Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 2016. viii, 259 pp. (Illustrations.) US$32.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-262-03439-5.
Mia Consalvo’s Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Video Games in Global Contexts is a welcome examination of how Japanese games reach audiences in the United States, and the choices and challenges game developers and distributors face in seeking to make that translation a successful one. The strength of the book lies in the later chapters focusing on specific strategies game studios and localization companies in Japan and North America use to navigate the challenge of shaping Japanese games for American players.
Before delving further, a warning: the title of the book is misleading. The first paragraph opens with a vignette of the author playing Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 as a child, but quickly moves on to other topics and never returns to Atari. In a footnote Consalvo also admits both the book and her experience with video games largely skips over the platformer era, when the Zelda franchise was at its height. Instead, almost all of the text is dedicated to discussing games and studio activities of much more recent vintage. Similarly, the “global contexts” promised by the subtitle turn out to be almost entirely from the United States.
While the title was most likely a marketing decision, a similar tension between the core of the text and its outward packaging surfaces here and there throughout the book. Consalvo acknowledges her original research agenda was aimed more at figuring out what is “Japanese” about Japanese video games. Thankfully, the author seems to have noticed along the way how easily that approach can slip into forms of cultural essentialism, particularly as she is reliant on English-language sources to understand the Japanese gaming industry. The finished book makes a valiant effort to ward off this danger, engaging up front with the legacy of Japonisme and techno-orientalism and seeking to recognize the varying degrees of “corporate cosmopolitanism” found within any given studio. Nonetheless, shades of this original impulse to pin down cultural difference occasionally slip through, usually in asides about what makes a particular game “distinctly Japanese” (54). The text occasionally feels like two different books stitched together: an earlier one that simply wanted to explore the many ways Japanese games have been appealing for US audiences, and a later one repackaging this initial impulse with a theoretical framework more palatable to current academic discourse on globalization and transnational media. The book has much of interest to say on both of these fronts, but the tension between the two is never quite resolved.
In building her theoretical framework, Consalvo draws extensively from John Urry’s work on media cosmopolitanism and from anthropological studies by Ian Condry and others on the transnational circulation of anime and its North American fan cultures. She rightfully notes how digital gaming has been curiously marginal in the latter discussions, despite the centrality of video games to the Japanese “media mix” and the circulation of its products abroad.
Addressing a game studies readership, the book makes a strong case for expanding the field to fully embrace the many different types of game studios and gaming experiences now on offer, a move Consalvo glosses as going “from the game industry to many game industries” (2). She attends to the diverse scales at which the video game industries now operate, from high-profile triple-A releases produced by large teams at well-known studios to small independent games originally sold or given away only at the Tokyo Comic Market. On the American side, she similarly describes a wide range of participants working to bring Japanese games to English-speaking audiences, from well-established North American companies working to translate or even produce international versions of games for Japanese studios, to a two-person localization start-up focusing on independent JRPGs, to ROM hackers putting in long hours to produce downloadable English-language versions of Japanese console games.
Along the way Consalvo highlights some noteworthy historical transformations in the culture of game localization. While the earlier community of volunteer ROM hackers has subsided, new opportunities for such “culture brokers” have emerged in an age of online indie game markets and marketing. Chapter 5, for example, tells the story of a two-person US-based localization start-up, Carpe Fulgur, which unexpectedly sold over 300,000 copies of their first localization project thanks to strategic online exposure. This more freelance approach makes for a compelling contrast with the lumbering long-term corporate strategies deployed by Square Enix in trying to sustain a global market for long-running series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, the focus of chapter 4.
Two chapters at the end of the book return to the question of why exactly certain Japanese games have found favour with international audiences. Sometimes the reasons appear simply fortuitous: the convergence of design and consumer electronics know-how with console gaming in the 1980s, for example, or how the more colourful, anime-engaged style of some Japanese games works to distinguish them from the dominant trend towards photorealism in North American studios. Sometimes the cultural appeal is more intentional, with Japanese studios hiring localization teams to reconfigure or even remake a title, or with game developers outside of Japan influenced by particular Japanese series in their work on a game’s aesthetics or characterization. In the end, the book makes a convincing case that both these complex lines of influence and the diversifying paths to participation in a cosmopolitan video game culture are what has given rise to the contemporary moment, where the pertinent question isn’t simply what country a game is from, or what language it was originally in, but what corner of an ever-expanding game universe it seeks to stake out.
Paul Roquet
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
pp. 367-369