The Common Experience of "Classic Games"
—For this feature, we've gathered three figures, each born in the year 1970, to speak with us today. Thank you for coming.
Ueda: In this industry, wouldn't it be harder to find game designers who weren't born in the 1970s?
Sakurai: Mr. Ueda, you started out working at Warp, right? The founder of that company, Mr. Kenji Eno (known for the 'D' series. Passed away in 2013), was also born the same year as us. There are others too, like Mr. Tetsuya Nomura from Square Enix, so even if you're just naming creators born in the 1970s, it's kind of interesting. I think it was a period of substantial growth for gaming, so much so that you'd think everyone in that generation played games as a kid. There are a ton of series that first came out back then and are still around today, aren't there? During our boyhood years, we were caught in a whirlpool of innovative new IP that kept coming out, title after title, and I believe that greatly altered our paths in life.
Kamiya: In the games Konami was making for the NES back in those days, the cartridges came with a special chip installed onboard that would supplement the abilities of the main console. That let them do things like animate large characters, and they had excellent sound quality. Even that small bit of forward progress felt like a dream at the time.
Ueda: I was extremely charmed by the games themselves during that era, though computer technology was also making progress at the same time, so I felt a lot of surprise while also having fun.
