Original post from r/HobbyDrama by u/cslevens.
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”- AM, a fictional supercomputer from the short story ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, by Harlan Ellison.
“If you don’t understand how to make something difficult interesting, it ends up being guesswork. There is such a thing as ‘interesting difficulty’, and when programmers tried to just guess what that was, it never turned out very good.”- Shinobu Yagawa, Programmer of Videogames that Hate their Players.
It is just past midnight on a Saturday, now a Sunday. I am playing a videogame called “Battle Garegga”. It is a 2D Shoot ‘Em Up game, often abbreviated as a SHMUP. I am controlling a flying warplane, aesthetically similar to a World War II era fighter jet, but with a far more Steampunk design. The machineguns up front let loose an unceasing torrent of ammunition and shrapnel. The automated drones that surround me let loose an equally impressive wall of bullets.
I feel like I’m flying. The game is in 2D, and looks nothing like reality. But I feel like I’m flying.
I’ve just defeated the boss of the Third Level, a massive Tank that desperately grew more and more guns as I took it apart, piece by piece. I fought it and won. It died. It exploded.
I am flying.
As I soar into Stage 4, I make the conscious choice to die.
I fly, soaring, to the top of the screen. I turn my guns off. The drones around my plane fall silent. Enemy planes fly onto the screen, zeroing in on my position. I let them approach. My hands are fully off the controller.
A plane crashes into me, and I explode. I feel like I’m falling. Plummeting.
I chose this death, but I feel like I’m sinking every time I do it. I do it almost every time I play the game. While I chose this place to die, it’s a choice I would rather not make. But it is necessary.
This game actively hates me. Battle Garegga hates to see me do well. And I’ve done very well on Stage 3. I could feel the hate welling up. I could see it. The only thing that could calm the game down was my blood.
So I bleed in tribute. I choose death at my own hand, in exchange for the gift of not being slaughtered mercilessly by a vengeful bit of programming. A few seconds later, I’m revived. I’m flying again. I’m on my last life, but my sacrifice now ensures that the game remains technically beatable.
I’m fly-………….. I get hit by a stray bullet. I’m dead again.
That was my last life. Game Over.
I can’t hear the game laughing at my loss, but I can’t not hear it either.
I start again.
What is a SHMUP?
The SHMUP, despite being a well known and recognizable genre, is defined surprisingly poorly. People can agree on certain core mechanics- the player controls a single, solitary thing (plane, space ship, person, etc.) ,and must shoot many, many enemies. Sometimes the enemies are an active threat. Sometimes they are just hanging out. But the point of the genre remains to fly around and “Shoot ‘Em Up”, until either a predefined victory point, or until an inevitable death. Your metric of success is generally “Points”, sometimes awarded simply, sometimes best understood with PhD level mathematics.
Oh yeah, and typically you die in one hit. Get hit by a stray bullet? Dead, minus one life. Lose enough lives- typically two or three- and the game ends. If you’re dying, you’re not shooting ‘em up, so dying is typically something to be avoided in the genre. Remember this.
For the first few decades of Videogames’ rise in pop culture, SHMUPs were inescapable. One of the very first commercial smash-hit games, Space Invaders, was very firmly in the genre. Several other titles became inescapable fixtures within both Arcades and Home consoles- Raiden, Gradius, R-Type. As Arcades reached their absolute peak in the mid 90’s, SHMUPs were one of the pillars holding up the whole medium.
Why SHMUP? Why not SHMUP?
Like Arcades themselves, the age of SHMUPS was not to last. As the commercial mechanism of the “Arcade” began to die a painful death (a topic better covered elsewhere), SHMUPs began to wither as well. SHMUPs, while well established in pop culture, had always been far, FAR more popular at the Arcades than on Home consoles.
It’s easy to see why. Firstly, SHMUPs as a genre were extremely financially lucrative for arcade owners. The very nature of difficulty in SHMUPs, with deaths coming easily and punishingly- meant that only the most experienced players could make their playthrough last long. SHMUPs often offered an “enticing” difficulty, where the games were just easy enough to prompt players to play them more, but just hard enough to slaughter those same players regularly.
To simplify the economics: put a quarter in the machine. Play the SHMUP. The SHMUP is just hard enough that you die, game over. But it’s just easy enough that you think you can win. So you put another quarter in and start over.
As a player, you might have mixed feelings on this. But the guy who gets all the quarters LOVES it.
These same qualities, however, meant that SHMUPS never came close to that level of popularity in the living room. Outside of the arcade environment, SHMUPS can seem a bit….. exposed. When you pay full price for a SHMUP game up front, it’s easier for players to visualize how much money they spend. When you play one quarter at a time, it’s much harder to comprehend that monetary cost in the moment. And given that home consoles and home videogames are a much higher upfront cost than playing an arcade game, it led players to differently evaluate how much value they were really getting from their money.
SHMUPs do not seem as appealing from this angle. When you can just restart or continue your game for free, you get exposed to more of the game’s difficulty at once. You have an easier time seeing, from the very first playthrough, EXACTLY the amount of difficult nonsense you will be expected to put up with to win. When you see all this gradually, quarter by quarter in the arcade, it seems less imposing. But on a home console, the SHMUP looks a lot scarier because you can more or less see it all at once. Players, naturally, were intimidated away, and SHMUPs barely hang on to this day as an extremely niche genre.
It also did not help that the technology of home consoles rapidly eclipsed that of Arcades. 3D games rapidly, rapidly began to eclipse the popularity of 2D games. At the time, SHMUP design could really only flourish in two dimensions, so a genre fall was inevitable. Though some SHMUPs would experiment with pseudo 3d gameplay- like the well remembered RAY Trilogy-
Arcades would die, and SHMUPs would die in parallel. And one would argue that when the SHMUP died, it died at a point where the qualities of a good, “proper” SHMUP had more or less solidified.
Just remember this: What defines a good, proper SHMUP? Difficulty that is hard, but visually seems to be beatable. Fair mechanics, that don’t make you quit right away.
Above all else: A proper SHMUP has the appearance of fairness.
What is Bullet Hell?- Part 1
FUCK THAT.
FUCK ALL OF THAT BULLSHIT.
YOU TAKE THAT APPEARANCE OF FAIRNESS, YOU BREAK ITS NECK, AND YOU SEND IT STRAIGHT TO HELL.
I WANT TO FEEL LIKE AN UNSTOPPABLE GOD OF RIGHTEOUS DEATH, WADING THROUGH THE VITRIOL OF MY ENEMIES AND BLASTING THEM INTO AN UNDESERVED NIRVANA.
I WANT TO WALK THROUGH THE RAIN AND COME OUT DRY
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO RIP AND TEAR
STAB. AND. STOMP.
The (Guessed) Origins of Shinobu Yagawa
Outside of the SHMUP fandom, there is extremely little known about Shinobu Yagawa. Despite being a prolific and well known creator within the genre, I could not even source an accurate birthyear for the man! The English internet has no information on his education, family, where he lives, nothing. What little history of the man we have comes through his creative works, and through exactly two interviews he has given to the public.
We can logically guess that at some point, Shinobu Yagawa was born. I try not to assume when I write these things, but I’ll make that assumption here quite proudly.
Continuing this stream of barely-cobbled-together-assumptions, it is likely that Yagawa was a child at some point, and eventually ceased being a child, and then became an adult. He could have skipped one of those, but it is hard to tell. By the time he was an adult, he was living in Japan. Around 1990, we can very clearly say two things about Shinobu Yagawa: That he was making a living as a videogame programmer, and that he was a gigantic fan of the SHMUP genre.
In 1990, Taito (the creators of the original Space Invaders), released a little known game called Gun Frontier. On first glance, Gun Frontier would look like nothing special. It superficially appeared very similar to other games in the genre.
The player controlled a flying plane, with a lot of weaponry. There were many enemy planes, of which to shoot. If you shot said enemies, you would get points. Other than the game being Wild West themed, there really wasn’t much that stood out about the game.
But then, when people tried to play the game, they noticed that the game would…… punish them for playing well. The faster and more often you fired your weapons, the more fierce the enemies would get. If you spammed the screen with your firepower, an expected perk of the genre, enemies would spam right back. This escalation in difficulty was so extreme, that it was possible to accidentally render the game physically un-winnable!
SHMUPs had previously used a similar design philosophy before- it’s called “Rank”, and we’ll get into it more later- but never in this extreme of a fashion. This was punishing, and made the game almost feel spiteful. The game offered you a fun way to play, but if you ever accepted this offer, the game would then punch you in the face. To this day, though acknowledged as an interesting step in gameplay design, Gun Frontier remains very divisive.
Shinobu Yagawa played Gun Frontier and immediately fell in love. The idea of a game with difficulty that responded to the player’s actions was just a concept that he could not look away from. Yagawa knew then that he wanted to make difficult SHMUP’s, but he also knew that he wanted to make them different in an interesting way.
Very shortly after, in 1992, Yagawa would release his first breakthrough game, Recca: Summer Carnival ’92. Curiously, though this was a SHMUP, it was not an arcade title, but instead was developed for the Famicon/NES.
Within the ever-shrinking population of SHMUP fans, Recca is known as an incredibly pivotal title within the genre for multiple reasons. The design of Recca, though it did not incorporate the dynamic difficulty of Gun Frontier, was unlike anything ever seen before. The player’s controllable ship was extremely powerful, with five different weapons, and a shield function that offered straight up invincibility. You could block bullets now!
But you would have to block bullets, because the sheer amount and pace of the enemy fire was overwhelming. The game was not the typical matter of “Shoot everything, and survive”. It required more thought by the player, and nerves of steel.
And all this, on the simple hardware of the NES of all things! This wasn’t just an innovation of design, but a remarkable technological achievement. Yagawa quickly became known in the industry as a genius programmer and designer, to the point that companies would rapidly scout his services. Titans of the SHMUP industry (namely Raizing and CAVE) keep him regularly employed over the next 20 years, because of what he would accomplish with his games.
Starting with Recca, Shinobu Yagawa would birth a new subgenre within the SHMUP, right about the time when arcades would begin to die.
Shinobu Yagawa would create the games that spawned the Bullet Hell movement. And to this very day, people keep arguing about whether his games are any good or not.
What is Bullet Hell?- Part 2
Bullet Hell (aka Danmaku, Curtain Fire, Manic Shooter, etc.) is a type of SHMUP that revels in excess, and celebrates difficulty. The point of the Bullet Hell genre is to take everything that SHMUPs used to need to succeed- those concepts that gave them the initial appearance of fairness- and toss them into the garbage.
In bullet hell games, it is often hard to see yourself. Bullets are flying literally everywhere. They are big, they are loud, they are obnoxious, and there are thousands of them at any given time. Bullet Hell games are not designed to draw players in- they are designed to scare away the meek.
But if you find the courage to step up and play one, you rapidly find out that they are not as imposing as they look. Are Bullet Hell games difficult? Yes, all SHMUPs are difficult. But Bullet Hell games, specifically, give the player a LOT of tools for success that you would not typically have in other SHMUPs.
While the enemy’s firepower is excessive, so is yours. The player in a bullet hell game typically has massive, highly damaging, and wide ranging attacks, with no cost. In addition, the player’s hitbox- the part of the player that bullets can actually hit- is absolutely TINY. In other SHMUPS, when you fly a plane, you typically die when a bullet hits any part of the plane. But in a Bullet Hell SHMUP, a bullet has to hit a tiny, tiny, TINY hitbox in the center of your plane, or else it does no damage. In some games, this hitbox is as small as a single pixel.
On top of that, depending on the game, Bullet Hell Players are given gameplay mechanics that let them turn the difficulty of the game to their advantage. Many games let players “cancel”, or erase, enemy bullets en masse, either turning them into explosions that harm enemies, or into ever escalating amounts of points. It is not uncommon for Bullet Hell games to devolve into a risk/reward loop, where you intentionally let the enemy fill the screen with deadly, deadly bullets, and then destroy the bullets for an influx of points and extra lives.
Just to be clear: The games are still EXTREMELY hard. But they aren’t even close to impossible. They just pride themselves on looking impossible, is all.
There is debate on what game is considered the “first” bullet Hell Game. While Recca ’92 is very much a precursor to the genre, there are two more prominent candidates. The first is 1995’s DonPachi, by CAVE, which defined many of the aesthetic elements that would define the visuals of Bullet Hell for decades to come.
The second is 1996’s Battle Garegga, programmed and designed by Shinobu Yagawa. While Battle Garegga would introduce many staples of the genre, it is most remembered for being a game that hates you. Yes, you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never played the game at all.
Battle Garegga Hates You.
Battle Garegga combined the two design elements that Yagawa seemed to love- the shifting and evolving difficulty of Gun Frontier, and the absolute insanity of Recca. But in combining these two things, Yagawa created a game that was, itself, an absolute monster of disdain.
Battle Garegga features an extreme form of gameplay design called “Rank”, similar to the difficulty system of Gun Frontier, but far, FAR more extreme. Rank was previously a soft fixture of SHMUPs prior to Battle Garegga, as a part of that enticing, fair-looking difficulty we discussed earlier.
In general, if you played a SHMUP and scored very well, or you destroyed a certain amount of enemies, the game would invisibly “Increase Rank”, and make itself harder. There would be more enemies, and they would be tougher. Inversely, if you did poorly, the game would “Decrease Rank”, and become easier.
In Battle Garegga, this works a bit differently. The workings of Rank in Battle Garegga are obtuse, unintuitive, and entirely invisible. But to keep things simple, here is a list of things that Increase Rank in Battle Garegga:
-Living
-Shooting your weapon
-Enemies being hit by your weapon
-Using a “Smart Bomb” to clear the screen of bullets
-Powering up and Getting Stronger
-Collecting Points and Resources
-Gaining Extra Lives
Here is a list of things that Decrease Rank in Battle Garegga:
-Dying
Did you think I was being hyperbolic when I said this game hates you? The Rank in Battle Garegga, notoriously, increases when you, as a player, do literally anything. If you Shoot ‘Em Up in this SHMUP game, the game will hate you, and become extremely difficult. If you try and play smart, destroy enemies efficiently, and do your best to stay alive, the game will STILL hate you, and become extremely difficult. And if you play the game and try to do as little as possible, the game will STILL hate you, and become extremely hard.
Enemies will be tougher, and they will fire enough bullets to make Battle Garegga look like a modern day Bullet Hell SHMUP. But, as a precursor to the genre, Battle Garegga offers ABSOLUTELY NONE of the perks that make most Bullet Hell games tolerable. Your hitbox is gigantic. Your weapons, while cool, are not an unstoppable engine of destruction. While you have a smart bomb, it is slow, and offers you no benefit for cancelling enemy bullets.
It cannot be understated what a dramatic effect Rank has on Garegga, and the obscene degree to which it escalates the difficulty. Here is a video of someone playing Garegga with Rank maxed out (with an invincibility hack), just to demonstrate how ludicrously and literally impossible it gets.
Gun Frontier gained some notoriety for the fact that a poor player could accidentally make the game unwinnable. Battle Garegga gained far more notoriety for the fact that EVEN AN AVERAGE PLAYER could do this, just by playing “normally” . Novice playthroughs typically end at Stage 4 or 5 of the game (out of 7), with the rank having risen so high that the game becomes even more literally impossible than Gun Frontier.
The very design of Garegga, and Yagawa’s philosophy to difficulty and rank as a whole, hates the player. They punish the player for playing the game, in every sense.
And yet Battle Garegga was a smash success, by the standards of SHMUPs. It is so beloved within the industry that Yagawa was more or less given a complete, unhindered, creative blank check for every other game he would be asked to make.
From this point forward, almost every single game Yagawa would make would incorporate the elements that made Battle Garegga so infamous. He would immediately make two spiritual successors with Raizing- “Armed Police Batrider” and “Battle Bakraid”. These games, plus Garegga, form the legendary “Bat” trilogy, and are seen as the “purest” implementation of his gameplay philosophy. All three game feature unique aesthetics, wild and crazy bullet patterns to avoid, and, of course, Rank. All three are games with a Rank system so extreme, that it takes a large amount of research and study on the player’s part to even make them digestible.
After his time at Raizing, Yagawa would migrate over to CAVE, where he would be given the helm on a continuous list of titles. He would develop both “Ibara” and “Pink Sweets”, both of which bring his games into the Bullet Hell genre proper. While both of these games feature an obtuse, unforgiving, and downright spiteful Yagawa-style rank system, they also offered the player concessions more in line with the rest of the Bullet Hell genre. Smaller hitboxes, higher player firepower, and the ability to neutralize enemy bullets for points. In other words, “Yagawa-Lite”.
He would then develop “Muchi Muchi Pork”, which forgoes the Rank system almost altogether. In place of acting as an unfeeling monolith dedicated to hating the player, the game is instead a mechanically fun and forgiving maximalist Bullet Hell title, that also functions as a love letter to heavyset women in general.
Look, I know that doesn’t fit with the theme, but I felt weird not mentioning it. It’s a solid game, if not completely, completely bizarre in aesthetics. You see what I mean.
Finally, and most recently, Yagawa would be trusted with “Re-making” or “Revising” existing CAVE games. Essentially, he was given the freedom to use the assets of existing games to make what were essentially entirely new titles, that play very differently from their source material.
He would turn “DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu”, into “DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu: Black Label”, which takes the original game and implements the absolute most extreme form of Rank that Yagawa could possibly conceive of. His revision not only implemented rank, but actually created a visible “Rank Meter” on screen. Which, of course, the player would need, because any and all movement of Rank in this title is MASSIVE AND INSTANTANEOUS. While players had much more ways to influence Rank (up and down), this influence resulted in difficulty swings so wild that it’s not uncommon for players to reach Maximum (Impossible) Rank, drop to Minimum Rank, and then rise to Impossible Rank again within seconds. Here’s a playthrough.
Yagawa would turn “Espgaluda II” into “Espgaluda II: Black Label”, which was not as dramatic of a transformation. The original Espgaluda II offered the players the opportunity to temporarily manipulate Rank somewhat (in a tradeoff for points), so Yagawa simply took those mechanics and pumped them up to 11. Gameplay here.
After this, Yagawa would somewhat fade into the background. He is still credited as a contributing programmer for CAVE’s more recent titles, but it seems that he’s decided that his time as a lead programmer and designer has reached an end. Though Yagawa’s contributions to both SHMUPs and Bullet Hell are universally acknowledged and respected, his very design philosophy itself is heavily debated.
A lot of people love Yagawa’s games. But a lot of people hate them too.
The Case Against Yagawa
I’ve probably made this clear before, but I’ll state it again; Shinobu Yagawa loves making games that are hostile to the player. They punish the player for playing the game. They are mechanically obtuse, to the point of indecipherable. And even if you can get past all of that, they are still extremely hard, and downright unfair in places.
In a genre that prides itself on mechanical fairness (or, in Bullet Hell’s case, the appearance of unfairness), Yagawa seems to relish in the taboo. He clearly does not believe his games need to be self evident. He doesn’t care if people have no desire to play his games, because they are turned off by the hatred burned into their circuits.
This is not something that can draw in new players. This is not something that can even draw in experienced players. Even when veteran gamers look at Battle Garegga, they need annotations or a dedicated commentator to explain what is going on.
At that point, players aren’t even playing a SHMUP. They’re struggling to play the mechanics. It’s not the experience that SHMUPs or Bullet Hell provides- it’s a puzzle. A dissertation. It’s a game so full of itself that it simply will not let you play it.
The game hates you so much, that the only way you can engage with it is if you allow the game to play with you. You have to let the game pressure you, you have to let it force you to a razors’ edge of exasperation. It’s the videogame equivalent of an abusive relationship. Many players hate this, and it’s difficult to argue against them.
And yet.
The Case for Yagawa
To this day, amongst a certain miniscule subset of this already tiny subset of gamers, Yagawa’s games are absolutely beloved. They offer an intensity completely unmatched in any other game, SHMUP or not.
Yes, the games actively hate you, and they limit player choice. But once you actually knuckle down and approach them on the game’s own level, you realize the intentionality of the design. Yagawa did not make these Rank systems simply with no thought, they both serve and are served by every choice within the game. When you fully understand the restrictions under which you must play, player creativity opens up to a ludicrous degree.
Suddenly you understand the many, many, MANY different ways you can approach the unique problems that Yagawa games create. Some people keep rank as intentionally low as possible, doing their best to milk as many points as possible out of the game while doing as little as possible. Some people (like myself at the beginning of the article) find unique ways to “Yo-Yo” their rank. You find really, really lucrative ways to farm a massive amount of points and extra lives at once, jacking up the rank as the game rages at your success. But then you intentionally suicide- you intentionally spend a life, and time your player’s death- to drop that rank back down to a more manageable level. You’re always low on lives, and the game always remains dangerous, but if you maintain a good rhythm you can safely gain and lose lives like clockwork.
And these are just the surface level strategies. There are so many other ways to tackle the unique challenge that Yagawa has created. These outlets for player choice and expression are why players, to this day, defend these games. Even though the games hate these players’ guts.
The Legacy of Yagawa
Yagawa’s games were never, and never will be, household names. That is simply their nature. But for a brief window in 1990’s and early 2000’s Japan, they were well known and well liked in the industry. They were gamers’ gamers’ games, known and loved only to diehards, exactly the kinds of people who would go on to become programmers themselves.
Like all things Yagawa, his influence is steeped in mystery and conjecture. But the inquisitive eye will notice many, many elements common in games today that resemble the Rank and Difficulty principles that Yagawa would create.
Most prominent to me are the Soulsborne series, including Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Bloodborne. These games, like Yagawa’s, scale their difficulty in response to player success and failure. Depending on the game, dying can make the game easier or harder, and it can open or close certain gameplay options. Soulsborne games are also unafraid to offer players gameplay mechanics that are cool (e.g. “Humanity”), and then immediately punish the players for using them (“Invasions”). It’s impossible to conclusively say whether anyone on the dev team at From Software was directly influenced by Yagawa’s output, but his games existing in the way they did certainly went a long way in normalizing this level of player and difficulty manipulation.
As another conjecture, many modern SHMUPs, made (by definition) by hardcore SHMUP fans themselves, draw a more direct and clear line to Yagawa’s influence. “Crimzon Clover” directly carries the Yagawa-like gameflow of yo-yo-ing up and down rank. “Blue Revolver” implements a version of rank that actually favors the player, minimally raising rank for good play, and massively decreasing it when the player dies. SHMUP designers and die-hards, on large, love Yagawa, and his philosophies persist in the genre today.
But amongst this accomplishment and legacy, I’m left only one question.
Why?
Yagawa dedicated his life to making games that are hostile to the player. It may sound like creative liberty, but as an active player of these games, you can feel that these games are software products that genuinely, genuinely hate the player.
What did we do to Yagawa? Why did he make games like this? Is he as filled with hatred and misanthropy as his games suggest?
The Surprisingly Benign Motivations of Yagawa
We only have two real instances where Yagawa talks about himself or his games (linked earlier), and they paint a picture of a man who is almost as impenetrable as his games. In every sense he seems like a normal, chill guy, yet many of his answers contradict himself, or make no sense whatsoever.
In his longest interview to date, Yagawa is directly asked about his approach to Rank and Difficulty, and he…… downplays it completely. Then he claims he did it all for the money.
“People often say that [rank is my signature], but I think it’s an exaggeration. I’ve also done games without rank, after all. But it’s certainly the case that my arcade games have that feature. It’s not because of some insistence on my part, but rather because income at the arcades is equivalent with the amount of time one spends playing. It sounds bad, but it was one of my methods for increasing income for arcade operators”. – Shinobu Yagawa
Now that is obviously an extremely cynical and unsatisfying explanation. Which is why, as a writer, I’m relieved that Yagawa immediately backpedaled, and sort of let loose that he made these relentlessly aggressive games…… because he enjoyed them personally.
“If you spend all this time improving at a game, only to have it gradually end more and more quickly, then I don’t think its very fun, and it won’t be played…… I don’t have much fun when I play games that are said to be ‘for beginners’”- Shinobu Yagawa
And then things get weird. As Yagawa talks about his approach to gaming and programming, it came out that the only videogame consoles he actually owns are a Sega Saturn and a DS. However, Yagawa owns a staggering 150 Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s) of various arcade games. A PCB is essentially the inside of an arcade cabinet, the bit that holds the actual game on it. Yagawa, however, does not own any arcade cabinets, and what’s more, has no place to store his PCB collection. So he collected all of these games….. without any means to play or store them.
“It’s a pain finding a place to store them all (PCB’s), and I don’t have free time to play them at home anyway.”- Shinobu Yagawa
In other words, Yagawa might have a natural tendency for doing things he likes (buying PCB’s), but is punished by the natural restrictions of that hobby (space, inability to play said games). Sort of like how his games’ Rank tends to punish those who hoard lives and resources. Sort of how his games like to punish people for trying to play the game.
Hm.
Regardless of his motivations- whether he made games in the way he did purely for money, purely for his own fun, or somewhere in-between- Yagawa clearly loves them. They are digital creatures of pure animosity and spite, but he loves them in a way that only a father can.
“Do you feel like the shooting games you made are the best?”- Interviewer
“That’s not entirely untrue. .”- Shinobu Yagawa
Epilogue
I’m flying.
The credits are rolling. After three years of playing, I’ve won a run of Battle Garegga.
As my warplane flies off into an animated digital sunset, I look at my score.
Only seven million points. Yagawa’s early games are famous for their scores having an “Overflow” feature. Once you get over ten million points, the score counter runs out of digits, and it expresses the millions as letters instead. So ten million is “A million”, eleven million is “B million”, twelve million is “C Million”, etc.
I plotted my strategy and played my heart out, and I won, and my score wasn’t even high enough to break the scoring system. The current world records are in the J Million and K Million range.
I was flying, but now I feel like I’m falling. I can hear laughter.
The game knows I would not be satisfied. It laughs because it knows I will come back. It knows I can never win, and I can never escape. This is a laugh of hatred.
Somewhere in Japan, Shinobu Yagawa laughs in his apartment, filled to the brim with Arcade PCB’s. His is a laugh of love and joy. He laughs, playing Battle Garegga on his Sega Saturn, satisfied that he’s created games that people, perhaps very few people, enjoy as much as he does. He smiles.
I frown. I’ve won, and the game still says “Game Over”.
I’ll play more tomorrow.
