Was there any adults involved in development of MSX and related games?

Enlighted (6096)

08-05-2016, 02:10

I don't know if you have noticed, but I have a feeling that big part of the software I love the most was developed by people who were just 5-15 years older than I was at the time I saw these games first time.

From the point I look at the situation now, they were all kids. No need to put them down in any way though... They made a terrific job! I just started to wonder that on what age people like Hideo Kojima or Kazuhiko Nishi got involved in these things?

ログイン/登録して投稿

By AxelStone

Prophet (3199)

09-05-2016, 19:19

Japanesse people are very precocious, specially in videogames world. People like Yu Suzuki (Sega) created hits as Space Harrier arcade being only 25 years old.

By pitpan

Prophet (3156)

09-05-2016, 20:26

Precocious? At 25 you should be able to do most stuff. Remember than Alexander the Great had conquered half of the known world by that age. We should have given him an MSX

By Metalion

Paragon (1629)

09-05-2016, 20:44

NYYRIKKI wrote:

From the point I look at the situation now, they were all kids.

I think your problem is the same as mine : you are getting old.

We now view people who are 25-30 as kids, but when you are that age, you're as capable as anyone else. OK you lack maybe a bit of experience, but you are able to develop a game if you're part of a team.

Also, remember that video games were quite young at the time. They were existing (in a commercial form) for less than 10 years. So no one had really a great experience in that area. The young ones were more creative and more game oriented than their elders. So it makes perfect sense that they were at the forefront of the game development.

I remember when I was 14 years old, and made my first steps on a Apple II+. In a matter of weeks, I had ideas for basic games, and wrote some. Same thing when I got on the Commodore 64 and right after that, the MSX. Ideas were everywhere : adaptations of arcade games, variations of it, ideas picked up in a magazine, and so on ... We had the game fever and we were young !

EDIT : BTW, if you have not had the opportunity to watch "Halt And Catch Fire", a series about the development of the first PC clone in the "Silicone Prairie" of Texas, I urge you to do so. It's about the early eighties, geek coders, writing a BIOS, computers, it's pure fun !!!

By MsxKun

Paragon (1134)

09-05-2016, 23:26

Metalion][quote=NYYRIKKI wrote:

It's more than fun I watched full season 1. (it has 80's music too, I loved listening Gary Numan there.)

By JohnHassink

Ambassador (5684)

09-05-2016, 23:38

Some of the extremely talented Japanese game composers (like Yuzo Koshiro) were around 20 when they created some of their more iconic stuff. It still boggles my mind.

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

10-05-2016, 07:10

And actually, the soundtrack of "Vampire Killer" was composed by a young lady, fresh out of highschool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinuyo_Yamashita
Can't find the link to the interview right now, but as the story goes, she'd play the melodies on a little keyboard to the Konami director, and he'd give suggestions.
I love how our icons, the Japanese game developers, actually were pretty pragmatic and going with the flow. Sometimes, they were not so "serious" as we tend to think (read for instance about how Time Pilot was developed).
In the end, they were just "victims of the circumstances" and exploiting our beloved chips in the best way they could do. Yielding results that we enjoy unto this day.
I can thank Konami, Compile, Falcom, Namco(t), T&E Soft, Taito, Capcom, Telenet, and everything else I forgot (like Hudson, Tecno Soft, Game Arts), for making my youth a lot less shitty.
This doesn't mean, by the way, that I didn't enjoy "Western" games.

By AxelStone

Prophet (3199)

10-05-2016, 10:11

@pitpan I think that make Space Harrier arcade at 25 is really precocious. You can have skills at 25, but there is a there is a long way between that and "publish a arcade hit in one of the biggest games company". Consider that if Sega encomended such project to Yu Suzuki was probably because he had already highlighted with previous works. At 25th, most of us were making homebrew stuff.

JohnHassink wrote:

Some of the extremely talented Japanese game composers (like Yuzo Koshiro) were around 20 when they created some of their more iconic stuff. It still boggles my mind.

Wow!