Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 49, the history of video podcast. Episode 49.

The History of Video Games.

This week, we're going to talk about a topic that often comes to mind when people are discussing modern Japanese culture.

It's one of the major vehicles that gets people to develop an interest in Japanese culture,

including myself, and represents one of the

few areas where Japan, even after the devastating 1991 real estate crash, still maintained

a high level of market domination.

It's time to talk about video games.

I say video games and not just Japanese video games, because a discussion of the two is very difficult to separate.

The development of the Japanese video game industry was very much a reflection of the worldwide development of the gaming industry as a whole.

The first video games are, in fact, as old as the first computers, though it's unlikely

will ever be sure what the first one made was.

The size and cost of early mainframe computers developed during and after the Second World

War, in part, in fact, to help with allied code-breaking efforts targeting Nazi Germany and

Imperial Japan, meant that few institutions had computers

and early games tended to be very simple affairs.

The earliest examples I could find were a 1951 game designed to play a board game called NIM

against a human opponent, OXO, a Tic-Tacto simulator developed

by the British computer scientist Alexander Douglas,

which also included the first graphical display

in human history, and a checkers program

...