Comment by somenameforme
3 months ago
It was a really interesting and weird time growing up when Japan was the king of tech. I had a friend who's dad was often over there and bringing all sorts of weird stuff back. There was this NES/Famicon game where you played with a sort of gyroscope. I have no idea how you were supposed to play the game, but found the gyroscope endlessly fascinating. Then of course there were the pirated cartridges with 100 in 1 type games. Oh then we found the box full of his dad's "special" games. Ah, good times.
Special games? I thought NES was controlled by Nintendo?
There were some licensed games in Japan that they'd never release in the West, and also a relatively large scene for unlicensed/'bootleg' games. Fun slightly related factoid - the Game Genie was an unlicensed hardware mod and they actually got sued by Nintendo, and won.
I somehow suspect in modern times they'd have lost.