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On a Sunday morning in September, Typhoon Talim was flooding the western part of Japan with a torrential downpour, but at Todoroki Station in Tokyo on the other end of the country, its effects were limited to a light rain. A 20-minute ride south of the city’s famous Shibuya crossing, Todoroki is a sleepy residential station served by a single local train line. I got off the train at 9:30 a.m. and opened up my too-small cheap umbrella. Face down in Google Maps, I passed by the small cluster of fast food eateries and convenience stores by the station turnstiles. The shops gave way to the sort of Tokyo you don’t see if you don’t leave its center: Trees. Winding roads. Gas stations. A garden full of massive leafy vegetables. A driving range.
The typhoon’s rains splashed my phone screen as I attempted to not get lost. This was not a town for tourists. There wouldn’t have been much reason for me to come to a place like Todoroki, but for this: Up the street is a collection that houses over 13,000 of Japan’s earliest computer games. This is Ground Zero for a grassroots effort to preserve the origins of Japanese gaming history before they disappear.
Half a mile from the station on a quiet street, a gated, hedge-trimmed building houses a row of four-story units, rooms stacked one atop the other. One of these is the headquarters of the Game Preservation Society, a non-profit founded in 2011 with the goal of researching, documenting, and preserving the games of Japan. Though most of its board members are Japanese, the society’s president and its main driving force is a French national, Joseph Redon. He lives here in the facility, and is the one who greeted me at the door as I put my plastic umbrella to the side and slipped off my shoes. Redon, 41, cuts a striking figure: rail-thin in impeccably tailored clothing, his entire head bald including the eyebrows, spectacles with thin circular frames completing the mad-scientist look. He spoke with the quiet desperation of someone fighting a losing battle with time.
Read more here. (Kotaku)
The typhoon’s rains splashed my phone screen as I attempted to not get lost. This was not a town for tourists. There wouldn’t have been much reason for me to come to a place like Todoroki, but for this: Up the street is a collection that houses over 13,000 of Japan’s earliest computer games. This is Ground Zero for a grassroots effort to preserve the origins of Japanese gaming history before they disappear.
Half a mile from the station on a quiet street, a gated, hedge-trimmed building houses a row of four-story units, rooms stacked one atop the other. One of these is the headquarters of the Game Preservation Society, a non-profit founded in 2011 with the goal of researching, documenting, and preserving the games of Japan. Though most of its board members are Japanese, the society’s president and its main driving force is a French national, Joseph Redon. He lives here in the facility, and is the one who greeted me at the door as I put my plastic umbrella to the side and slipped off my shoes. Redon, 41, cuts a striking figure: rail-thin in impeccably tailored clothing, his entire head bald including the eyebrows, spectacles with thin circular frames completing the mad-scientist look. He spoke with the quiet desperation of someone fighting a losing battle with time.
Read more here. (Kotaku)
