Hardcore Gaming Crowdfunding Book on Obscure Games

Cataloguing "101 rare, weird and important Japanese video games."

By Chloi Rad

Hardcore Gaming 101, the website dedicated to long-forgotten retro games, cult classics, and everything weird, underrated, and obscure in the world of video games, is seeking funding for a book on "101 rare, weird and important Japanese video games."

Called Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities, the book will serve as a catalogue of rare, lost, mostly exclusive gaming gems from Japan spanning a broad range of genres, platforms, and developers and publishers both large and small.

"Japan has produced thousands of intriguing video games," states the book's official crowdfunding campaign. "For any number of reasons, not all of them were ever released outside of the country, especially in the '80s and '90s. While many of these titles have since been documented by the English-speaking video game community – and in some cases, even unofficially translated – a huge proportion of the Japanese game output is unknown outside of their native territory (and even, in some cases, within it)."

"It's interesting to trace where certain elements may have come from and to recognize the talents of the trailblazers."

Hardcore Gaming 101 founder Kurt Kalata spoke to IGN about the importance of preserving video game history and his personal goals in taking on the endeavor with his new book.

"Gaming history is important to me because it's important to analyze how everything is connected to each other," says Kalata. "It might be a cliche, but like Carl Sagan said, 'You have to know the past to understand the present.' New products are always influenced by things that came before it, so it's interesting to trace where certain elements may have come from and to recognize the talents of the trailblazers."

Kalata cites a particular example in the Mugen no Shinzou series: "The second game in the series is so similar to Dragon Quest, even though it predates it, that there are some Japanese RPG players who even call Dragon Quest a rip-off. And of course, Dragon Quest is basically the codifying game of the JRPG subgenre, so it's interesting to see games that came before it, and what inspired them."

For IGN's own take on exploring the lineage of gaming, check out an installment of our Secret Origins series below.

In addition to tracing the lineage of our favorite video games, Kalata also hopes to give indie game developers a new set of material to draw inspiration from.

"So many games in the modern game space are homogenized, but there are still indie developers with broader tastes," says Kalata. "So maybe some day someone will look at something like The Screamer or Last Armageddon and do their own modern take on it."

According to Kalata, so many games featured in his upcoming book are nearly impenetrable — "they look cool, they have great concepts, but they're limited by both hardware, and design sensibilities that hadn't fully evolved" — but perhaps resurfacing them in an easy-to-digest guide may put more eyes on the ones Kalata believes deserve more recognition.

Over the years, Hardcore Gaming 101 has produced a number of books on topics ranging from Taito arcade classics, a complete guide to the shoot 'em up genre, and a deep dive into Japanese game developers.

Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.

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