Inside Lens, a special documentary series
featuring the works of international filmmakers
in Japan and Asia.
This episode is directed by Marie Linton.
Marie is a French correspondant who covers a wide range of topics,
including current affairs and Japanese and Asian culture.
Game Preservation: The Quest (pixel art animations by Daisuke Amaya, 2016)
Video games appeared in Japan in the early 1970s.
But it wasn't until 1978 that Space Invaders triggered a revolution.
Hundreds of video game arcades opened across the country.
The game marks Japan's sensational arrival in the global video game industry.
One year later in 1979,
personal computers were being made in Japan for the first time,
and along with them, tens of thousands of creative video games.
In 1985, a plumber with a big black moustache became an international icon.
Nintendo's Super Mario ushered in the era of home entertainment consoles.
Then in 1994, Sony released the PlayStation.
This technologically advanced console
sent game arcades and PC games into decline.
In 2011, the inconspicuous founding of the Game Preservation Society
marked a new turning point in the history of Japanese video games.
The society is the brainchild of Joseph Redon,
a French citizen who is passionate about Japan,
and Takuya Fukuda,
a surgeon, who not only repairs peoples' bodies
but also old video games.
Their Game Preservation Society consists of 45 fellow enthusiasts.
It's a small organization with a big aim:
saving video games from the 1970s, 80s and 90s from extinction.
Joseph REDON (president and co-founder, GPS)
Time works against preservation.
And the life cycle of video games is also very short, very quick.
Anything that is stored on magnetic tape
has a lifespan of only a few years,
a lifespan which barely goes beyond 20 or 30 years.
Takuya FUKUDA (board member and co-founder, GPS)
Should we forget the old stories our grandmothers told? Of course not.
All those children stories have been passed on across ages.
It's been the same for the preservation of movies and music.
It's natural to want to cherish the things we loved in our childhood.
Tomorrow's generations will tell us if this makes sense or not.
Chapter 1 Collecting Video Games
Nagano Prefecture
Hunting down old video games
usually involved travelling around the country
in search of all those dying computer shops
that most certainly were about to dump their stock or slide the key under the door.
We also receive donations from collectors themselves.
Kazumi TAKAI (arcade game collector and distributor, Takai-Shokai)
I collect games from local candy and coffee shops,
or from arcade game centers that have gone bankrupt.
All those games come from many different places.
One by one I've collected, repaired and stored them here.
If those games disappeared, how would we know they ever existed?
That's why I'm doing my hardest to preserve that culture and pass it on.
The country's most impressive collection of arcade games
can be found tucked away in the countryside of Nagano Prefecture.
Game distributor Kazumi Takai started gathering old video games in the 1990s
after realizing how popular the games had become in the United States.
Enthusiasts there already had a name for their hobby.
They called it: "retrogaming."
Takai repairs and rents retro games.
Joseph Redon sometimes visits this Ali Baba cave of sorts
in search of games he can't find anywhere else.
I wonder how many arcade boards you have here?
Each shelf of this size holds a hundred games.
So there must be around 3,000 boards.
Are those 3,000 boards in working state?
Yes. They come with their manual and are ready for rental.
These game cabinets are in very good shape.
Thank you very much.
This is my favorite game.
It looks like it's in perfect condition.
Can I play?
Please, go ahead!
Here's the switch.
This is one of the very first Japanese vector games.
It's a Sega game.
We're used to seeing pixels on our screens.
But this game is entirely made with vectors.
Arcade boards from the 1970s tend to rust from the inside.
Yes, that's right.
They're getting worse one after the other.
Arcade boards from the 1970s are already badly damaged.
Many of them don't work anymore.
To help preserve the games,
Takai often entrusts them to the Game Preservation Society.
This time, Redon will be taking away The Tower, an arcade game from 1981.
Here is The Tower.
The cassette is inside.
This game is very saught after among those who know it.
They want to play it again at all cost.
Once the game makes its way back into the arcades,
a lot of people will be happy.
Chapter 2 Repairing and Preserving Video Games
Setagaya, Tokyo Game Preservation Society HQ
I've brought it with me.
It's the very rare The Tower.
It's the large cassette version.
We can't play on this format.
Since we can't do anything with that,
first we'll need to preserve and convert it.
Part of it is unreadable, but it's all fine here. It will be ok.
We have to filter the data and adjust the sound volume.
In the worst case, we'll have to copy-paste the working fragments.
The aim of preservation is of course to save the product itself.
But it's also about storing a digital copy
in case the game were to disappear.
Inevitably we'll come to a point where the tape, the disk or whatever format will cease to work.
Joseph Redon has been passionate about Japanese video games
since his youth in the French Alps.
In France, especially in the 1980s,
there wasn't a village without a church or a bar,
so there wasn't a village without video games.
80% of the video games we had in France were Japanese.
When he moved to Tokyo in 2000,
the French native was shocked to find that retro games
were left to languish within an inclusive community.
Although video games were a big part of "Cool Japan",
they were considered a subculture.
So with Fukuda, he founded the Game Preservation Society.
Its members are not only system engineers
but also salarymen, librarians and doctors,
many of whom are retro game collectors.
These anonymous repairmen
restore the old rusty devices and their magnetic tapes.
They also bring back to life machines
like the DECO Cassette System
that allowed arcade owners to load multiple games into a game cabinet.
Yoshimasa KUSAKA (founding member, GPS)
This drive normally reads magnetic tapes.
It doesn't work anymore, so we're now trying to identify the problem.
It's fragile here too.
A piece is missing,
and that one is problematic.
Only one part is left,
and it's half broken.
We need to fix it.
No, I'm afraid it's unsalvageable.
When I first started this preservation project,
I had no information on this system at all.
I didn't even know what it actually looked like.
Its existence was almost like an urban legend.
Chapter 3 Let the Gamers Play!
Sanjo, Niigata Prefecture
Members of the Game Preservation Society reintroduce the games they repaired to the general public,
at amusement arcades and in such unusual places as at this supermarket in Niigata Prefecture.
Hello, it's me!
Here it is as planned.
Here's the DECO Cassette.
I brought the complete system.
It's not enough to preserve the games.
You have to be able to play them.
Who'd be interested in a book if it was only displayed in a museum?
It makes no sense if you can't open and read it.
These are video games, and I want to repair them in order to play them.
How old is this game?
I think Burnin' Rubber was released in 1982.
Here, another retrogaming organization
called All Japan Cocktail Cabinets Fans, has organized an event
where children are invited to play games that are much older than they are.
Are you avoiding it? Really?
Jump! Yes that's it! Good.
I made a mistake.
Naoki IKEDA (participant)
I don't dislike modern games.
But they owe a lot to older games.
I'd wish people would acknowledge their importance.
I enjoy playing recent titles,
but the simplicity of retro games is really one of their qualities.
Today's video games, somehow, need to draw on what's been created in the last 40 years,
so that they can not only evolve, but also reinvent themselves.
Because it's not easy to innovate every time, to create something new.
There comes a time when you loose inspiration,
and I believe this is what's happening in today's industry.
Chapter 4 Recording the Play
Akihabara, Tokyo
Jun "QtQ" KITAMURA (scorer)
Yes, that's the one! It's been a while!
Maybe 30 years I think.
Jun Kitamura alias QtQ belongs to what is called the "scorer" community,
a group of hard-core video game players
who challenge each other on the most difficult games of the 1980s and the 90s.
Including The Tower.
That was close!
30 years ago, we were in primary or junior high school.
On our days off, it was usual for us to head to arcade game centers.
In candy shops for children, you could also find a videogaming corner.
I'd hang out and play there with my friends.
There've always been scorers in Japan, ever since Space Invaders,
and possibly even before.
And that's precisely what encouraged the players, at the time, to try and push the games to their very limits.
This social aspect of arcade games is also very interesting.
Niigata Prefecture
As a tribute to the scorers community and the golden age of video games,
the Game Preservation Society wishes to record the gameplay of some of the best players.
Takuya Fukuda, a technical geek and passionate hacker,
invented a device that can do just that:
a prototype gameplay recorder.
We want to preserve the gameplay of veteran players.
It's still a prototype, but that's why I built it.
It's inserted right between the game board, the controller and the monitor.
Usually the board is directly connected to the devices.
But in this case my prototype is in charge of everything, from power supply to controls.
This way, it can record the gameplay and replay it afterwards.
I'll switch it on.
It's no fun discovering a game that you have no idea how to play.
It's no fun if you don't understand it.
That's why it's also important to preserve the way it's played.
I develop this device for the benefit of future generations.
Let's say there was only one person on Earth still capable to play this instrument.
Well, you'd want to record it.
We could imagine a technology that would not only allow to record the sound
but also record the way we push the keys.
The timings, the pressure...
We could in fact replay the same thing, without the musician.
In order to test his new tool on other platforms,
Fukuda meets again with the members of the All Japan Cocktail Cabinets Fans.
First, he connects his prototype gameplay recorder.
Tadashi HIJIYA (founder and 1st member, AJCCF)
That should do it.
Then in replay mode,
the game is supposed to run through exactly as it was played
without the player touching any gear.
Do you recognize your play style? I can recognize mine by watching the playback.
It seems to work for now.
See, it runs very well with shooting games
because they're using patterns.
Ah, I see.
You're gonna die just here.
There, I'm dead.
Chapter 5 Dreaming of a Game Library
Setagaya, Tokyo Game Preservation Society HQ
We're not done yet.
Come on, let's go!
Heave ho! Heave ho!
One, two, up!
During their free time and with their own money,
the members of the Game Preservation Society archive the games they've gathered.
They are currently the only ones in Japan doing this tedious work.
Not even the game makers themselves keep a record of their own games.
Keigo MATSUBARA (founding member, GPS)
If someone or a government organization had taken care of it,
we wouldn't need to do all that.
But for now, there's no proper structure,
so someone has to do it.
I believe it's a job for a museum.
It's an impossible task for an individual, because in the long run it's too expensive.
It's not a solution.
Without a source of funding, preserving video games is not possible.
That's why I would like to see a public institution look after it.
Each game that enters the archive of the Game Preservation Society
will escape falling into oblivion.
Such as Galactic Wars 1,
a Nihon Falcom's PC game from 1982
inspired by the Star Trek TV series.
But sometimes rescuing a game comes at a price.
Redon personally acquired this game from a collector for approximately $4,000,
a hundred times more than its original price.
This one means a lot to me.
I spent 15 years looking for this game.
Why? Because it's the first game by a company I'm particularly fond of.
This is their very first game. There are very few copies left around obviously,
because they were directly manufactured in the shop
when a client wanted to buy one.
Which means they're all hand-crafted.
The organization dreams of creating a great archive of Japanese video games,
a complete library comprising games from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
So far, they've collected some 20,000 games
out of an estimated 35,000 from that period,
half of which are PC games
considered to be the most endangered.
Our mission, through our preservation work, also consists in rehabilitating
a number of game creations that we consider important.
Moreover, we want our archive to be accessible for future research,
so that journalists, writers, researchers and historians
can bring to light important works from the past,
just like it's done in music, in literature...
Today it's a pressing job, an important and urgent task.
But it will also serve in the future.
Harajuku, Tokyo Ota Memorial Museum
It might seem pretentious to compare video games with Japanese prints, with ukiyo-e.
I can't compare the artistic values of each genre.
The similarities lie more in the ways ukiyo-e and Japanese video games
became famous in the West and then slowly disappeared from Japan.
Video games and ukiyo-e are quite alike.
In the past, ukiyo-e were often used as advertisements, like the ones in our newspapers,
or in our fashion magazines.
When they became outdated, they were deemed useless.
However, since their paper was of good quality,
people would use them as wrapping to protect merchandise that were shipped abroad.
This way, foreigners who enjoyed their exoticism started to collect them,
then ended up considering ukiyo-e as an art,
while the Japanese threw them away.
Although ukiyo-e was held in high esteem and preserved abroad,
public awareness in Japan was too late and almost nothing was left.
Hence the miserable situation of ukiyo-e in Japan nowadays.
I think the Japanese have a different sensibility, and that's for the best.
There are certain games which only the Japanese can make.
I believe it's important that they go on making them,
and that they can draw on their own history.
Indeed games are a heritage,
and I believe that heritage must remain in Japan for the Japanese.
And thus, indirectly, for us too.
Because if they create magnificent things, we too will benefit from them.
Thank you for watching this documentary.
The Game Preservation Society is a non-profit organization.
In order to preserve the video game culture, all members are volunteers.
To pursue its mission, this project needs your help.
By becoming a subscribing member, you can support their work and join the society.
Funds are critically needed to repair games and build the archive.
Please visit gamepres.org to become a supporting member.
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