The Game Freaks Who Play With Bugs – In Praise of the Video Game Xevious

Authors

  • Nakazawa Shin'ichi Tokyo University Auteur-e
  • Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon University of Alberta Traducteur-trice
  • Tsugumi Okabe University of Alberta Traducteur-trice

Keywords:

video game, xevious, tibet, video game history, japan

Abstract

In 1967, the large-scale American amusement device manufacturer Williams and Company4 released a pinball machine by the name of Shangri-La. In the history of pinball, 1967 was the time when cabinets were already approaching their full maturity. First manufactured in the middle of the 1930s, pinball machines evolved at a similar pace to that of the economic growth in the United States. It is during this period that they thrived to the point of becoming one of the representative devices of electromechanical game machines alongside bingo and slot machines.

Author Biographies

  • Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon, University of Alberta

    Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon is a SSHRC funded PhD student enrolled in the programs of Humanities Computing and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and a former recipient of the 2012 Research Student Monbukagakusho Fellowship awarded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences, and Technologies. His areas of specialization are Game Studies and East Asian studies. His PhD thesis project consists of an examination of Japanese game centres (arcades) through the perspective of the social affordances provided by the assemblage of game cabinets, game software and the space of game centres itself. He published co-authored chapters in books such as Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games (2015) and in Séries cultes et culte de la série chez les jeunes (2014). He is involved in the organization of Replaying Japan: The International Conference on Japan Game Studies.

  • Tsugumi Okabe, University of Alberta

    Tsugumi Okabe was born in Japan and raised in Canada. She is a bilingual speaker of English and Japanese, and is also studying Mandarin and French. Tsugumi is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta in the department of Comparative Literature where she is conducting her SSHRC funded research on transcultural adaptations of detective fiction and detective manga. Tsugumi is currently working on a project that involves Japanese female game developers to interrogate how myths about Japanese women account for gender inequality and misogyny within Japanese work culture. In her free time, Tsugumi likes to play Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

References

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LOGiN (1983), «THE MAKING OF XEVIOUS», May issue. LOGiN (1984), February issue.

Game Machine (1982, December 29), issue 201.

Additional Sources

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Published

2015-12-01

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2015): Geemu et media mix

Section

Translation

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