Behind the Scenes - How RPGs Invaded Japan (Patreon)

Hello $5 Patrons! Welcome to a behind the scenes post on my latest video, which is about how role-playing games made their way from the tabletops of America to the consoles of Japan.

Let me start by going back to the very beginning. 

Last year, I was working with a literary agent on a book proposal: a history of game design in 100 games. I made a list of games, wrote a few sample chapters, and crafted a full proposal. It was sent to loads of publishers and they all said… "No". Oof! Bit of a blow to my ego. 

But nevermind! I enjoyed researching these old games for my sample chapters and so decided to take the idea and make it into a video series*. This ended up being Design Icons, with episodes on Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

Unfortunately, the videos painfully underperformed. If you rank all my videos from most viewed to least, they're in the bottom five. Even videos on accessibility did better - that's how bad they did!

My bottom 10 videos on GMTK, in terms of views

In retrospect, it's perhaps not too surprising. The titles are boring (they were originally just the name of the game). The games are old. There's not a good enough hook to get people in the door.

As a note: I don't want it to seem like I let numbers and stats completely drive what I do. The single most important factor for whether I make a video is: whether I want to make it. So in general I use stats to help me know how to best package and deliver my videos, to get the highest number of people to watch them.

For example, here's what happened when I changed the thumbnail for the Hitman 2 video. It's the exact same video, but improving the marketing helped it surpass half a million views!

Pink > Purple

So, I put Design Icons on the back burner for a while to focus on other things and thought about how to make it more interesting to a wider audience.

Fortuitously, the answer became obvious when I starting looking into the next video I had planned. It was going to be a double bill on Ultima & Wizardry (which I had identified as the key early RPGs in my research for the book), but I quickly realised that the games themselves just weren't particularly exciting to analyse. 

They're both very simple, neither are particularly well remembered, and it's not like they invented any of the RPG tropes like stats, magic, and levels - that's all just borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons!

I should say that Ultima as a series is very interesting - the sequels get extremely complex, the spin-off Ultima Underworld birthed the immersive sim genre, and the spin-off Ultima Online played a key role in the invention of the MMO.

I still love the original thumbnail for the video

So how can I make a video on these two games? 

Well, when I was making the first two episodes, I found that the most interesting part was not so much the games themselves - but what came before and what came after. How Pong was turned on its side and made singleplayer to make Breakout - and then if the blocks shoot back, you get Space Invaders. And how Pac-Man led to a whole bunch of maze-based clones, but was also influential on everything from Doom to Metal Gear Solid. 

So hey, why not focus on that part of the story? The most interesting thing about Wizardry is that it's based on these really early mainframe games from the 70s. And the fact that Ultima and Wizardry were so popular in Japan that they inspired a whole new genre over there is so cool!

So to fill out the story, I basically figured out what major RPGs games were made after U&W (The Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Elder Scrolls etc), and looked for interviews with the original designers to see if I could find them talking about U&W being influential. Same with JRPGs made after Dragon Quest (Mother, Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star). Every time I found a connection, it was like slotting in another jigsaw piece!

I decided to make the connections a key part of the video, so that meant cheeky things like mentioning how D&D inspired Colossal Cave Adventure, which led to the formation of (Zork developer) Infocom. And then showing how Yuji Horii took Infocom's Deadline to make Portopia. Or teasing Rogue at the start of the video, and then bringing it back with Mystery Dungeon at the end.

Other research simply involved reading as much about RPGs as possible. The full source list is in the description for the video - I highlight 34 articles, videos, interviews, and magazine issues as specific sources for claims (for example: I had heard rumblings that Miyamoto used Ultima as an influence for Zelda 1, but it took ages to track down an actual source for it).

The next task was to make the video. 

I got stuck on the very first screen of Koei's Dungeon...

Usually I record almost all my own footage for GMTK episodes, but that just wasn't going to be practical for this video as it would mean tracking down, figuring out, and recording emulators for all sorts of ultra niche systems like the TRS-80 and Japanese computers. Plus, playing complex text-based games in Japanese! Not easy. So I recorded some of the games (like the PC-8801 games) but used YouTube for the rest. 

Finding Japanese language videos on YouTube was quite hard. There's loads of footage of fan translations and American ports, but getting - say - the original Famicom version of Dragon Quest II was tough. The solution, it turned out, was to search by the Japanese characters (in this case: ドラゴンクエストII 悪霊の神々). That would completely filter out all the English results, letting me focus on hunting down high quality videos without watermarks or webcams!

The other problem I had was the old video footage and old photographs. How do you make a pixelated, 200 pixel wide scan of a photo from the 1980s look good in 1080p? My solution was to emulate an old slide projector.

The effect is quite easy to make. There's the original image, a frame made from a black rectangle with a fluffy mask cut out, and a blank slide photo used (with a colour burn blend mode) to give colour and texture. 

I also threw on a bit of colour bleed, using Premiere's "VR Chromatic Aberrations" effect, which lets you make the red, green, and blue parts of the image warp out in a weird, but cool effect which has become the overall aesthetic of Design Icons. 

You can see the swap at 20% speed

As for the motion effect, I use a thing called an Adjustment Layer. You can put effects on that, and it applies it to all the clips below. So this layer blurs the underlying image a bit, then offsets its vertical position super fast for a second. If I swap out the slide while this is happening, the final effect sees the slide blur out, fly up, and the settle back in as a new slide. Neat!

Unfortunately, I did get some feedback from a tiny number of viewers that the two effects were difficult to watch. As a staunch supporter of accessibility, I decided to make an alternate, unlisted visual accessible version with reduced motion and colour bleed. You can find that here.

For the most part, I squeezed everything I wanted to say into the video. Only one interesting tangent got cut for time and flow: Wizardry is not very well known in the west (especially compared to Ultima), but it's still huge in Japan! There were Wizardry games made for PS2, and there was a Wizardry anime. Bonkers.

Test thumbnail, before I licensed the dice image from Adobe

Finally, there was the name and thumbnail. Previously I would have called it "Ultima & Wizardry | Design Icons". This time, I went for something more punchy and clicky, with a striking and eye-catching thumbnail.

The title is (currently) "Are Western and Japanese RPGs so Different?". And the thumbnail is "How RPGs Invaded Japan", which is a very strong phrase. I was a bit concerned about the use of the term "invaded", which could be problematic - but I have received absolutely zero comments on that, so my fears were unfounded.

I put the final video out. And I guess the question is: how did it do? 

So far: really well! At this rate, it's one of the best performing videos of 2020. Two days after release it's above average video performance (views are 32% higher than usual), has a really high retention (on average, people watched 62% of the video), and great clickthrough rate (8.4%). Those are all the factors that get YouTube to promote a video, so it could grow even more. 

Grey zone is the average views of the last 10 videos on the channel.

So, I guess Design Icons is back! Going forward, I'm going to be looking for the most interesting stories I can find, and use those to build my overall history of game design. Focus on the people, the narratives, the connections, the discoveries, and the trivia. No idea what's next (I still intend to go chronologically, so something early 80s I imagine), but I look forward to figuring it out.

If you have any questions about the video, please comment down below. If you have any ideas for Design Icons episodes, DM me ;)

* The original book proposal had 100 games, but please don't expect 100 episodes of Design Icons!