Business

Myorenji, Yokohama, 1983

I had developed a name for my first company. Japanese companies were using computer acronyms as company names or names of magazines, Login, I/O, ASCII, Compile. I grabbed BPS, which stands for Bits Per Second, which is still in use today. It’s the speed at which information is transmitted from one point to another point. At the time I formed BPS, a fast modem transmitted data at 300 bps. Today, 5G Cell phones transmit data from 50,000,000 bps (50 Mbps, Mega means one million) to over 1,000,000,000 bps (1Gbps, Giga means one billion). That’s some serious progress.

I departed from the rest of the pack by actually adding some real meaning to my acronym. The name of my company became “Bullet-Proof Software.” I had read an article in BYTE magazine “It is only recently and gradually that the consumer has become aware of the value of bullet-proof software.” They meant that instead of adding more functions to a program that sometimes\ don’t quite work as planned, focus on getting the core features working perfectly. I agreed. Any software with my name on it, would have to be Bullet-Proof.

I went to Akihabara, the electronics center of Japan. I walked around the computer shops to find out what was going on, in Japan. Hitachi was definitely nowhere near the top of Personal Computer manufacturers. On top was NEC (Nippon Electric Company). I also found out what was selling. Games.

I little more investigation told me that Japanese games were about two years behind American games. Personal computers had come out a few years earlier in Europe and America, like Apple, Commodore, Tandy Radio Shack, Sinclair ZX80 and others. I did not see any Role Playing Games in Akihabara, the electronics capitol of Japan. “This is my chance,” I said to myself. I will make a Role Playing Game. I can do this.

I would need to know something about the computer game business. There was a tiny computer game shop in Hiyoshi, a stop on the Toyoko Line, a railway connecting Shibuya, Tokyo and Yokohama. I used to play table tennis with college friend, Conrad Kozawa, who lived in Hiyoshi. We played at the Hiyoshi Civic Center. So we decided to drop in, to the Computer shop.

Koei was two small shops. One was a record rental (you could rent a record and make your own cassette tape playlists for your Walkman). The other was a computer game shop. Computer games in those days came on cassette tapes. I remember going to my friend’s house to play computer games. It took as much as 20 minutes to load a game in those days at 300 BPS (Bits Per Second). I spoke no Japanese, so Conrad would translate for me. I wanted to know how games were distributed.

The guy behind the counter said, “We also publish games”. Hecalled the President of the company, Yoichi Erikawa, a game designer himself, and I met him. After talking for a bit, I found out that, he actually spoke English and he actually played Go. We decided to go the Civic Center so we could play Go, a Japanese board game, and have a meeting. I told him I could make a new kind of Computer Game. He said he would like to publish it. I said I wanted my own company to publish games someday, but I wouldn’t mind publishing my first game through Koei.

I said that he could subtract all of his costs including advertising and PR and we would then split the profits. He said that he would provide me with an NEC 8801, a color and a black and white monitor, a printer and whatever else I might need to do the development.

We shook hands. We had a deal. Or so I thought. I took over a small 6 tatami room in my wife’s parents place, built myself a computer desk. Got the NEC equipment and started coding. Creating the first Role Playing Game in Japan, the Black\ Onyx, would turn out to be the hardest thing I ever did. I would spend the next 9 months of my life devoted to finishing my game in time for Christmas.

I did it.

My First Impressions of Tetris

From the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Russia to mobile phones around the world, the history of Tetris has inspired numerous articles, books and movies. Its long and complicated story has been told many times over, so I am not here to tell the story of Tetris; I am here to tell my story.

Tetris is the addictive puzzle game that changed my life and so many other lives for the better. It became one of the most popular games in the history of computer games, but it was not clear to anyone that it would turn out that way. Not to the early publishers of Tetris, Mirrorsoft and Spectrum HoloByte. There were a number of people that had access to Tetris and some even licensed rights to Tetris.

For me, my first peek at Tetris came at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I was a computer game publisher in Japan on the lookout for games to bring to Japan. By the time this particular show came around, I had published dozens of such games. But this time would be different.

Set in huge halls with high ceilings, the Consumer Electronics Show could be daunting in its vastness, bright lights and sounds ranging from blaring rock music to the various video game sound effects. At the show, there was pretty much every publisher of computer games in the U.S. showing the games they hoped to sell that year. Each publisher had a monitor and a keyboard or joystick for each game they were debuting at the show. There were literally hundreds of such stations where I could get a sample of gameplay by standing in line and getting a couple of minutes to try it out.

So, it was there that I found myself standing in line at the Spectrum HoloByte (formerly Sphere) booth, waiting to play a very crude-looking, simple, real-time puzzle game. I knew Gilman Louie (the CEO) and Phil Adam (the president) as really nice people. I looked for the copyright notice on the box.

©Mirrorsoft and Andromeda Software

Licensed to Sphere

TETRIS WAS INVENTED BY A 30 YEAR OLD SOVIET RESEARCHER NAMED ALEXI PASZITNOV WHO CURRENTLY WORKS AT THE COMPUTER CENTER [ACADEMY SOFT] OF THE USSR ACADEMY OF SCIENTISTS IN MOSCOW….

These were the words that scrolled across the screen at the bottom of the TETRIS title screen.

It only took a few minutes of Tetris gameplay before my curiosity was piqued. I stood in the Tetris line four times. I played until I put the high score on the machine. I replaced Gilman Louie at the top of the leaderboard. I was fascinated that a game as simple as that could keep my attention for so long. Its lure reminded me of a Japanese board game that my father taught me how to play called Go, which has black and white stones played onto a 19-by-19 grid, looks simple and is incredibly deep.

It was at that very Consumer Electronics Show in 1988 that my adventure began. My life, and the landscape of video games, would change forever as a result of the game’s instant allure. I knew it would be a hit and I knew that I needed to be a part of it. This was the start of a stressful and convoluted process, which would lead to some of the craziest moments of my life and an epic story of determination and collaboration.