After the release of Dungeons & Dragons in Japan in 1985, hobby magazines began pushing imported metal miniatures to hobbyists. Despite regular coverage for a few years, miniatures as a model hobby never seemed to catch on.
Category: Games
The Sony HiTBiT F1 Game Robot: When Gall Force Sold Computers
Sony’s marketing campaigns for their MSX computers involved everyone from Syd Mead to Seiko Matsuda, but their most memorable bit of advertising may have been a print ad featuring a scratch-built powered suit to advertise their HiTBiT HB-F1 MSX2 machine.
More Than A Coincidence: Notes on Xardion and Gunbuster
Stephen revisits Xardion to talk a bit about its similarities with an earlier Gainax project, Aim for the Top! Gunbuster.
What Could Have Been: Gainax’s Brief Stint as Video Game Consultants
The reputation of Gainax is one that looms large among anime fans. The studio’s iconoclastic origin story and the meteoric rise of Hideaki Anno, its star creator, have become the stuff of legend. But there are still pockets of Gainax history that remain largely unexplored.
Mach Vision: A Bubble Era Arcade Game from Sega, Nissan, and Makoto Kobayashi
In the Japanese economic bubble of the late ‘80s, seemingly anything was possible. That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that Nissan, Sega, and Makoto Kobayashi collaborated on a massive, event-only arcade game that seemingly defied the technical limitations of the era.
8-Bit Anime: Cruise Chaser Blassty
What happens when a mediocre PC game from the 1980s outlives its lifespan thanks not to the quality of its gameplay, but the strength of its design work? That’s Cruise Chaser Blassty, a collaboration between game developer Square and animation studio Sunrise.
The D&D Origins of Lodoss War’s Boring Characters
One of the many (legitimate) criticisms levied against Lodoss War is that it has boring, stereotypical characters. Here’s why.
FamilySoft’s PC-98 Gundam Games
Beginning with Mobile Suit Gundam: Classic Operation in 1990, FamilySoft would release seven core Gundam simulation titles plus expansions. Of these, only three would feature original stories and a pedigree brought by artists that had previously worked on Gundam anime and manga.
Anime Simulation Games of the 1980s
There’s no shortage of retrospectives about tabletop wargaming in the 1980s, but most of them are focused on the U.S. or U.K. markets and rarely, if ever, touch on Japan’s wargaming scene.