The Little Adventures of Mr. Takumi Entry 4: Mr. Takumi and "Games" (2015)

Title: Entry 4: Mr. Takumi and "Games" / 「第4回　巧さんと“ゲーム”」
Source: Nintendo Dream, December issue, 2015

Summary: Director/scenario writer of Dai Gyakuten Saiban (The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures) Takumi Shū wrote a six-part column in 2015-2016 for the magazine Nintendo Dream titled The Little Adventures of Mr. Takumi. The common theme for all six columns was "first meetings", and Takumi would write about his first encounters with topics that would have impact in his own personal life and his games. In this fourth column, Takumi writes about his memories with videogames and how he first get enthranced with the adventure game genre that would form the basis of the majority of his work.

Mr. Takumi and "Games"

Good evening. Today's theme is "games". ...Now I think about it, it's a bit odd that up until this fourth column by a game creator, games weren't even mentioned once.... This is a rather grave happening, I do have to say so.

Anyway, I'm also what they call a boy, or I used to be one, so of course I loved games. Like I said in the previous column, the period between my childhood and college days were mostly colored by "mystery fiction", but I now realize that games too were a color that gave life to that period. But to tell you the truth, I was only really into games before I met mystery fiction. This was before the birth of Family Computer (TN: Nintendo Entertainment System). Basically, I left the gaming scene just as the Famicom took over the world. I'd like to write about that in this column.

When I was a kid --before the Famicom-- videogames were played at game centers and I was of course of the generation who were told that game centers were hanging spots for hooligans so I wasn't allowed to go there. But there were those times where I clung on my 50 yen coin and went there to play Crazy Climber... But still, you couldn't easily get into a game center as a kid in elementary school. So I mostly played videogames on a computer.

It was still the dawn of the age of personal computers.Back then, we didn't call them pasokon (personal computers) but maikon (TN: "my computer"). My father was also first in line to get the newest gadgets and the first to get bored of them, and one day he suddenly brought with him the latest model from the maikon store: a PC-8801. It was extremely expensive, even though it didn't had a floppy disk drive, let alone a hard disk drive. Back then program data was saved as "sounds" on a cassette tape... Nowadays we don't even use cassette tapes anymore... but I can't go around explaining all of this, so I'll keep this short. Anyway, back then, you had to input computer game software yourself, by typing in the large programs you'd find in computer magazines on the keyboard. Not sure whether you should call the programming work young Takumi did in front of the computer analog or digital...

So why did this game-loving boy stop playing games? There's a resaon for that. To put it bluntly, I made a horrible mistake. I will never forget it. It was 1981, two years before the release of the Famicom. I had been begging for computer console called the Cassette Vision for my birthday. It was a revolutionary dream machine, that allowed you to play all kinds of games, from Kikori no Yosaku (Woodcutter Yosaku) to Galaxia just by changing cassette tapes. Who could've guessed that these happy days would later change my life forever.

Two years later. "That time" came. After the release of the Family Computer, this conversation happened one day in the Takumi home.

"Dad, I want a Famicom!"

"But you already have a game computer."

"But I want Donkey Kong..."

"But you have Kikori no Yosaku."

"Yeah, but...."

...Because of Yosaku, my parents didn't buy me a Famicom. What a mistake I had made! With the introduction of floppy disks for computers, this outdated cassette tape kid lost his place in the world, and he too got bored of Yosaku. He turned his back to games, and dived into the world of mystery fiction.... What a curious fate.

I wouldn't play videogames again until in college. I have good memories of accompanying a game friend who went to buy a Super Famicom (Super NES). So I went to his room to play some games, and man, games had developed a lot since Kikori no Yosaku. Of course they had. By the way, this friend was also the reason I got to work in the game industry, and in a way the savior of my life. He told me Capcom was a good company, even though he himself nonchalantly went to Sega, and whenever we meet in Tokyo for the Game Show or whatever, we go out for some drinks.

Anyway, my generation has been playing videogames since the early days with Breakout-like games and Space Invaders. When I think about what left the biggest impression on me, what I could consider my formative game experience... I'd say it's that US-developed game I saw in computer shop: Mystery House. The games I had known until then were Invader-like games, that were simply testing your reflexes. But all you saw on the screen of Mystery House was the door of a mysterious manor. And there in the corner of the screen was one phrase: Enter command? ...This was the very first form of an "adventure game", where you used the keyboard to input whatever command you liked (in English). Input command? If you'd type OPEN, followed by DOOR and look! the door opened! Well, now you're thinking, of course it works like that, but imagine the sensation young me felt, of seeing things happen on the screen exactly as I ordered.... "Wow, the door opened!" I cried out adorably.

And so the "adventure game" genre where you advance in the adventure by your own actions managed to find a special place in my heart. And by adding that other thing I loved, mystery fiction... But that's a tale for the next time.