an afternoon’s worth of lectures planned for me. No wonder he was so eager to meet me.

“But Dai Koukai Jidai III was different. It strove for realism at all costs. Compared to the other Age of Discovery games, it’s the most complete package out there by a longshot. They even defined what languages your character spoke. Your stats in X language or Y language aren’t good enough, you can’t even talk to some people. They divided Europe up into Spanish, the Romance languages, the Germanic tongues. Completely realistic. So of course they simulated the slave trade in-game.”

The man grew more ominous as he spoke.

“It was hilarious. Every trade commodity in the game was measured in number of barrels, and naturally that went for slaves too. What’s more, commodities were set up to go rotten as time goes on, either disappearing or becoming unsuitable for sale. Leave slaves on a ship and go on a long voyage, and they start disappearing, one barrel after another. They were treated like things, start to finish. You wanna talk to me about pure realism? Nothing could be truer to history than that, you know. But I guess people criticized it anyway. Starting with the first patch, Koei pretended that the slave trade never existed.

“You know, Koei, the publisher, their games were all about history, and history’s a delicate thing. They ran into little problems like these all the time. That’s what makes people like me love their stuff so much. But a lot of people just can’t forgive them for that. Nobody’s gonna look you in the face and say that the slave trade never existed, but they still can’t forgive Koei. Meanwhile, these same people loved killing thousands of soldiers, shooting down airplanes, dismembering monsters without a second thought. It’s funny how the whole shebang’s regulated nowadays, huh? It’s like the playing field’s even again.

“So, getting back to your game, Teitoku no Ketsudan. That’s another little tempest in a teapot Koei got itself into. A bunch of birdbrains got their panties in a twist because of a stupid little ‘Comfort’ command, but what happened after that was even more ridiculous. What with comfort women being such a controvery back then, the protestors said it was inappropriate for a game to be bringing up the topic in the first place. A lot of the slopeheads in the game biz, they didn’t know crap about history. Once doubts started to be raised about the whole comfort women thing, people started calling it a plot on the part of the game makers. The ‘liberals in Koei’ put the command in there because they wanted to stir up the hornet’s nest. Sort of thing.

“Being involved in history the way Koei was made dealing with our neighbor nations one hell of a pain sometimes. For example, they outsourced some of the work on the third game in the Teitoku no Ketsudan series out to China. That naturally led to a few demonstrations over there. And you know the fourth Dai Koukai Jidai? That game had a pretty Korean girl shoehorned into the plot for some reason, and you know they did it just to placate people over there. And that’s not all, either. For example, they had another series, Taikou Risshiden, which traced the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. You can forget about any game in that series ever touching upon Hideyoshi trying to invade Korea. And, you know, Koei used to have three main game series — Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga’s Ambition, and a third one covering Genghis Khan’s era. Why did they stop making Genghis Khan games? Well, it’d hardly be appropriate for Minamoto no Yoritomo to invade Korea and import all their princesses into his imperial court, would it?”

I nodded now and again whenever it seemed appropriate. He didn’t care if I understood any of his prattle. He just wanted to talk.

“I don’t know if they did it on purpose or if they just had their heads that high in the clouds, but Koei went through this cycle all the time, portraying some era in history and getting raked over the coals for it before revising the whole thing. Any game — any piece of entertainment — it’s got to be at least a little subversive like that. That’s why I’ve always been such a fan of ‘em.”

My legs were growing numb. I stretched them out in front of me.

“You know, Fuga System, that was another outfit that wasn’t afraid to take chances. They did all sorts of crap they knew they couldn’t get away with from the start. They had this series, Amaranth. This was an era when RPG heroes were all these pure-hearted, immaculate icons, but in Amaranth they screwed each other all the time, and they depicted it, too. The hero switched girls for the sequel, and the game showed everything they did. There wasn’t any adults-only rating or nothing. Plus, in II, the princess of this kingdom winds up getting raped and impregnated by this dark-skinned barbarian from the north, and in order to keep the baby’s blood from “dirtying” the royal lineage, the nobility created this 40-year gap in history and pretended she never existed. Crazy stuff. In their early years, they had this game called BeatVice where you kidnapped and impregnated a girl, held her child hostage and made her fight as a warrior. They were kinda an obscure outfit so it never generated Koei-style controversy, but if the media ever got wind of them, it would’ve been huge. Of course, that was the appeal of the PC game scene. You didn’t have any console first-party breathing down your neck. As long as no one bad found you, you could do anything. It was neat.”

The man’s ramblings continued to expand, showing no sign of ending.

“You know, freedom of speech should be the sole responsibility of the author. It’s his fault if he stretches it too far, and if you don’t like it, then don’t buy it. Thanks to the cretins who don’t get that, we’ve got the world we have today. I mean, it was loony. You had girls showing up in adult games wearing middle-school, high-school uniforms, and they wanted us to believe they were 18 years old. Ridiculous. Course, looking at it the other way, as long as they put that notice on the box, it was fine and dandy to screw whoever you want, even if she didn’t even look ten. Funny, looking back, huh? I mean, they didn’t even mosaic out the penetration in porno games in the beginning, not until 177 got brought up in the legislature and making an X-rated game was enough to get you arrested. That’s where the EOCS came from, too. Bunch of retards. They gave Graduation 2 an 18+ rating because it showed high-school girls drinking and smoking. The EOCS only had jurisdiction over the Softbank-controlled distribution outfits, though. If you could find another distro route, you could still release any kinda game you wanted, sort of like what Sogna did. And, of course, after the Internet developed, indie labels started popping up. One of them, Analog Factory, released Jitsu-shimai, a game that depicted incest. Pretty much a direct challenge to the EOCS. Crazy times.”

The history buff sighed. “What does freedom of speech mean, anyway? Is anything okay as long as you claim that it’s fiction? Or as long as the opposition groups don’t find you? Either way, the developers never bothered facing facts. Any form of entertainment’s going to offend someone, somewhere out there, but they kept on revising and recalling their work whenever any crap popped up. That’s why we’re all in this pile right now.

“Of course,” he said as he handed me the Teitoku no Ketsudan box, “when a game tries as hard as this one, I guess it’s too easy a target for ‘em, huh?”

I didn’t follow half of the things he told me, but one thing was clear enough. There were people out there, a lot of them, obsessed over games. They were willing to blow huge sums of money on out-of-print titles. And the age we live in, one where people like me kept their stomachs full off their obsessions, isn’t a very nice one, apparently. The only thing his mind was occupied with was nostalgia for some mythical, glorious age that may as well have never existed.

(To be continued)

——-

Footnotes

Stun Palm of Doom: One of the signature special moves available for Akira in the Virtua Fighter series. Most fighting-game scenesters call it by its Japanese name, Hougeki Unshin Soukoshou (崩撃雲身双虎掌).

Dai Koukai Jidai III: The third game in the series known as Uncharted Waters in English-speaking countries. A Japan-only release from 1996.

Kanda: A district in the Chiyoda ward of Tokyo, largely known by out-of-towners for its wealth of used bookstores. It is heavily built up and not the sort of place most people could afford to own a large residence in.

“20th-century historical novelist“: This refers to Masamitsu Miyagitani, a well-known Japanese author whose novels mainly involve characters from ancient Chinese history.

The Atlas: A series of seafaring simulations released by Artdink between 1991 and 2000. The PC Engine port of the original Atlas is available on the Wii Virtual Console in Japan.

“Doubts started to be raised”: The Japanese government gave a formal apology to Korean comfort women in 1992, but their position has hardened in the 21st century. Some Japanese historians (as well as political manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi) have produced claims that the women were never actively coerced into prostitution as previously reported, a stance that has been condemned by most other Asian and Western countries. See Wikipedia for more about this.

“Demonstrations”: In 1996, the Chinese government declared Teitoku no Ketsudan III an “anti-revolutionary game,” claiming that it “features Hideki Tojo and glorifies the Japanese invasion of China.” Koei did not outsource development to China as the story’s history buff claims, but did manufacture their PC game packaging in the municipality of Chongqing, where workers threatened a walkout. The controversy was part of the reason the Teitoku series did not see a new release until 2001, five years later.

Dai Koukai Jidai IV: This game was released for Windows and the PlayStation in 1999. The Korean girl, Sol I-fa, appeared in the PlayStation port only. Korea and China (particularly Taiwan) are extremely important marketplaces for Koei’s historical simulations, with each game splitting their sales almost half-and-half between Japan and the other Asian countries.

Minamoto no Yoritomo: A 12th-century Japanese shogun. Also the final boss in Genpei Toumaden.

Fuga System: A small PC developer active between 1988 and 1998. Amaranth, an Ys-like RPG, is largely unknown outside of Japan but proved popular enough to spawn a series of five games between 1990 and 1995.

177: A game released in 1986 by Macadamia Soft, a division of dB-Soft. Here’s a (censored, non-porny) nico-Video of it.

EOCS: The Ethics Organization of Computer Software, a Japanese group that oversees the adult game industry.

Sogna: The adult-game label of Tokyo-based software publisher Silence, active from 1992 to 2003. They officially quit the EOCS in 1997.

Looking back, I was amazed I holed myself up in there, ten hours or so at a time, open to close, despite how unhealthy it all was. Odd how it didn’t bother me at all. I was knee-deep in that realm on a daily basis. But the hours spent playing filled me. The feeling I got with every cheer that leapt from the audience when I landed an extended combo, with every complimentary wry smile I shared with my opponent regardless of who won or lost, was indescribable.

Here is chapter two of The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER, a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa that takes retro games and uses them to weave a tale of suspense and post-apocalyptic sullenness. In a collapsed Japan where all the “poison” has been removed from mass media, the otaku culture of the past finds a way to survive in the wreckage. Ryohei Takamizawa’s job is to find rare and out-of-print games for his nostalgia-happy clients. What’s he up to this chapter?

Happy readin’.

——-

“I mean, I can’t make any money off PC-98 games,” said the guy at the Sofmap #666 counter, trying desperately to keep the hairpiece balanced on his head.

There was a marketplace for so-called “retro games” back in the day — one large enough to support used-game shops and even a magazine or two — but nearly all of them dealt exclusively with console titles. Games from the floppy-disk era wind up deteriorating over time, and the boxes were so large that they tended to be the first thing to be trashed whenever it came time to clean house.

“‘Course, collectors never change over time, y’know? If there’s some loser out there who wants something, there’s always some other loser who’s got it.”

“Can you think of any leads?”

“Well, there’s this player who comes in here a lot who was talking about how one of his customers is a huge history buff.”

With that, the man traded me the address to an underground arcade in the Kabuki-cho district of Shinjuku in exchange for a 10,000-yen note.

——-

Ever since I became a player, I’ve come into the habit of losing myself in memories of the past. My name is Kazuki Noda, and I never even imagined I’d be keeping myself fed doing crap like this.

The room was filled with the odor of the crowd, packed in like sardines and sweating, as the explosions and game music and punching sound effects mixed together to form an indecipherable ear-rattling chaos. The cigarette smoke wafting in from somewhere was enough to make me choke. Even the seediest of racetracks give their patrons a little more space to work with than this. The crowd’s eyes were fixed on the machine across from mine. No matter how many of them gather around, you almost never hear any cheers or clapping. Looking at them from the outside, staring wordlessly at the player and his console, was a weird experience.

Looking back, I was amazed I holed myself up in there, ten hours or so at a time, open to close, despite how unhealthy it all was. Odd how it didn’t bother me at all. I was knee-deep in that realm on a daily basis. But the hours spent playing filled me. The feeling I got with every cheer that leapt from the audience when I landed an extended combo, with every complimentary wry smile I shared with my opponent regardless of who won or lost, was indescribable. I couldn’t even begin to put into words how it was, the arcades back then.

“Hey, I think you got someone.”

The beer I was drinking to pass the time was stronger than I thought. I was nodding off, and the attendant was shaking me awake.

There was no noise, no explosions, no body stink. The room was desolate bare concrete, with dim lighting placed on top of a few pricelessly valuable arcade cabinets, along with a few vending machines. It was an underground arcade in Kabuki-cho. After the new Entertainment Industry Act took effect, the legal arcades had nothing but crane games and non-violent, non-destructive titles approved by the government. No business could be more healthy and constructive than these “amusement parks,” as they call themselves.

Shinjuku Sportsland was the illegal arcade you went to once you were sick of wholesome entertainment. The place was basically a hobby for the owner, the customers mainly men in their thirties who longed for the good old days of fighting games. It was hard to picture a bleaker scene.

Of course, I guess that’s why I’m able to make a business out of this. I’m a player. That’s my job.

Whenever some honest, run-down salaryman goes through the door (like the one just now), the first thing he does is look around the room nervously. I guess I could understand it. It’s not like you’d get the death penalty if you got caught by one of the occasional raids and they decided to make an example out of you, but you would lose your social standing, at the very least.

But once his eyes turn toward one of the machines (like this one did just now), you can tell right off that he’s one of your kind. Slowly but surely, he looked across the machines. He settled on The King of Fighters ’95, a classic from the 2D masters at SNK. The basic concept, pitting characters from SNK’s top franchises like Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting against each other, was such a hit that it wound up outperforming the original franchises themselves. Arcades back then divided their floor plans between 3D games like Virtua Fighter and the 2D titles of Capcom and SNK, the two genres duking it out for share on a daily basis…not that any of that matters anymore. Regardless, gamers saw KOF95 as one of the best games in the series, the pinnacle of the franchise before the glut of characters made it lose steam. To put it another way, this was a customer with good taste.

As I observed the man, plainly excited to be playing a fighter he rarely gets a shot at, I began to notice that the low skill level the game was set at wasn’t enough for him. Setting the CPU level on the easy side was a service for the customers, most of whom didn’t have the reflexes they had back when these games were new, but it was also what made my job possible. I nonchalantly sat in front of the cabinet facing his, giving him a quick look. He was confused for a moment, but realizing what I was there for, he nodded.

The man was capable. He was nimble enough with cancels to easily hold his own against the computer, but compared to the old masters, he was frankly nothing. Maybe he used to be better; maybe he was just an average gamer and liked playing anyway. It honestly didn’t matter to me. My job was to fight him on his terms, to bring the battle to a level he was comfortable with. This wasn’t a competition. A player’s job isn’t to win; it’s to give the customer as enjoyable an experience as possible.

In the case of a team-battle game like KOF95, that means starting by keeping the fight close, then winning with the last guy on your side. The trick here is to work some sort of easy-to-detect weakness into your play style. I don’t make it that easy for him to get, but — for example — if he picks up on the fact that I have trouble defending projectiles after a dive cancel, then he’ll feel like he has a chance at winning. Then I let him win once every three matches or so.

“Thanks. It was fun.”

The nervousness totally gone, the salaryman was already moving like a regular as he palmed a bill into my hand. The custom was to tip the player the same amount that you put into the machine. You don’t get much in one go, but if you had enough customers in a day, you could keep yourself above water well enough.

Back when the game industry was a real business, I had a name for myself among the fans. I let it get to my head. Once I started getting a little writing work from it, I actually thought I could make it a career. I was a textbook case: a kid who left school with no job hopes and the idea that he could become a world-famous game designer off of that somehow.

Watching the salaryman leave the arcade, I threw the bill he gave me into a vending machine and chose the cheapest low-malt beer they had — the only luxury I could afford. When I wasn’t dreaming about becoming a world-beating game designer, I was also imagining myself as a professional gamer. Which I guess I am now. A pro gamer. A player who can take on anyone at anything, from arcade games to net PVP stuff to old Famicom carts. All it makes me is a game panhandler, a man relying on other people’s nostalgia for the golden age of gaming to earn his next meal. That’s what being a “pro gamer” gets you.

——-

“Hey. You the player here?”

The man must have thought I looked pathetic, sipping my beer slowly to keep the sensation in my throat for as long as possible. I valued my salary too much to get on his bad side. Between the alcohol and my sense of self-loathing lay this man, dead in front of me; someone in his early twenties, someone who couldn’t have been from the game generation.

“Yeah. You here to play? You’re kinda young for it.”

Swiveling my unfocused eyes upward, I could plainly see the contempt in his expression.

“I don’t play games outside of my business,” said the man. His name was Ryohei Takamizawa, and he was a game hunter. I knew my fair share of brokers tracking down the games, the consoles, the arcade boards for the sort of people that underground arcades needed to make their money, but they’re usually nowhere near this young.

“The Softmap #666 guy told me you got a history fan in your clientele.”

I don’t spend all day holed up in this arcade. Sometimes I make house calls. A lot of people my age have consoles carefully stored in their closets, or Windows games that shut down their servers and are playable only in standalone mode, and they’re looking for someone to play with or show off to. All well-off enough that they can afford to call me in, of course. Occasionally I get a call from one of these clients to serve as their opponent for the entire day. The base pay’s a bit better that way. They throw in a little more in order to encourage me not to report them.

“Yeah. I mentioned the guy to him. He made me play Age of Empires, I think.”

“I want to get some contact info for him. There’s this game I’m looking for.”

People like these, too young to be there for the golden era, really got on my nerves. They’re arrogant, and they don’t give a shit about games. It’s just a source of income to them.

“So, how much?”

Just like I expected, he thought that money could do anything for him. Of course, the bill he showed me was admittedly enough to make me unconsciously clear my throat. It could buy me an entire jug of sake, easy. But I had to stand my ground here. Otherwise, I’d just be a game panhandler.

“I don’t need your money. Let’s play a round. Beat me, and I’ll arrange a meeting.” I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I sounded like a character from that strip-mahjong game you always found in the corner of the arcade.

The Virtua Fighter 2 cabinet lay before my fingers. No title symbolized the arcade fighting scene better than this one. There was a moment in time where being good at this game would make you the object of worship; an “iron gamer,” as the otaku put it. What are all those iron gamers doing today? I could see one of them in the same line of work as I was, grimly smiling to himself.

“Sure. I always wanted to see what a ‘player’ could do.”

As I sat down next to the cabinet and pressed the start button, I realized that I cared less about the money and more about showing this kid what gamers from my era are made of.

(To be continued)

Footnotes

PC-98: A computer series, launched by NEC in 1982, that ran off Intel processors but was different enough from the IBM PC standard to not be compatible. It had a virtual monopoly on the Japanese business marketplace until the mid-to-late 1990s, and was also a very popular platform (much more so than the X68000) for games and doujin software. Like with old PC games in the US, the vast majority of PC-98 titles are easily emulatable and have little collector value.

Shinjuku Sportsland: This is an actual arcade located in Shinjuku, one with a bustling fighter scene and one that also plays host to a great deal of preliminary location tests.

“I don’t care what it takes. I want to play Teitoku no Ketsudan from Koei. The first one,” the man said, as if confessing his darkest desires. “I’m not talking about the console port, either. The PC-8801 one. First printing.” With that, he fell silent. Now I knew why that envelope was so thick. I had heard stories about that one.

The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER is a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa and published in 2002-04 over eight issues of YuGe, a Japanese magazine devoted to games old and new (now called GameSide). Illustrations were provided by Aki Shimizu, a manga artist who I don’t think has done anything that’s attracted a Stateside fanbase yet but is still a pretty talented dude.

This is almost certainly the only apocalyptic SF novel themed around used video games that has ever been written, and its mere existence shocks and enthralls me, and so I’m translatin’ it, starting with this first installment. I’ve included a decent amount of links and footnotes so you’ll be able to understand all the Japan- (and Akihabara-) centric references. If something still seems obtuse to you, please let me know.

Happy readin’.

——-

The great skyscrapers, once some of the most renowned in the world, crumbled into an abandoned, almost incomprehensible ruin. The towering hulks of Old Yodobashi town, once the proud face of Nishi-Shinjuku’s economic industry, transformed into enormous slums that are lawless even by Tokyo standards, making them famous for a far different reason than before. Being here at night would make you a man with suicidal tendencies.

The unique smell of rancid garbage fills the air. It is unique to the slum because public services, including trash collection, have long shied away from here. Here there is no electricity, no, gas, no water — not officially. And yet the lit windows that dot the high-flung buildings, illuminated by generator batteries stolen from somewhere, cast a yet-more ominous light on the landscape. Someone has forced an illegal connection into the city’s sewer system, and leaking pipes snake their way through the innards of every inhabited building. It is impossible to say if the homeless people lying at the edge of the roads are dead or sleeping, but there they are, not even able to stake out an existence in the slum itself. “Hi.” A woman from some unknown country calls to me, hoping to sell herself for the cost of a bowl of ramen. The darkness in the corner no doubt hides some kid, a pickpocket or mugger aiming for my wallet.

I gripped the gun by my side tightly, not quite used to the sensation.

I may not live here, but like them, I am an outsider all the same. They must have smelled this out, which is why they elected not to attack me on sight. I proceeded on to my destination: the remains of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, smack dab in the center of the slum, the structure above its 42nd and 31st floors blown away by a missile.

——-

The thickness of the envelope placed before my spoke volumes about the difficulty of the job, not to mention the insanity of the client.

“So, what do you need?”

The man dressed in Japanese clothing sat in front of me, staring into my face as if brooding over something. He seemed older, but probably he was in his forties or fifties, like most of my customers. The look on his face belied that. Only a certain creed, from only a certain era, caused that look.

“I need you to search for a game,” said the man. He was an author. His work allowed him an extremely comfortable living, allegedly.

“Then why don’t you go to the store? Or a used-game shop?” I fully understood the pointlessness of this question, but nonetheless repeated it with every client. It served as a sort of final warning.

The man spat out his response. “Who the hell wants that crap they sell?” he said, peering as if trying to curse me with his eyes. Oh, great. This guy’s for real — an honest-to-god surviving otaku.

——-

Apparently the world started falling out of whack right after we got into the 21st century. Japan, forced into the corner by its declining economy, reverted to its maddeningly insular island-nation mindframe, eating itself bare from the inside. Teenage crime skyrocketed, the spread of the Internet and its establishment as a form of new media created a haven for uncontrollably free speech, unemployment rates rose higher and higher, and in a crazed attempt to quash it all, the land and its people yearned for more controls and restrictions than ever before. The Child Pornography Act, the Juvenile Harmful Environment Protection Act, the Resident Registry Network System, and the Anti-Spying Act were all enacted, one after another, and the valiant politicians who subsequently snuffed out free speech made Japan a very uncomfortable place to be.

The deciding factor came with North Korea’s national-scale suicide attack. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building was the first of many city targets hit by missiles, followed by a string of terror attacks carried out by North Korean agents, their very existence in Japan a startling horror to most. The desperate regime plowed its way southward, and the resulting Korea War II (a media misnomer, since the first war had never officially been declared over, but the term I use regardless) forced the Japan Self-Defense Force into full deployment, causing untold deaths. The fiscal cost of fighting plunged government finance and Japan’s own economy into further turmoil, and the overwhelming flood of refugees (both real and opportunist) that drifted in from the Sea of Japan after the war ended spread the poverty and chaos deeper into the country. They, more than anything else, struck the final blow against Japan.

Its economy and security at rock bottom, Japan’s government saw an immediate power grab and restriction on all aspects of society as the only way to restore order. The Social Environment Protection Bureau is the most symbolic example of this attitude. The establishment of an office that eliminated any aspect of society deemed “harmful,” like something straight out of a science-fiction novel, was welcomed by the Japanese, every one of them raising their hand in agreement. Maybe it should have been expected. We always preferred law and order over freedom and equality anyway.

The SEPB’s primary targets included the very thing I base my work around nowadays: the “otaku culture” that sprouted like weeds from the end of the 20th century to the start of the 21st. The manufacture of pleasure for the sake of pleasure, of no productive value whatsoever, and the ineffectual “otaku” that voraciously consumed it all were the most wasteful thing imaginable as Japan rebuilt its economy and society, and nothing could possibly be more harmful to youth in this modern land. Besides, it was the sex and violence in video games and violence that brought about hikikomori and juvenile crime in the first place. Everyone knew that.

The blind leading the blind.

It didn’t matter what it was. They needed a scapegoat, someplace to shift the blame for this impoverished, unstable society, and they chose otaku and their culture, stacking them up right alongside the refugees that flowed ashore.

Outright oppressing it was far from necessary. If you take a bunch of retired police detectives, give them a cushy, well-paying job keeping watch over publishers and game makers for harmful content, grant them the right to file criminal charges and apply governmental pressure as a division of the SEPB, then ask them to choose between free speech and feeding their family in this economy, the decision was painfully clear. As for the rest of the problem — the doujin culture sparked by Comiket, the circulation of peer-to-peer media, the chaotic webs of speech on 2channel and elsewhere — relieving them of their forums and placing trade-ministry bureaucrats into a watchdog organization to keep the handcuffs on Internet providers proved to be more than enough.

In the blink of an eye, it was all gone — every pedobear and longcat and “Do a barrel roll” and “so i herd u liek mudkips,” every depiction of war, sex and violence from games, novels, manga and anime. A new era in mass media was created, one bursting with harmless, wholesome Disney ripoffs.

Back to today, though. Even though this new wave crashed over every form of media, it still failed to wash away all the otaku. The games, manga, doujinshi and anime videos that fueled the glory days of the otaku era, seized and trashed and their mere possession criminalized, were still passed around behind closed doors. The otaku of the age, now in their forties and fifties and most of them with stable, financially secure lives, are still burning with their passion.

Case in point, the elderly writer sitting before me.

My name is Ryohei Takamizawa, professional broker specializing in video games, exclusively serving the needs of ex-otaku like this one.

“I don’t care what it takes. I want to play Teitoku no Ketsudan from Koei. The first one,” the man said, as if confessing his darkest desires. “I’m not talking about the console port, either. The PC-8801 one. First printing.” With that, he fell silent.

Now I knew why that envelope was so thick. I had heard stories about that one. Even back when otaku culture was booming, the game was infamous, treated by the industry like some kind of demon spawn. Koei was a publisher that made it big with historical simulations, especially the Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, and Teitoku was their World War II sim, one that attracted an exceptionally dedicated fanbase. WWII sims had a tendency to be obsessively detailed and accessible to only an elite few, and Teitoku (released in 1989) became a hit because of its comparatively simple and “game-like” battle system. Releasing a “war” game like this nowadays is something beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

The initial pressing of the first game in the Teitoku series had a command called “Comfort.” This option, when selected, displays a little animation that shows a soldier putting his arm around a (presumably native) woman. It was a simple command that let you rest your soldiers, but the media at the time was perpetuating a scandal at the time about “comfort women,” something or other whose significance is nil at this stage, so the depiction was not taken to very kindly. It became the target of pundits claiming that video games are socially irresponsible, and so another version got made.

“Huh. No wonder you’re throwing that kind of money around.”

“During the Second Korean War, I was–”

“Wait. This doesn’t need to get depressing. I don’t need a reason — you’ll pay whatever it takes for that game, right? That’s all I need to know.”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty generous guy. Does being an author get you that much?”

“It doesn’t matter what I write about. With all the regulations, all they need is something coherent, and they’re ecstatic.”

I checked the envelope after the writer left. There was a million inside. Inflation being what it is, that was about a month’s salary for your typical office flack, but even an office flack is an enviable position these days. I thanked myself for calling him generous.

——-

Walking down the hallway, stained and moldy thanks to the leaky, exposed water pipes, was treacherous. The fact I am willing to live twenty floors up in a building where the elevators are mere conversation pieces astonishes me sometimes.

Advancing slowly to soothe my aching lungs, dulled by my usual lack of exercise, I finally made it to the 23rd floor. The moment I opened the door, my ears were greeted with a song that had been implanted into my mind after all the times I heard it — the Sato Musen commercial jingle, a tune that throws the old otaku generation into paroxysms of nostalgia. This floor, and the next nine above it, are known to those aware of its existence as “Neo Akihabara.”

The doujin shops, game stores, and used-game retailers driven out of Akihabara (now a simple jumble of appliance shops) have piled into this black market, given no place else to go. Law enforcement is at best spotty in the giant slums, and the fact this market exists at all is due to its location in Nishi-Shinjuku, a place most normal people would be reticent about ever stepping foot in.

I knew exactly where I wanted to go.

The weathered sign said “Sofmap #666,” the numerals painted in bright white after the fact.

(To be continued)

Footnotes

Nishi-Shinjuku: One of Tokyo’s main business districts, packed with skyscrapers.

Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building: A large building that houses the city’s government. Actually composed of two skyscrapers connected on the bottom.

Child Pornography Act [...]: The three acts are proposed bills that, in real life, did the Japan-politics equivalent of dying in committee after public controversy. The Resident Registration Network System is form of citizen database launched in 2002; its constitutionality was upheld by Japan’s supreme court in 2008.

Pedobear [...]: I engaged in selective localization here because I was too lazy to explain “uguu” and other Japanese Internet/video-game memes. Apologies.

Teitoku no Ketsudan: The SNES and Genesis versions were released in the US under the name P.T.O.: Pacific Theater of Operations.

Sato Musen: A Japanese electronics store that used to occupy the building directly facing the JR Akihabara rail station exit. Their annoyingly catchy ad jingle could be heard on TV spots and blaring from speakers immediately upon exiting the station, making it an unmistakable part of Akihabara culture. The chain sold its stores to rival Yamada Denki and ceased operations in July 2008.

Sofmap #666: Sofmap is another chain of Japanese electronic and game shops. Until 2006, each of its stores in Akihabara were assigned numbers, with Sofmap #3 specializing in games, #6 exclusively selling PC software, #7 dealing in used laptops, and so forth.