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TV’s TV (1987) & TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:34:00 +0000

TV’s TV was a four-hour late-night television program broadcast in Japan on Fuji TV from 01:55 to 05:55 on Saturday, March 14, 1987. It was a televisual predecessor to a book that I also discuss below, and an early sign of the experimental programming that Fuji TV would formalise later that year with its JOCX-TV2 late-night brand—a slot explicitly created to give young creators room to experiment.

The program comprised 100 TV spots, presented as a wall of TVs, showcasing a range of video games from around the world. For many Japanese viewers, it was their first encounter with the Amiga, Apple II, and Atari.

The creative credits read like a who’s who of future Japanese media innovators. Toshio Iwai (Otocky, SimTunes, Electroplankton, Tenori-on) created the CG using an Amiga. Masaya Matsuura (The Seven Colors: Legend of PSY·S City, PaRappa the Rapper, Vib-Ribbon) composed the music. The show’s production was overseen by Tsunekazu Ishihara—now president of The Pokémon Company—who would go on to direct the book that followed.

TV’s TV ushered in a new way of looking at television, not only because it introduced Western computers and games to a Japanese audience, but because it did so in a format that was itself playful and game-like.

There’s a full table of contents in the description of the video below.

But don’t watch the 4 hours yet! Read on.

テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全 / TV Games Encyclopedia (1988)

The following year, the team behind TV’s TV channelled that same energy into print. The result might be described as a book, but it’s much more than that. テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全 (TV GAMES: Denshi Yūgi Taizen; TV Games Encyclopedia), published in May 1988 by UPU, ISBN4-946432-31-0, was a seminal encyclopedia of video game history—and perhaps the single most ambitious book about games ever produced.

It arrived right in the middle of Japan’s bubble economy. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, a combination of rock-bottom interest rates and rampant speculation sent asset prices into the stratosphere. Money was everywhere and it was looking for things to be spent on.

This was the era when Japanese corporations bought Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures. When golf club memberships traded for the price of houses. When the land beneath the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was theoretically worth more than the entire state of California. Consumer spending went through the roof: credit card circulation tripled, luxury imports quadrupled, and the art market went berserk—Japanese buyers paid record sums at auction for Renoirs and Van Goghs just because they could.

The cultural side-effects were extraordinary. Bubble-era money funded some of the most ambitious, beautiful, and outright weird creative projects Japan has ever produced. Architecture, graphic design, magazines, vehicles, music, fashion, animation—everything was touched by the sense that budgets were infinite and ambition should match. It’s no coincidence that this period overlaps with the golden age of Japanese game development, or that Fuji TV was handing late-night airtime to young experimentalists, or that someone thought a four-hour TV program about Western computer games was a good idea.

The TV Games Encyclopedia is very much a product of this moment. Its lavish physical production—the frosted plastic slipcase, the variety of paper stocks, the multiple print techniques and finishes—reflects the kind of excess that was not only possible but expected. A book about video games had no business being this beautifully made. And yet here it was, priced at ¥3,500, with the ambition and budget of an art object. When the bubble burst in 1991—ushering in what became known as the Lost Decades—this kind of thing simply stopped being made.

The object

The book is extravagantly packaged in a frosted plastic slipcase and printed on a variety of paper stocks. It contains a host of different print techniques, finishes, and folds—and, most obviously, it is ring-bound with the majority of pages split into three horizontal sections. Unusually for a Japanese book from this period, it reads from left to right in the Western manner.

This makes reading the book an experience like nothing else. Pages are linked with cross-references, giving it a game-like, exploratory feeling. At various points, atmospheric photographs of games taken off cathode ray tube screens are spread across three separate panels, but the panels are distributed almost randomly throughout the book—making it a sort of puzzle to be able to view the whole image.

Imagine a hyperactive version of a choose-your-own-adventure book, or a paper-based website before the age of the internet.

The book was designed by Hitoshi Suzuki (鈴木一誌), one of Japan’s most influential book designers—a protégé of Kohei Sugiura (杉浦康平) known for radical editorial layouts. Phototypesetting was by Masaaki Inoue (井上聖昭), with design assistance from Takao Kabaya (蒲谷孝夫).

The name

The title is doubled: first in modern katakana (テレビゲーム, terebi gēmu) and then in classical kanji (電視遊戯大全, denshi yūgi taizen—literally “electronic play grand compendium”). The former is how Japanese people actually say “video game”; the latter is an archaic, almost scholarly construction. The juxtaposition is deliberately playful.

The structure

The main body of the book is divided into four parts:

KEY	Section	Description
●	History	The history of video games, from Willy Higinbotham’s tennis game through Space Invaders, the Atari VCS, Apple II, and the Famicom
■	Creators	Companies and key developers
＊	200 Games	Two hundred selected titles across all platforms
＋	Interviews & Columns	In-depth conversations with creators and essays on game culture

Because every page is physically split into three sections—and each section carries jump signs pointing to related content elsewhere—you don’t read the book linearly. You follow threads. Top section might be history, middle section a company profile, bottom section a game entry, and the cross-references send you bouncing between all three. It is, in the most literal sense, a hypertext document published five years before Mosaic.

The content

All contemporary platforms of 1988 are covered, and crucially the focus is worldwide rather than Japan-only, making it a comprehensive who’s who from the golden age of video games. The book documents over 200 games, profiles dozens of companies and creators, and contains what may be the richest set of developer interviews assembled in a single volume up to that point.

The people behind it

The book was planned and directed by Tsunekazu Ishihara (石原恒和), now president of The Pokémon Company, and produced by the company SEDIC—the same outfit that developed the musical-platform game Otocky (1987), designed by Toshio Iwai. The creative thread connecting TV’s TV, Otocky, and this book is SEDIC and Ishihara’s circle: a group of people at the intersection of games, art, and media who understood video games not as disposable entertainment but as a cultural form worth documenting seriously. The team were also featured in the Tetris: Heavenly Scrolls book in 1989.

Among the book’s contributors was Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智), who later created Pokémon and is currently president of Game Freak. Tajiri had already established himself through his Game Freak fanzine as one of Japan’s most dedicated game critics, and his presence here—alongside Ishihara—prefigures the partnership that would eventually produce the world’s largest media franchise.

This is also the book that Tetsuya Mizuguchi cites as the genesis of his career in video games. Mizuguchi would go on to create Sega Rally Championship, Rez, Lumines, and Tetris Effect—a body of work deeply concerned with synesthesia, music, and the sensory experience of play. It’s not hard to see how a book this alive to the artistic possibilities of games might have lit that fuse.

A note on names

The book contains several misspellings of Western names, and at least one name that has since changed. For the record:

Dan Bynten in the book → Danielle Bunten Berry (credited as Dan Bunten at the time; designer of M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold, she transitioned in 1992)
Tossio Iwai in the book → Toshio Iwai (岩井俊雄; his own name is romanised inconsistently)
Mark F. Flint — this is the pseudonym of the head of System Sacom, a Japanese game developer responsible for titles including Dome, Soft de Hard na Monogatari, and Xenon 2: Megablast (Japanese release). His real name remains unclear. The book contains what appears to be his only substantial interview—and possibly the only interview with him under any name!

The people list and interview list below use corrected/modern names.

People featured

Douglas Noel Adams · Don Bluth · Bill Budge · Danielle Bunten Berry · Nolan Bushnell · Douglas G. Carlston · Steve Cartwright · David Crane · Chris Crawford · Masanobu Endō · Mark F. Flint · David Fox · Richard Garriott · Nasir Gebelli · Hibiki Godai · Dan Gorlin · Satoshi Honda · Yūji Horii · Haruomi Hosono · Rob Hubbard · Toshio Iwai · Tōru Iwatani · Eugene P. Jarvis · Garry Kitchen · Yoshio Kiya · Timothy Leary · Ed Logg · Alan R. Miller · Shigeru Miyamoto · Kazuo Morita · Paul Murray · Kōichi Nakamura · Tomohiro Nishikado · Kazunori Sawano · Tom Snyder · Kōichi Sugiyama · Takanari Suzuki · Tony Suzuki · Toshiyuki Takahashi · Bill Williams · Roberta and Ken Williams

Companies featured

Accolade · Activision · Artdink · ASCII · Atari · Atari Games · Avalon Hill · Bandai · Beagle Bros · Bothtec · BPS · Brøderbund · Chat Noir · Electronic Arts · Enix · Enzan-Hoshigumi · Epyx · Firebird Software · Free Fall Associates · Game Arts · Game Studio · Hudson · Infocom · Irem · Koei · Konami · Kogado Studio · The Learning Company · LucasFilm Games · Mindscape · MIT · Namco · Nihon Falcom · Nintendo · Optimum Resource · Origin Systems · Sega Enterprises · Sierra On-Line · Silicon Beach · Sir-Tech Software · Sirius Software · Square · Strategic Simulations · Sublogic · Synapse Software · T&E Soft · Taito · Thinking Rabbit · Tokyo-Shoseki · Williams

Interviews

The interview section is the book’s crown jewel. It contains what are believed to be the only interviews ever conducted with several of its subjects—most notably Mark Flint (the enigmatic head of System Sacom). With rare input from people like Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji (creator of Bubble Bobble, who died in 2008). For a number of the Western developers, these are the earliest known long-form interviews, predating the retro gaming preservation movement by over a decade.

Accolade (Peter Doctorow)
Activision (Jeffrey Mulligan, Richard Larberg)
Activision & Sound (Russell Lieblich)
Atari (Nolan Bushnell)
Atari Games (Ed Logg)
Atari Games Japan (Hideyuki Nakajima)
Atari, Activision, Accolade (Alan Miller)
Brøderbund (Douglas Carlston)
Activision (Steve Cartwright)
Bubble Bobble (Fukio “MTJ” Mitsuji)
Electronic Arts (Trip Hawkins)
Free Fall Associates (John Freeman, Anne Westfall)
Irem (Mitsuri Kawai, Masato Ishizaki, Atsushi Yamazaki)
LucasFilm Games (David Fox)
Mind Mirror (Timothy Leary)
Namco (Masanobu Endō)
Nintendo (Shigeru Miyamoto)
Nintendo Concepts & Future Developments (Hiroshi Imanishi)
Door Door, Dragon Quest (Kōichi Nakamura)
“Dragon Quest” (Yūji Horii)
Galaxian (Kazunori Sawano)
Pac-Man (Tōru Iwatani)
Space Invaders (Tomohiro Nishikado)
Strategic Simulations (Joel Billings, Randy Broweleit)
Wizardry (Sir-Tech)
Q&A (Bill Williams)
“Copywriting” (Shigesato Itoi)
“Future Video Games” (Toshio Iwai)
“Video Games are Borderline” (Rika Kayama)
Taito & PSG (Tadashi Kimijima)
“Kind-Hearted Hackers” (Yūichi Konno)
“Discovering Otaku, 1987” (Hiroshi Masuyama)
“My Soliloquy” (Takao Momozono)
“Invader Now” (Fumihiro Nonomura)
TRON Real Time Operating System (Ken Sakamura)
“Future of Games” (Izuo Sakane)
“Games & Science Fiction” (Takao Shiga)
Music & Games (Kōichi Sugiyama)
“Luxury in Video Games” (Satoshi Tajiri)
“Computer Culture” (Mitsuhiro Takemura)

Authors

Init	Name	Romanisation	Notes
AM	三浦明彦	Akihiko Miura	SEDIC, Otocky. Game designer, Star Craft (MobyGames)
EM	松村英治	Eiji Matsumura	Writer, Amiga consultant (MobyGames)
FF	原田ユニ子	Fujie Fuyouko	Real name Yuniko Harada. Translator
HK	紀伊尾宏隆	Hirotaka Kiio	Freelance writer (MobyGames)
HM	桝山寛	Hiroshi Masuyama	SEDIC, Otocky. Techno/director (MobyGames)
HQ	小泉すみれ	Sumire Koizumi	Editor
KH	平林一則	Kazunori Hirabayashi	Freelance, Yotsuya Bannō Kikaku
KI	伊藤桂	Kei Itō	AV planner, editor of CAFE Magazine
KK	倉繁宏輔	Kōsuke Kurashige	SEDIC, CG engineer
MT	瀧本雅志	Masashi Takimoto	I&S, SEDIC. Now Professor, Osaka University of Arts
ST	田尻智	Satoshi Tajiri	Writer, Game Freak fanzine. Creator of Pokémon (MobyGames)
TI	石原恒和	Tsunekazu Ishihara	SEDIC, I&S. Now President, The Pokémon Company (MobyGames)
TT	田中利昭	Toshiaki Tanaka	PC game reviewer for Bug News, Comptiq (MobyGames)
YI	石井康文	Yasufumi Ishii	Student, Gamer
YK	今野裕一	Yūichi Konno	Editor, Peyotl Kōbō (夜想, 銀星倶楽部, WAVE)
YM	森川倖	Yukihito Morikawa	Manga artist, Yotsuya Bannō Kikaku
YT	田村安史	Yasufumi Tamura	System designer, technical writer
YY	山下由美子	Yumiko Yamashita	Freelance writer

It’s been scanned

There’s a scan on Internet Archive, though this won’t give you the full hypertext experience!

Full scan of the book on Internet Archive

Contemporary references

Buying the book today

The current price for the book is high, and varies quite a lot. It’s gone up since I bought my first copy in 2022. Whilst it’s almost unknown in the West the book continues to be fondly remembered and much sought after in Japan. Today you’re looking at somewhere between £200–600 GBP, or equivalent, depending on the condition. Some have cracked outer case, some are missing the correction insert, some have gone mouldy with age. But, up to now they have come up for sale often.

Yahoo! Japan Auctions
Mercari Japan classifieds
Amazon Japan books
Kosho book store search
From Japan (offers reshipping worldwide)
HOYOYO (offers reshipping worldwide)

Postscript

I’ve been working on this blog post on and (mostly) off since 2022. I’ll try to improve it over time!

Review: Wizkid

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:02:00 +0000

The greatest video game ever sold?

Wizkid was born in a time when British video game developers ruled the world. That such a time existed may seem strange today, as developers from Japan and the USA roll out one blockbuster game after another whilst British development companies quietly wonder where it all went wrong. Back in the early 90s a video game could be made by a small team of individuals rather than a team of hundreds - it was a much simpler time. To put things into perspective, at the time Wizkid was released the home computer scene was in decline and video game consoles such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Mega Drive were invading UK homes.

A product of bedroom-based development house Sensible Software during the peak of their creative output, Wizkid was an ode to everything British. It was Monty Python, seaside arcades, Fawlty Towers, tabloid newspapers, The Young Ones, punk rock, Viz and so much more – all wrapped up in a game that can only be described as, well, completely bonkers. It was fun, but perhaps more importantly it was funny. My initial play session left me bewildered, but as I settled into the weirdness it dawned on me that I was witnessing the most wonderful game I’d ever seen.

At this point in time Sensible Software were a household name, an established company and burgeoning brand who were coming off the back of a string of considerable successes. Most recently they had scored a hit with Mega-lo-Mania and were deep into the development of Sensible Soccer, the game that would turn out to be their magnum opus. Wizkid may seem like an unlikely stop gap, not helped by the fact there are only a tenuous link to Wizball - the older game by the company mentioned in the subtitle. You’d be right to wonder how such a crazy concept was sold to the executives at Ocean, but back then it was quite common for a publisher to sign a developer on the strength of their previous games with nothing but blind faith - or perhaps just trust - in their capability to deliver. A lot like the music industry works - the record company or publisher sign an artist to make an album before they ever hear it. Jon Hare – one half of the original Sensible Software team – has described Wizkid as a game that shows the height of the team’s collective expression and imagination, a game that was undiluted by the publisher and showed just how much they were capable of achieving. The result is a game so quirky it feels almost Japanese in its execution.

Right from the off you’re in no doubt that the game is a little bit left of centre, as you witness Wizkid conduct a pair of cannon to an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”. You can’t help but raise a smile - perhaps as a reaction to the confusion that’s slowly setting in, or maybe just because the act of conduction a pair of cannon looks so damned fun - in much the same way as the parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The game combines two decidedly old-school concepts: block-breaking and the adventure game. You play an odd variation of Breakout, where instead of a paddle you control a disembodied head whose job is to dislodge blocks so they collide with enemies. Success results in the appearance of a musical note, of which there’s a whole tune’s worth to collect. Once you complete the melody the game switches into adventure mode, where you gain control of the fully formed Wizkid and can walk him around a series of platform-based adventure screens, collecting items and solving a series of obtuse puzzles. Between these two forms of gameplay, you’ll collect a bunch of cats, solve some crosswords, buy some useful and not-so-useful items from a shop, row a boat, ride a donkey and much more besides. If ever there was a case where a game was more than the sum of its parts this is it. The game is unforgiving at times and if you’re not careful you’ll do well enough get to the end, but not well enough to see the “real” ending. You’re unlikely to see everything the game has to offer in your first play-through so there’s a chance to discover more in subsequent replays. If you’re not going to be able to play it, make sure you at least watch the play-through videos linked below.

Could a game like Wizkid be successful today? It’s hard to say, but it would have its work cut out. The types of games it’s comprised of have long since fallen out of favour. Publishers don’t take risks any more, preferring to instead push out identikit games that cater the latest trend. On the other hand, there does still seem to be occasional room for off-the-wall presentation and humour in a game, as shown by the likes of Peggle and Tomba! - a combination of which would be a pretty good match to the madness of the world of Wizkid.

Whilst it’s not my favourite game, or even anywhere near what you might consider to be a perfect game, the sheer scope and ambition seen in Wizkid means it’s my choice as the greatest game ever sold.

(That’s not to say it’s the end of this blog, though!)

Review: Sensible Soccer

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:35:00 +0000

The beautiful game.

When people mention football (soccer) games these days there are probably mean one of two games: FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. These games have evolved year-on-year, from when they were originally poles apart to today where they are very much the same sort of game: photorealistic players, recognisable stadiums, team kits, tournaments and commentary from your most loved (or hated) TV sports commentator. They really feel like you’re at a football match. But I often ask myself why they feel like you’re watching a football match rather than playing a football match?

Back in the days when pixel graphics ruled the world - well my world at least - the computer football game was an entirely different beast. The power of the machines at the time imposed limits on what was possible in terms of graphics and anything else superfluous to the gameplay. Football was rendered at a much more abstract level and the rest was left wide open ready to be filled in by your imagination.

In this story it all started with Microprose Soccer - created for Microprose by a couple of Essex boys: Chris Yates and Jon Hare, who later went in to form Sensible Software. It literally flipped football games on their head - displaying the action from a top down viewpoint which allowed for easy control of both player and ball, and also let you influence the path of the ball after a kick using aftertouch. From humble beginnings come great things, as they say, and that was definitely true in this instance.

The story goes that in the middle of developing their “god simulator” Mega-lo-mania, the guys at Sensible Software started dressing up the tiny characters in football kits for fun. Reflecting on their addiction to Anco’s Kick Off 2 at the time, they realised that they had the basis for a new football game of their own: Sensible Soccer - or Sensi as it is affectionately known.

What set Sensi apart from its competitors was that you could see so much more of the pitch at once, allowing for an unparalleled level of forward planning. Control of players and ball was more accurate than ever and meant that it really felt like you were on the pitch playing as part of a team. Although the graphics may seem purely functional they possessed an ability to show remarkable likeness for the players they were representing, regardless of the fact they were only composed of hair colour, skin colour and shirt number it was completely obvious who each player was.

Subsequent revisions of the game made small, incremental improvements including the addition of red and yellow cards and an on-screen referee, as well as improved goalkeeper behaviour and other tweaks. International teams were added along with the World Cup Tournament in a version that also made it onto most consoles at the time, but it remained the same game. A year later came Sensible World of Soccer, which proved to be the ultimate version of the game. It added further refinements to the core gameplay and a comprehensive manager mode giving the game so much more depth. It also featured an amazing amount of player data - all of the players in all of the teams from all of the professional leagues in the world at that time were included - over 1,500 teams and 27,000 players in total. Add to that all national and international competitions for all club and national teams around the world and you have an most perfect representation of football.

But you know what? All that data doesn’t really matter - all you need is a couple of joysticks, a second player and a few minutes to enjoy one of the finest videogame experiences every made. In fact, in 2007 the game was included in a list of theten most important video games of all time. The fact it plays as well today as it did all those years ago is testament to it’s quality. It remains a truly beautiful game.