Pre-NES Japan
A few posts here recently have me thinking about the evolution of video games again and Japan's place in it.
I've always been kind of annoyed that people tend to want to give Japan credit for both saving the video game industry and revolutionizing it. By all means Nintendo deserves all the credit in the world for their great marketing of the NES but to be fair, Atari had already come before them and provided a great guideline of what to do and what not to do with a home gaming console.
But people fail to realize that during the video game crash console gaming may have been on life support but PC gaming was arguably thriving. Many of the classics of our time were being released at this time. Japan is often given credit for creating the RPG and platform genres however I remember games such as Pitfall and Montazuma's Revenge before Mario came out. I also remember playing games such as ultima and Wizardry before Zelda and Final Fantasy came out. But again, because most of these were released on home computers they weren't as popular at the time.
However what I'm really ignorant about is the state of video and computer gaming in Japan before the NES. Here in the USA we had all of the classic consoles (Atari, Colecovision, Intellivision, etc...) as well as Apple, Commodore and other home computers. What was going on in Japan in the late 70s early 80s. Did they have their own revolutionary computer RPGs like Wizardry or Ultima over there that we never hear about over here in the states or were they playing Wizardry as well? A recent post here about classic computer games seems to indicate that they in fact were.
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