How Role-Playing Games Arrived In Japan With Black Onyx 50
eggboard writes "Henk Rogers was a Dutchman who arrived in Japan in the 1980s following a girlfriend (later, his wife). An inveterate D&D player, he became enthralled with the NEC-8801, and nearly killed himself trying to create a D&D-like world that he released as The Black Onyx. No one initially knew what to make of it, and the game sold slowly at first. Through savvy pricing, packaging, and press attention, sales grew, and the game jumpstarted RPGs in Japan. Rogers got left behind, though, as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy hit a local nerve better than his efforts. 'I also realized that I didn't quite understand the Japanese aesthetic and way. These games were quite different to mine, and just struck a more effective cultural chord.' Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine."
License? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:License? (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, but thanks for playing.
Re:License? (Score:5, Informative)
Really? Based on what?
Here's Wikipedia's version:
Rogers discovered Tetris during a Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in 1988. At the time, the game was being distributed in several countries under a master license agreement which the original licensee had not honored. Rogers went to Moscow (without an invitation) to see if he could obtain rights to distribute the game. Two other companies were simultaneously bidding for the same rights. Rogers brought Nintendo on board and secured the exclusive rights to market Tetris on video game consoles. Nintendo successfully used this grant to squeeze its rival Atari out of the market, as Atari had sought to market Tetris based on the original (invalid) license.
During the negotiations in Moscow, Rogers also became friends with the game's Russian author Alexey Pajitnov. In 1990, he helped Pajitnov move to the United States and set up a new company, AnimaTek, to develop new computer graphic technologies.
So what reason do you have to disparage Rogers?
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'cause he didn't hide away in his mom's basement!
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"Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine." That's the most interesting part of the story - how the best video game product of communism got sidelined into the capitalist computer paradigm.
That's a very odd way to put it. Most of us would never have heard of Tetris if it hadn't been "sidelined." It's not as if the Soviets were exporting copies of Tetris all over the world to support the global struggle against oppressive capitalism. Also, the use of the word "best" implies there was some competition. Can you name any other "video game product of communism?"
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Gorodki, Konek-Gorbunok, Magistral, Balls.
I'm sure there are more.
I don't suppose you have any links to back that up? I suppose the failure of communism at the state level means we'll never be able enjoy the plethora of video games uncorrupted by capitalism.
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JRPG are what is wrong with videogames now and then. The player basically grinds and grinds and grinds to his death.
This is a cultural difference, Japanese developers believe gamers want to work for / earn their fun rather than be given it easily. Western audiences generally disagree but the games are popular in Japan.
And from time to time he engages in turn based battles.
Western RPGs were turn based first. All RPGs originated from the table top equivalent (e.g. D&D). Western RPGs like Ultima were turn based until pretty far into their run. There's also the Zelda RPGs which use real-time battles but are Japanese, the first one of those was around 1990 which was before mo
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Huh? JRPGs were actually quite popular during the mid-90s up until about the previous console generation. If you look at the top grossing video games of all time [wikia.com] you see that there are quite a few JRPGs on the list, and it certainly wasn't only Japan that was buying them. But take a closer look at the
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Grinding and turn based battles are what RPGs were originally all about. It was JRPGs which first pushed towards strong narrative.
Western developers/publishers almost completely lost interest in RPGs after the early nineties, and only recently have they made a comeback. Even so, the JRPG market is far bigger and more diverse than "Western" RPGs have been at any point in their history.
Tetris (Score:2)
Re:Tetris (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of Voyager, "Virtuoso" (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, I remember that episode and it's a good analogy. Off topic, but that episode (baring the odd acting) was one of the better ones from a xeno-culture-clash perspective.
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Not the first RPG in Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
RPGs did not "arrive" in Japan with The Black Onyx, that is just a popular myth. Here is an attempt to chronicle all of the JRPGs that came earlier:
http://blog.hardcoregaming101.... [hardcoregaming101.net]
Re:Not the first RPG in Japan (Score:5, Informative)
This, pretty much. The Black Onyx was a 1984 game, but it's well known that 1981's Wizardry had a much bigger impact in Japan.
They even made DS games on the Wizardry franchise because it's so famous over there [amazon.co.jp]
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Come on, there is no way the Japanese could have developed video games without leaching from the great Americans who invented everything from the world wide web to the wheel.
And queue the Al Gore jokes in 3,2,1...
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Come on, there is no way the Japanese could have developed video games without leaching from the great Americans who invented everything from the world wide web to the wheel.
And queue the Al Gore jokes in 3,2,1...
Al Gore's taking credit for the wheel now?!
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Admittedly this seems to have derived from a quote from the guy himself. Wizardry was mentioned, but with no acknowledgement that it was in Japan. On the other hand, I can't quickly find any dates on when Wizardry hit Japan, other than it had a mediocre translation.
“Next I looked at what kind of games were doing well in Japan,” he says. “It was immediately obvious to me that the core difference between the two markets was that there were no computer role-playing games in Japan. The US had Ultima and Wizardry. But there were no such adventures in Japan. I thought, I could do that.”
Perhaps part of the problem was that his lack of understanding the language made it harder to see what was already there. A quick look at that blog implies that a lot of those came out in 1983, so it was already starting to happen at the same ti
Re:Not the first RPG in Japan (Score:4, Interesting)
The Dragon Quest team themselves credit The Black Onyx with causing them to investigate RPG titles like the earlier Wizardry, which is the reason why Dragon Quest even exists today. Just because Wizardry existed first doesn't mean that it had some universal impact throughout Japan.
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http://www.giantbomb.com/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-mad-overlord/3030-9180/releases/ [giantbomb.com]
It appears that Wizardry was not released for Japanese platforms until 1985, when it was released in Japan for the NEC PC-8801 and the NEC PC-9801.
Of course, this is after The Black Onyx was released for the NEC PC-8801 in 1984.
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I think the reference to BO in this particular article is relevant. It also mentions the edge-online article. http://blog.hardcoregaming101.... [hardcoregaming101.net]
I'm getting a strong feeling of all these things happening at the same time. BO had a few innovations (apparently pioneering the health bar), but it was no genesis of JRPG on its own. Also, BO was (IIRC) a 3D-maze-view game like Wizardry, while JRPGs generally went the Ultima way with a top-down map view, though I remember that Phantasy Star I had a top-down overwor
Better article (Score:4, Informative)
One of the other external links from the Wikipedia article has more information: http://www.edge-online.com/fea... [edge-online.com]
(I added the other one mentioned in the summary to the Wikipedia page, though.)
Wizardry (Score:3)
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I suppose you mean this to indicate that Wizardry predates his work, so Black Onyx is not first computer RPG. Nobody claims that - if you would read TFA:
It was immediately obvious to me that the core difference between the two markets was that there were no computer role-playing games in Japan. The US had Ultima and Wizardry. But there were no such adventures in Japan. I thought, I could do that.
Yawn (Score:2)
Black Onyx:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Looks pretty boring to me. Bards Tale - far better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bad article title. (Score:2)
Clearly, the article says "RPGs arrived in Japan with Dungeons and Dragons", not with Black Onyx. Black Onyx came later.
The article title should reflect that.
Virtually every game programmer owes him money (Score:2)
Henk Rogers is one of the co-founders of The Tetris Company LLC, a company which asserts -- and has successfully defended -- copyrights over any and all video games involving falling n-ominoes. So if you ever wrote a Tetris clone, you owe him royalties.
I'd say he's doing all right for himself.