Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School [1987]

Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School [1987] is not one for the ages. It was made in either 3 months or start from finish in 2 weeks flat, depending on which interview you believe, immediately after Hironobu Sakaguchi finished work on Final Fantasy [1987], and right before Yoshio Sakamoto, creator of Metroid [1986], moved on …

Takeshi’s Challenge [1986]

Sincere apologies for skipping around so much in 2022! I’ll get back to the rewind sometime but, honestly, I was getting burnt out something fierce due probably to the lack of variety and it was clear I was in no position to enjoy nor understand Reach For The Stars [1983]. That’s not good for anyone, …

Dragon Quest [1986]

Let's start in the middle, when most of the plot, such at is, revolves around some guy named Erdrick. Erdrick is presumably dead, but he casts a long shadow. The player character is, they are told in Edrick's Cave, a descendant of Erdrick. A couple random townsfolk comment that they do not actually believe that …

The Legend Of Zelda [1986]

In a way, I could have started my project right here, except I wouldn't have known what I was looking at. The Legend Of Zelda [1986] is a consolidation of almost all dominant gaming paradigms from 1980-1984, all into one place, all right up against one another, sometimes simultaneously. It's a near-brilliant work of synthesis …

Castlevania [1986] + Dark Castle [1986]

Just from reputation, I expected to have to turn around and eat my words from the Super Mario Bros [1985] post, the ones about how it inaugurated a new kind of thoroughgoing consideration towards player onboarding which quickly became gold standard. But instead, I saw it more or less confirmed. The gameplay begins with a …

Super Mario Bros [1985]

Despite being such a big nerd over music, I have barely discussed video game music outside of my post on Space Invaders [1978]. Nevertheless, throughout the early 1980s it steadily expanded from the beachhead, bringing video games from a medium where some or many games had no sound at all or only rudimentary sound effects, …

Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983]

(Content warning: Police abuse, suicide. Spoilers for Portopia.) While both Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77] and The Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983] are nostalgic reveries of a real location from the author's life crammed into the computer, Portopia must abridge its Kobe City. It's not as geographically exacting, instead compressing locations into composite sketches and eliding …