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Your favorite game developers didn't start out big. In fact, they may not have even been making videogames when they first opened their doors. Over the next page or two, we'll look at the origins of four industry giants, their first few actual videogames, and surprising revelations about their early years. What creative mastermind was hired purely by chance? What was the first game console sold by Nintendo? Which release was SNK's first breakout success? The answers may surprise you!
KonamiKonami quickly made big splash in the videogame industry during the '80s and onward, but back in the distant year of 1969, they were making smaller waves in the entertainment business by repairing and distributing jukeboxes. Founder Kagemasa Kozuki wisely made the transition to the arcade business after the explosive success of Taito's Space Invaders in 1978. It was an even smarter move when you consider that the Sony's Walkman cassette player was released just one year later -- people could be a lot more reluctant to drop coins into a jukebox bolted to the floor when they could just take their favorite music with them wherever they went.
Konami dipped its toe into the videogame business with a subsidiary named Leijac. (That sounds like a hero of the French Yukon, but the safer assumption is that the name is an abbreviation of "Leisure Japan Corporation.") Its debut release was Space King, a clone of Space Invaders so astonishingly similar to the original game that it serves as a reminder of just what the word "clone" means. The hardware is the same, the sound effects are the same, the gameplay is the same -- the only things even remotely different about the game are a color display and redesigned aliens. If you're wondering how Leijac was able to get away with copying Space Invaders byte for byte, it's probably because the company relied on safety in numbers. So many other Japanese developers were releasing clones of the game, Taito probably didn't know who to sue first.
After getting all that nasty piracy out of its system, Leijac went to work on its own games. Space War, released in America under the name Space Laser, is a futuristic duel against a computer opponent. The player controls a laser cannon at the bottom of the screen, while the computer mans another one at the top. Separating them is an asteroid belt filled with random space debris. The object is to sneak a laser beam through the mess in the middle and nail your adversary before he can draw a bead on you.
With its monochrome graphics and simple objective, Space War was hardly "game of the year" material, even in 1980, but its play mechanics were promising enough to be mimicked in a bonus stage in the Sega Genesis release Atomic Robo-Kid. The criss-crossing traffic in the center of the screen may have also been the inspiration for Frogger, the game that put Konami on the map after it ditched the Leijac alias.
Leijac would be given one last chance to shine before its retirement. It released Kamikaze in 1979, which was brought to America by pinball manufacturer Stern one year later and rechristened "Astro Invader." As you might guess, Kamikaze borrowed a lot of ideas from Space Invaders, but this time Leijac had the courtesy to include a few of its own concepts into the mix. Rather than relying on the familiar battle plan of "drop down, reverse direction, increase speed," the aliens in Kamikaze are dumped into a structure best described as an intergalactic vending machine. When a column is packed tight with invaders, one is dispensed from the bottom of the machine and plummets to Earth. The good news is that if it touches down, the game won't instantly come to an end, but if the little beastie dies, it explodes in a burst of electricity that will take you out with it if you're in the blast radius.
Kamikaze has the same crusty style as Space Invaders, as well as similar sound effects. However, what distinguishes the two games is a sense of urgency. Kamikaze spices up the Invaders recipe by forcing the player to juggle threats from all angles, picking off aliens as they fall while keeping an eye out for the lethal UFOs. The Japanese release is nearly unfair, but its American counterpart balances the difficulty nicely, plugging the open holes on either side of the screen and shrinking the aliens' lightning bolts to a manageable size. It's not up to snuff with what Konami would give the world years later in arcades and on the NES, but anything's a step up from plagiarizing Space Invaders.
