Japan

The emergence of Japanese popular culture has been one of the undeniable global phenomena for the past two centuries. Japan was not the first to create the first video game, that goes to “Space War”, which was created in 1962 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But since that, Japan has dived into the culture of creating video games in a very passionate manner. They have created legends, like Street Fighter, Super Mario, Sonic, Pokemon and this list can go forever. Besides simply creating games, they also created the devices for playing them; Sega Mega Drive, Game Boy and Playstation, all became legends of their time. A lot of games that were created in Japan like Street Fighter, reflect Japanese culture. Street Fighter is a good example, because the entire game is centered around martial arts, which is a big part of Japanese history and culture. Almost all of the movies that were made in Japan had martial arts elements, because audience loved it. Without Japan, we would not have video game industry, because no other country has contributed as much as Japan did. Japan has been, and continues to be one of the largest developers and creators of both of video gaming consoles and video games around the world. Japanese video games are beneficial to society and are an excellent source of employment to many in Japan.

One of the first arcade games, Space Invaders made a lot of noise in Japan. This game was released right before the first Star Wars movie came out, and it turned out that the movie helped it gain more popularity. People loved killing aliens with lasers, as a result so many people wanted to play this game, that this created a shortage. “By the end of 1978, Taito had made $600 million in Japan and installed 100,000 Space Invader Machines with some arcades dedicated solely to the game.”

The game that had a very significant influence on many modern games was the Street Fighter. It was the first game that had characters with different powers and with different ethnicity. Every character had its own unique powers, which appealed to certain people. This game is based on the idea of martial arts, which is a cultural thing in Japan. It goes far back into Japanese history, when they had samurays. Japanese people love to see people fight on the TV screens and gaming world was no acception for that. The entire game is centered around the theme of martial arts, and the winner is always the more skilled and talented fighter. Street Fighter was originally released on August 30, 1987, and since then this game was a success. Today you can find different modifications of the original Street Fighter, you can get it from the apple store, google play, internet, pc and consoles. The variety of medians on which you can access this game shows how much people still love it. There were many games that copied the idea of Street Fighter, such as Mortal Kombat, and all of them had very big success on the market.

In conclusion, Japanese popular culture had and has a very strong effect world wide especially in the gaming industry. A lot of old Japanese games are still being played worldwide, because they give gamers nostalgy. Japanese culture has a very strong connection to martial arts, and many games that are created in Japan resemble that. Companies like Sony and Nintendo, create amazing game machines, that allow us to play games like mario kart and final fantasy. PS4 and Nintendo have saturated the market, kids all around the world love it. As you can see this allows once again to push Japanese popular culture even further. I was growing up playing on GameBoys, Playstation and Nintendo Wii; which shows that my childhood was very affected by Japanese popular culture.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/12/asia/future-japan-videogame-landmarks/index.html

https://www.maxim.com/entertainment/street-fighter-ii-30th-anniversary-re-release-2017-9