Saved Games

Japanese PC games of the ’80s and ’90s have a rich history, little-known in the west. The Game Preservation society is working to make sure they don’t disappear forever.

- Wes Fenlon

It’s late afternoon in Tokyo, and in the narrow three-story home that serves as the headquarters of the Game Preservation Society, I’ve just learned about Jesus. In the west, when we talk about videogame developer Enix, we’re probably talking about Dragon Quest, which inspired an explosion of console JRPGs in the ’90s. Joseph Redon would much rather talk about a PC game like Jesus, which was made by Enix around the same time as the first Dragon Quest, back in 1987.

Like most of the thousands of games in Redon’s collection, I’ve never heard of Jesus until he shows it to me. The mission of the Game Preservation Society, the non-profit he co-founded, is to collect, archive, and protect Japan’s PC games, most of them made in the ’80s and ’90s before consoles took over and doomed them to obscurity. Any game I point to he can tell a story about, casually dishing out some of the history of who made it and why it’s special.

He loves every second of it. When he begins to talk about Enix, he slips into the role of a storyteller born into an oral tradition, passing down a lifetime of knowledge that could only be accumulated in Japan. Off the island, Japan’s PC games are all but completely unknown. The Game Preservation Society exists to make sure they aren’t forgotten.

ENIX: THE PUBLISHING PIONEERS

“Enix is a very great publisher, but this is not the history everyone knows,” Redon tells me as we flip through the covers of ’80s RPGs and adventure games in a protective binder. Cover after cover is pure imagination fuel, evoking a breathless “I need to play this”. In those days, great art and magazines were the best tools for selling games.