When exactly was Super Mario Bros. released in the US? Nobody knows

didnt it start with spacewar?

just askin...

 

Or 1912, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1962, 1971 depending on your definition.

 

Obviously you've never heard of Super Mario Bros. Special. Legitimate, made by Hudson, and not released on any Nintendo hardware. I'm pretty sure that counts as a license.

 

It is referring to the boom rather than to "what was the first game". The book actually starts off w/ the American Pinball scene way back when. Not sure if it was 1912, but it was pre-WWII. Doesn't even talk about Japanese companies until about 100 pages in. They are dense pages as well, for a games book.

 

It sounds really good. The problem? The last actual book I read was... Well I cannot recall what it was and so I am always careful when picking anything up that is not mainstream and costs more than usual.

I have found the Internet in general + wikipedia have kept me from seriously justifying any literature on gaming history.

 

I see.. I learn.. I watched a YouTube video of this and was absolutely appalled.
I can also understand where and why the Nintendo seal of quality comes from, and it may just owe it heavily to this... Interpretation of Mario, if one could call it that.

 

To be fair, the quality of SMB Special was lacking more because of the hardware it was running on, rather than any incompetence on Hudson's part. It's not like there aren't games with the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" (never mind after they dropped "of Quality") that are as bad or worse than SMB Special.

 

the gameplay looks maddening. I just dont see how hardware would make it much better.
You are correct that nintendo licensed a lot of garbage, and had the "f-you" to sony not happened I expect they never would have put their licenses on other hardware (aside from triforce arcade hardware) ever again.

 

SMB Special is so completely different from SMB, I wouldn't call it a version of SMB released on another platform.

 

Well, I can probably make the decision really easy for you: it's 500 pages of Japanese, so if you can't read Japanese don't bother. 1000 kanji will take you far in this book, but you'll still find some confusing legal-terms. It is interesting. You could probably get *most* of the information out of Wikipedia, but there are a lot of things on the J-side that are likely not in there, and definitely not as well laid out. Imagine something in Wikipedia being bullet-pointed, and this actually explaining it.

I felt reading the first few chapters focusing on America, in Japanese, was a little counter-productive.

 

That is the problem with most books, they do seem to ignore everywhere apart from America even though Europe generally had a rich history in computer and video games. The Edwardian penny arcade games in the UK had more to do with Pachinko then Pinball machines did, the Japanese arcade industry dragged games into the 20th century. Still I should pick this book up if I can find it as it does have a lot of Japanese centric stuff that I won't find anywhere else.

 

It is very informative, but doesn't talk much, if any, about Europe. I think the reason the US is in there is b/c that's where it started, technically, and you could look at Europe as a branch, with little influence on the J-market.

DISCLAIMER: I'm only half way through it.

 

no Japanese for me.

a good example of something like that was the Amiga cd32
I remember vaguely seeing this as a kid in canada, and it never got a USA release, only UK and Canada for the most part.
That however gets largely ignored.

 

The thing is that it did not start in America, just people are under the assumption it is. A lot of the computer game firsts were from Europe (and more specificially the UK). Compare a 60s/70s pachinko machine with a 20s/30s edwardian penny arcade game from the UK and they do look very similar, much more then the US pinball games of the time.

 

This book sets the basis before pinball even. I forgot the word he uses for them though, but they were not electronic. Get the book and find out. Wikipedia says somewhere in the Late 1700's in France there were some pinball-ish contraptions out.

EDIT: He might have started w/ the "elemeka" pinball machines in 1933. I should bust the book out. Anyway, wherever it started is pretty impossible to pinpoint. Where it was popularized, is not. Crystal Meth was first synthesized by the Japanese but I wouldn't blame them for making it the fist fuck it is today.

I think the other big thing that puts more weight on America was the legal battles of the time, and the definition of "gaming" machines. Fun Fact: Japan had similar issues in the 70's. Never knew that.