In June 1986, Japanese computer game magazine LOGiN launched a spin-off magazine, initially focused on Nintendo’s Famicom but soon taking in a wider range of platforms. It kept “Fami” as part of its name, though, eventually becoming known by the abbreviated name Famitsu. Today, coming up for 2,000 issues later, it is still going strong. Throughout those forty years, it has printed national sales charts, initially two-weekly and at somewhat of a delay. Those charts are available online, in English, at Game Data Library. I have been using them to add details of Japanese #1 games in my recent posts.
The first ever issue of Famitsu includes the first part of a guide to an arcade conversion which Capcom had just released on the Famicom: 魔界村 (Makaimura), or as they called it in English, Ghosts’n Goblins. Taking the Famitsu charts from a few issues later, the ones covering the weeks around that first issue’s publication, and looking at them alongside their equivalent in the UK’s Popular Computing Weekly reveals something unusual and interesting. That game was the #1 bestselling game in Japan and the UK simultaneously.
魔界村/Ghosts’n Goblins (Capcom, 1985, Arcade)
魔界村/Ghosts’n Goblins (Capcom, 1986, Famicom)
Ghosts’n Goblins (Elite, 1986, Commodore 64)
Ghosts’n Goblins (Elite, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
The way that the Famicom (or NES) became the dominant platform in the USA as well as Japan has meant that a lot of English-language discussion of games has assumed an audience who grew up playing games on it. In the UK, that applied to only a tiny fraction of players. In 1986, total UK revenues from computer games were more than six times as high as those from consoles and console games combined. Given how much higher console game prices were, the difference between numbers sold must have been many times bigger still. Part of my motivation for looking more into this history in the first place was to look at why my childhood experiences playing games were so different from what I frequently read about online.
However, there is a temptation to go too far the other way in reaction, and treat games in Britain as a totally separate scene. The reality was still one of interconnection, with some gaps, and with arcade games as a crucial international commonality. Some British arcade distributors made deals with Japanese publishers, and had their games as an important part of their offer, from the Space Invaders craze onwards.
Most Brits weren’t playing Nintendo’s own games at home, since Nintendo made them exclusively for their own consoles, but we could play Super Mario Bros. at the arcade. Demand in Europe for a home version was also demonstrated when Rainbow Arts made The Great Giana Sisters in 1987, which certainly was “we have Super Mario Bros. at home”. Other Japanese companies like Capcom did not have the same incentive to convert their arcade games only to Nintendo’s console, so we got to play more official versions of them on home computers too. Even if those were not exactly the same official home versions as were being played elsewhere.
The Great Giana Sisters (Rainbow Arts, 1987, Commodore 64)
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