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How Role-Playing Games Arrived In Japan With Black Onyx

Posted by Unknown on from the traIlblazers-don't-always-win dept.

eggboard writes "Henk Rogers was a Dutchman who arrived in Japan in the 1980s following a girlfriend (later, his wife). An inveterate D&D player, he became enthralled with the NEC-8801, and nearly killed himself trying to create a D&D-like world that he released as The Black Onyx. No one initially knew what to make of it, and the game sold slowly at first. Through savvy pricing, packaging, and press attention, sales grew, and the game jumpstarted RPGs in Japan. Rogers got left behind, though, as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy hit a local nerve better than his efforts. 'I also realized that I didn't quite understand the Japanese aesthetic and way. These games were quite different to mine, and just struck a more effective cultural chord.' Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine."

13 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. License? by o_ferguson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine." That's the most interesting part of the story - how the best video game product of communism got sidelined into the capitalist computer paradigm.

    --
    - In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
    1. Re:License? by rk · · Score: 3, Informative

      Black Onyx III was never finished. Then in 1988, Rogers, who had left programming to hunt for successful foreign games to bring to Japan, encountered a game called Tetris at a Las Vegas computer show. Rogers arranged a license from the Soviet Union government, which he sold to Nintendo. Tetrisâ(TM)s success forever changed the course of his life.

      Nope, but thanks for playing.

    2. Re:License? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Really? Based on what?

      Here's Wikipedia's version:

      Rogers discovered Tetris during a Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in 1988. At the time, the game was being distributed in several countries under a master license agreement which the original licensee had not honored. Rogers went to Moscow (without an invitation) to see if he could obtain rights to distribute the game. Two other companies were simultaneously bidding for the same rights. Rogers brought Nintendo on board and secured the exclusive rights to market Tetris on video game consoles. Nintendo successfully used this grant to squeeze its rival Atari out of the market, as Atari had sought to market Tetris based on the original (invalid) license.

      During the negotiations in Moscow, Rogers also became friends with the game's Russian author Alexey Pajitnov. In 1990, he helped Pajitnov move to the United States and set up a new company, AnimaTek, to develop new computer graphic technologies.

      So what reason do you have to disparage Rogers?

    3. Re:License? by ButchDeLoria · · Score: 2

      People wish ill on others for less. See: FOSS license arguments.

  2. Reminds me of Voyager, "Virtuoso" by Hahnsoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There was an episode where Robert Picardo's holographic Doctor introduces an entire planet to music. He becomes a celebrated singer, and even attempts to stay on the planet, but finds out at the end that the "music" that the aliens ultimately enjoy turns out to be far different. He starts a musical revolution, but is "left behind" at the end.

  3. Re:Tetris by KPexEA · · Score: 3, Informative

    Accidentally posted to soon, I meant to include a link to the whole Tetris story with regard to Henk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

  4. Not the first RPG in Japan by Majutsushi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    RPGs did not "arrive" in Japan with The Black Onyx, that is just a popular myth. Here is an attempt to chronicle all of the JRPGs that came earlier:

    http://blog.hardcoregaming101....

    1. Re:Not the first RPG in Japan by identity0 · · Score: 4, Informative

      This, pretty much. The Black Onyx was a 1984 game, but it's well known that 1981's Wizardry had a much bigger impact in Japan.

      They even made DS games on the Wizardry franchise because it's so famous over there

    2. Re:Not the first RPG in Japan by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 2

      Come on, there is no way the Japanese could have developed video games without leaching from the great Americans who invented everything from the world wide web to the wheel.

      And queue the Al Gore jokes in 3,2,1...

    3. Re:Not the first RPG in Japan by plasticsquirrel · · Score: 3, Interesting
      If you had read the article...

      The first Dragon Quest team went on the record praising Black Onyx as the influence for them investigating other western titles in the genre (specifically Wizardry). And so the RPG hacked and slashed its way into the Japanese videogame industry and consciousness.

      The Dragon Quest team themselves credit The Black Onyx with causing them to investigate RPG titles like the earlier Wizardry, which is the reason why Dragon Quest even exists today. Just because Wizardry existed first doesn't mean that it had some universal impact throughout Japan.

      --
      Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
  5. Better article by mattack2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    One of the other external links from the Wikipedia article has more information: http://www.edge-online.com/fea...

    (I added the other one mentioned in the summary to the Wikipedia page, though.)

  6. Wizardry by Hsien-Ko · · Score: 2

    says hi.

  7. Re:Makes crappy game, blames culture. by antifoidulus · · Score: 2

    This is a cultural difference, Japanese developers believe gamers want to work for / earn their fun rather than be given it easily. Western audiences generally disagree but the games are popular in Japan.

    Huh? JRPGs were actually quite popular during the mid-90s up until about the previous console generation. If you look at the top grossing video games of all time you see that there are quite a few JRPGs on the list, and it certainly wasn't only Japan that was buying them. But take a closer look at the year, you will see that almost all of them were released between 1994 and 2004. Then compare it to all the other genres. You will see a much more diverse range of years. Now granted the pre-16 bit RPGs can be given a bit of a pass since technological limitations really limited gameplay, but what about modern JRPGs, why have their sales basically tanked?

    I think it's largely because they simply haven't kept up with the times. It has nothing to do with "working"/"earning" your reward, there are plenty of puzzle games that are incredibly popular in both Japan and the west that certainly make you "earn" your rewards. And it isn't that "Japanese" made games are unpopular, there are a lot of recent entries in the best seller lists that are made in Japan, just not RPGs. No, the OP was right, the problem with JRPGs is that they simply haven't kept up with the times. Modern hardware offers the capacity to make incredibly engaging experiences, but all most JRPGs do is just make the same grindy experience that we had 20 years ago, but shinier. They need to really shake up their formula or else they will basically never be able to expand beyond their own small devoted fan base.

    --
    Monstar L