Tumble into the Abyss of 1980â˛s Japanese Graphic Adventure Gaming
I havenât stopped raving about Japanese adventure games from the 80â˛s for the last couple of days. The trail of this madness is littered all over my twitter right now (no doubt making people wonder âwho is this person, what have they done to Soycrates, and why will they not shut up about old games?â) but I thought I should collect/edit it here, in one space, perhaps to contain the wild beast and put it to rest for good. Come down the rabbit hole of PC-88 era fiction with me!
There was a huge boom of sci-fi, cyberpunk and detective graphic adventure games in Japan on the PC-8800 series that deserve to be seen and experienced by a Western audience, and it kills me so few of these have translations. Iâve been cataloging a good dozen of these games this week to search for them later on (and leaving my criteria of what deserves to be on the list loose, hoping not to cut any secret gems from my search), though I am likely to find that the majority of the games on my list have not yet, nor ever will be, translated for an English audience.
Some of these games were lucky enough to make the PC-console jump over to the Nintendo Famicom. But as the NES gained popularity in North America, it seems games like these had died off, become fringe, were judged not profitable for a global market perhaps. The force behind narrative-based adventure games that featured science fiction, mystery, thriller, and cyberpunk had arguably migrated from the interactive platform and into a safer environment of animation and manga.
Worldwide, the gaming market was drifting away from welcoming story-telling as a viable form of mainstream, profitable interactive entertainment: technology had pushed the boundaries of gaming far enough to enable what would become some of the most beloved action-platformer and shooter games of all time, such as Contra, Super Mario Bros, and Metroid. The 90â˛s would see the steady progression of platformers and the palpable rise of the First Person Shooter.
Back before Enix merged with SquareSoft, they were a pretty prominent publisher of this discarded genre (Iâve even previously written about one of these! It was an Enix sci-fi adventure game named Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster) although their acknowledgement of these games today - especially for the global market - is basically non-existent as they grew to focus on the RPG format for their games with story elements. Stories had not necessarily left gaming, as many who have played early RPGs will attest - but they had taken on an altogether different form, one interspersed between tactical combat rounds and item fetch quests than trees of dialogue and point-and-click era detective work.
One of the most popular examples of this kind of early adventure game - taking more cues from film than from RPG storytelling methods - comes from outside of Enix: none other than Konami's cult classic Snatcher, written by Hideo Kojima. Snatcher - originally released in 1988 for the PC-8801 and MSX2 computers - was not released to an American audience until its port to the Sega CD in 1994, based on the 1992 remake for the TurboGrafx-16 SuperSystem. Snatcher is beloved now, especially by Kojima fact-finders and superfans, but the sale of the NA-available Sega CD version is considered to be a commercial failure. It is only speculation, although entirely possible, that this failure could have in part contributed to the diminished production of sci-fi inspired adventure games, being taken as a sign of the Westâs disinterest in the graphic adventure game format.
Which is a crying shame, because this is in my humble opinion one of the most imaginative and wild eras of gaming. Think of the weirdest story and youâll get weirder when you dive into a pool of 80â˛s graphic adventure games. For example...
In 1986, a JP software house (that joined SquareSoft the same year) produced a mystery-adventure game filled with Casablanca references, time travel, and murder. It stars reporter Jerry Randolph, who uses a time machine to track down the killer of her old friend's scientist father. Pictured above in a field of green is Jerry herself, flanked by a time machine on her right and (what I presume is) the scientist on the left. The game is called Casablanca ni Ai o: Satsujin-sha wa Jikō o Koete, which with my best attempt tells me translates to Love of Casablanca: The Killer Across Space-Time or otherwise phrased Love of Casablanca: The Murderer Beyond Time and Space (While I have done translations of romanized japanese text from the 2015 FromSoft video game Bloodborne, I am very bad at this and bad at catching nuance).
Nevertheless, it does not follow any of the events of the film Casablanca despite so prominently featuring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on the cover and in the title sequence. It's genuinely just a time-travel murder mystery starring a female reporter as its protagonist. The game may even have its spot in progressive/feminist video game history annals: it released the same year as the very first Metroid game, often touted as one of the first playable female lead/protagonists in video games alongside Toby Masuyo (nicknamed âKissyâ) from the 1985 shooter Baraduke. Jerry may easily be the first female protagonist outside of the sidescrolling platformer.
But with so many games that disappear into the fabric of history, just as many of these adventure games have, whoâs to say?












