vivivi.games

← Dev log　|　日本語版

I've Loved Games Since I Was Little 1 (Digression)

The 1980s through the 90s were a thrilling, exciting era — digital content that had never existed before was reaching the world, and wave after wave of major breakthroughs came one after another.
Of course, the 2000s brought steadily improving graphics and the rise of more complex, larger games. But the 80s and 90s were special in their own way.

When I was in fourth grade, I walked into a game center for the first time on the way home from cram school.
Back then, game centers were really the only place to encounter cutting-edge digital content. You could see the latest PC games in Akihabara, but for a grade schooler, Akihabara might as well have been another country.

The game centers I went to as an elementary schooler were in Okusawa, Setagaya Ward — there were three of them:

My friends and I would race over on our mamachari bikes, of course without telling our parents.
The 10-yen arcade that appears in the manga Hi Score Girl — based on the geography, I've always thought it's probably Okusawa.

For elementary schoolers, Okusawa was heaven — a neighborhood with three 10-yen arcades.
Gauntlet for 10 yen, Ghosts 'n Goblins for 30 yen, the original Street Fighter for 20 yen, Pengo for 10 yen, Dig Dug for 10 yen, Pac-Man for 10 yen, Front Line for 20 yen, and so on.
Gripping a fistful of 10-yen coins, agonizing over which one to play.

I didn't have a Famicom (NES).
But I loved games, and even though a Famicom was off-limits, I managed to get a "mycom" — what personal computers were called back then — on the grounds that it would be educational.
The Casio PV-2000 "Rakugaki." You could draw pixel art on it and bring it to life with BASIC — a groundbreaking machine, something like Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash) for its time. But it was no match for the Famicom in terms of power, and the game library was just a handful of titles.

We bought programming books made for the PV-2000, and my friend — who had the same machine — and I would sit together and painstakingly type in every game listed in them. And how many times did we cry when we accidentally saved to the non-recordable section at the very beginning of the cassette tape — the leader tape — and lost everything? (laughs) (Note: back then, you saved programs as audio signals on cassette tape. Computers with floppy drives did exist, but they were way out of a grade schooler's budget.)

For me, being able to play the most cutting-edge games of the era with my friends at the arcade was something like a dream come true.
Game centers had digital game content that home consoles and personal computers simply couldn't match — in expressiveness, in gameplay systems, in everything.

When I entered middle school, I started commuting by bus via Futako-Tamagawa, which meant I began going to game centers there:

I also started making trips out to Shibuya Kaikan in Shibuya. And I kept going back to Okusawa by bus, of course.

Game in Tamagawa — "In-Tama" for short — was a cramped, dark, grimy arcade with one basement floor and three floors above ground. Walk in and you'd be hit by the smell of cigarettes, electronics, and adrenaline: the unmistakable scent of an old-school game center. But whoever ran the place had great taste — the latest hit games always made it in.

Even when I was broke, I could stop by after school or after club activities just to watch the screens and stay in touch with the latest in digital entertainment. For me, it was a place to quietly catch my breath.
Today, Futako-Tamagawa has been completely redeveloped — the neighborhood I knew is gone without a trace. There's something hollow about it.

Sometimes I stand at the station entrance and try to picture how the streets looked back then.
Wishing I could walk with my old classmates to In-Tama, on the road to the bus stop for Tamagawa-en.

← Back to the dev log