Video games are a major industry in Japan, and the country is considered one of the most influential in video gaming. Japanese game development is often identified with the golden age of video games and the country is home to many notable video game companies such as Nintendo, Sega, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Taito, Konami, Square Enix, Capcom, NEC, SNK, Koei Tecmo, Atlus, Arc System Works, Marvelous, Nippon Ichi Software, Level-5, Irem, Nihon Falcom, Sony and formerly its branch Sony Computer Entertainment. In 2022, Japan was the third largest video game market in the world after the United States and China.

The space is known for the catalogs of several major publishers, all of whom have competed in the video game console and video arcade markets at various points. Released in 1965, Periscope was a major arcade hit in Japan, preceding several decades of success in the arcade industry there. Nintendo, a former hanafuda playing card vendor, rose to prominence during the 1980s with the release of the home video game console called the Family Computer (Famicom), which became a major hit as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) internationally. Sony, already one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, entered the market in 1994 with the Sony PlayStation, one of the first home consoles to feature 3D graphics, almost immediately establishing itself as a major publisher in the space. Shigeru Miyamoto remains internationally renowned as a "father of video gaming" and is the only game developer so far to receive Japan's highest civilian honor for artists, the 文化功労者 (bunka kōrōsha) or Person of Cultural Merit.

Arcade culture is a major influence among young Japanese, with Akihabara Electric Town being a major nexus of so-called otaku culture in Japan, which overlaps with video gaming heavily. Japanese video game franchises such as Super Mario, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy, Sonic the Hedgehog, Fire Emblem, Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter, Kirby, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Xenoblade, Dragon Quest, Tekken, Kingdom Hearts, Persona, Dark Souls, Monster Hunter and many others have gained critical acclaim and continue to garner a large worldwide following. The Japanese role-playing game is a major game genre innovated by Japan and remains popular both domestically and internationally, with titles like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest selling millions. In 2018, the country had an estimate of 67.6 million players in its game market.

Gaming platforms

Arcade machines

Consoles

PC

Mobile phones

Androids and iPhones reportedly had the highest player rate amongst its owners versus the player rate amongst owners of game consoles such as the PlayStation 3 and the Wii. This is most likely due to many Japanese people having daily, long commutes on the train or bus versus time at home and the mobile phone being portable and convenient. The main characteristic of mobiles games is being freemium, and this monetization model is most commonly seen in gacha games. In 2015, mobile game publishers had more than twice the ordinary income rate as console game publishers in Japan.

Notable genres

Action games

Action games cover a variety of subgenres including:

Battle royale games Beat 'em up Fighting games Hack and slash Maze games Platformers Rhythm games Shooter games Side-scrolling video games

Gacha games

Gacha games are named after toy vending machines in Japan because of its lottery system. After spending in-game currency (which can be bought with real money), the player can get a random character or item. Most often, the characters that the player wants are rare and encourages the player to spend enough money until they get their desired character. Notable Japanese gacha games include iDOLM@STER, Granblue Fantasy, Fate/Grand Order, Umamusume: Pretty Derby and others. Gacha games can often have different game elements such as combat and serve as an RPG or contain rhythm game game-play.

Japanese role-playing games

Role-playing games (RPGs) originated from tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in the West such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). In 1985, a Japanese-translated version of D&D was the first TRPG to be published in Japan. TRPGs were not as popular in Japan compared to overseas, but after Enix published Dragon Quest in 1986, RPGs began to gain traction amongst Japanese consumers. Soon after, multiple Japanese publishers were releasing RPG franchises such as Final Fantasy, Persona, Tales, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, Ys, Kingdom Hearts, and many others that were very popular with Japanese and overseas consumers.

The term "JRPG" was coined by Western media because Japanese-developed RPGs had distinct elements that set it apart from RPGs developed in the West. The settings in Western RPGs tend to be inspired by fantasy and science-fiction literature while JRPGs have been inspired by anime and manga literature.Bjarnason, Nökkvi. (2020). A Fantasy without a Dream: Japanese Role-Playing Games and the Absence of the Expressive Ideal. 2. 11-21. 10.34382/00013359. In addition, Western RPGs tend to be open-world and feature real-time combat systems, but JRPGs favor confining the player to smaller areas in the game world following a linear story line and most notably using turn-based combat systems like in D&D. Although there was typically less freedom in JRPGs compared to Western RPGs, the linear story lines allowed for Japanese developers to completely flesh out the character development of the player's companions and sometimes the player's character themselves. This focus on narrative was different from the West's focus on expression through RPGs and JRPGs appealed to players all over the world because of their rich story lines. However, as of recently, some Japanese developers are starting to try to appeal to a broader audience by introducing real-time combat, for example, such as Final Fantasy XVI.

Visual novels

Visual novels (VNs) are text-based story video games where players can usually make decisions at multiple points of the story and achieve different endings. VNs are novel-like, but also include character visuals and artwork to complement with different scenes in the story and sometimes voice acting. Many visual don't feature many game-play features besides decision-making. This decision-making differentiated visual novels from regular novels as it allowed players to replay the game at certain decision points to make different decisions and see different endings. Most VNs are romance stories and allow the player to choose between multiple love interests and fall under dating sims. VNs often contained sexual content in the beginning when VNs were first developed for the PC, but when VNs were starting to be published for game consoles as well, family-friendly versions were also released. Like manga, popular VNs were also adapted into anime such as Higurashi: When They Cry, Clannad, Fate/stay night, Steins;Gate, and many others.

Two big subgenres of VNs are bishōjo and otome games. Bishōjo (meaning "beautiful girl" in Japanese) games are romance visual novels featuring a male protagonist with female love interests and are targeted towards straight men, while otome (meaning "maiden" in Japanese) games feature a female protagonist with male love interests catering towards straight women.

History

Background

In 1966, Sega introduced an electro-mechanical game called Periscope - a submarine simulator which used lights and plastic waves to simulate sinking ships from a submarine.Steve L. Kent (2001), The ultimate history of video games: from Pong to Pokémon and beyond: the story behind the craze that touched our lives and changed the world, p. 102, Prima, It became an instant success in Japan, Europe, and North America, where it was the first arcade game to cost a quarter per play,Steven L. Kent (2000), The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games, p. 83, BWD Press, which would remain the standard price for arcade games for many years to come.Mark J. P. Wolf (2008), The video game explosion: a history from PONG to PlayStation and beyond, p. 149, ABC-CLIO,

Sega later produced gun games that used rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. The first of these, the light-gun game Duck Hunt, appeared in 1969; it featured animated moving targets on a screen, printed out the player's score on a ticket, and had volume-controllable sound-effects. Another Sega 1969 release, Missile, a shooter, featured electronic sound and a moving film strip to represent the targets on a projection screen.

1970s to early 1980s

The first arcade video game, Atari, Inc.'s Pong, debuted in the United States in 1972, and led to a number of new American manufacturers to create their own arcade games to capitalize on the rising fad. Several of these companies had Japanese partners and kept their overseas counterparts abreast of this new technology, leading several Japanese coin-operated electronic games makers to step into the arcade game market as well. Taito and Namco were some of the early adopters of arcade games in Japan, first distributing American games before developing their own. Nintendo which at this time was primarily manufacturing traditional and electronic toys, also entered the arcade game market in the latter part of the 1970s.

As in the United States, many of the early Japanese arcade games were based on the principle of cloning gameplay established by popular titles to make new ones. However, several new concepts came out of these Japanese-developed games, and performed well in both Japan and in re-licensed versions in the United States, such as Taito's Speed Race and Gun Fight in 1975. Gun Fight notably, when released by Midway Games in the U.S., was the first arcade game to use a microprocessor rather than discrete electronic components. Sega's black and white boxing game Heavyweight Champ was released in 1976 as the first video game to feature fist fighting. The first stealth games were Hiroshi Suzuki's Manbiki Shounen (1979) Selected Contents Selected Contents and Manbiki Shoujo (1980), Taito's Lupin III (1980), Selected Contents and Sega's 005 (1981).005, Arcade History

Separately, the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, had been released in the U.S. in 1971, of which Nintendo had partnered to manufacture the light gun accessory for the console, while Atari began releasing home console versions of Pong in 1975. Japan's first home video game console was Epoch's TV Tennis Electrotennis. It was followed by the first successful Japanese console, Nintendo's Color TV-Game, in 1977 which was made in partnership with Mitsubishi Electronics. Numerous other dedicated home consoles were made mostly by television manufacturers, leading these systems to be called TV geemu or terebi geemu in Japan.