Originally released in May of 1982 in North America for $199 (or the equivalent of just over $614 in 2022!), the Emerson Arcadia 2001 was manufactured by NJ-based Emerson Radio, which at one point was one of the largest manufacturers of consumer electronics (but today simply licenses out its branding for other companies to use), in an attempt to enter the competitive console gaming market that defined the second generation of video game consoles, which was ruled over by the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, Emerson joined in just a year before everything started to crash, & would discontinue the Arcadia in 1984, with the console only receiving 51 games around the world & no known sales records; I imagine they weren't good, though. That said, the console was home to then-exclusive ports of some lesser-known arcade games, like Tekhan/Tecmo & Sunsoft's Route 16, Konami's Jungler, & Hoei/Banpresto's Jump Bug. However, the Arcadia did wind up having a notable place in history for its generation, as it was cloned like crazy the world over (with the possibility of most, if not all, of them being officially licensed), with over 30 being known! In France it was both the Advision Home Arcade & Hanimex MPT-03 (yes, some countries had multiple clones), in Spain it was the Tele-Computer Cosmos, in Germany there were eight different Arcadia clones(!), & even the US had a clone in the form of the Tryom Video Game Center; nice job cutting into your own sales, Emerson. Meanwhile, Japan had three different Arcadia 2001 clones, but I want to focus on just one: The Bandai Arcadia, the only clone in the world to actually keep the "Arcadia" name.
To most anime fans, the name "Bandai" needs no introduction, as the company's entire means of existence has been to release various toys, figures, model kits, & video games based on the numerous licensed properties it has the rights to, either via licensing or simply by owning them outright; even some of those LCD games I mentioned earlier were technically by Bandai, via its subsidiary Popy. Anyway, Emerson licensed the Arcadia 2001 to Bandai for release in Japan, with this being Bandai's second attempt at releasing a video game console after previously licensing the Intellivision, which had bombed due to a high price point of 49,800 yen (just over 66,800 yen today, or ~$500!). Coming out in March of 1983 at a price point of 19,800 yen (still cheaper than the Atari 2800, later that same year), the Bandai Arcadia actually managed to come out about four months before the Famicom & SG-1000 did (both sold for ~15,000 yen), but once Nintendo's console quickly started seeing the lion's share of sales, Bandai dropped the price down to 9,800 yen to compete. However, Bandai also had what it likely felt was an ace up its sleeve: Anime properties that it had the rights to & could make games out of! Yes, out of those 51 total games released for the Arcadia 2001 & its numerous clones, four of them were not only Japan-exclusive, but were all based on popular anime series, and while that Lupin the 3rd game obviously predates them via the arcade, these four games may be the first anime video games ever released on console. So, let's take a look at these four games released only in Japan in 1983, for a console originally designed in America, based on four different anime series, and see the (possible) roots of anime video games, on console, as we know them today!
Getting any sort of actual release schedule for Arcadia games in general is nigh-impossible, even the Atari Archive can only figure out a basic month-by-month guesstimate for the first 25 games released in the US & Canada in 1982, so we're just going to do this in alphabetical order (using the official English titles for these properties). In that case, we begin with Doraemon, based on the iconic comedy manga by the late Fujiko F. Fujio (a.k.a. Hiroshi Fujimoto) & the anime franchise it spawned that's currently nearing 3,000 total episodes across three different TV series since 1973, 43 different theatrical films since 1980, & way too many other productions to count. There are also a wide range of video games based on Doraemon, the most recent being a crossover with Marvelous' Story of Seasons franchise (i.e. "The REAL Harvest Moon"), but the very first one is what we have here on the Bandai Arcadia; in comparison, the Famicom wouldn't get a Doraemon game until 1986. In terms of gameplay, Doraemon for the Arcadia is an outright clone of Route 16, or Exidy's Venture, both of which originally came out in 1981. For those unfamiliar, both of those games are about moving your character about various mazes/dungeons, which are all made up of a large overall room housing smaller individual rooms. When in the large room your character & all enemies are literally nothing but individual pixels to show scale, while they're all more detailed when in the smaller room. Your goal is to search all of the smaller rooms & grab all of the items in them, while avoiding (or killing) enemies; due to them both coming out in the same year, in different regions, the similarities are just coincidental.
However, Doraemon is this exact game format (& not in a coincidental way), with each maze being in a 3x3 format & the goal being for Doraemon to eat all of the dorayaki within all of the smaller rooms. Here your enemies are mice, which Doraemon fears despite being a robot cat (as a mouse had once eaten off his ears), but unlike in Route 16 or Venture you have no ability to actually take out your foes. Instead, there are ?s housed within certain smaller rooms, and when you walk over one you are given either points and/or a set of take-copters/hopters, the little propeller hat that allows one to fly; on rare occasion, though, a ? will give you a mouse, resulting in instant death. Pressing the action button on the controller allows Doraemon to fly & lets the player select where in the maze they want to land, making it an essential way to escape mice, and you can have up to six take-copters on hand. Beyond that there's also the Anywhere Door, of which there are usually only two in any maze & upon entering will teleport Doraemon to a random spot in the maze. Once you eat all of the dorayaki in a maze, you simply start all over again, with the goal being to get a high score before you lose all four of your lives; there doesn't seem to be any way to earn extra lives, from what I played. Admittedly, the game isn't exactly fast paced, but that doesn't make it any less tense when one or more mice enter the same room as you, though sometimes you'll die immediately upon leaving a room, as a mouse just happened to be on the outside, which can be annoying.
Overall, Doraemon on the Bandai Arcadia is very simple, and while the game is arguably a little too precise when it comes entering smaller rooms in a maze, as entrances are literally only a single pixel large (the Arcadia's resolution is just 128x208 (or 104), so individual pixels really matter here!), there's no denying that I had a lot of fun playing it. While the game defaults to just having two mice chasing you, you can have up to four, which really does make for some frantic (if slower paced) gameplay that revolves around timing the use of take-copters perfectly to escape & get far away from your chasers. While it obviously doesn't quite hold a candle to either of the games it very blatantly copies from, the iconic blue robot cat's very first video game outing is actually pretty fun, on the whole.
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| The image of Arale for the title screen? Absolutely amazing, for the hardware. And then you actually start playing the game.. |
Up next we have Dr. Slump - Arale-chan, based on the 1981-1986 anime adaptation of the 1980-1984 serialized manga debut for Akira Toriyama. Though Dragon Ball is obviously the more iconic series from Toriyama, Dr. Slump is no slouch when it comes to iconography in Japan, with 317 total episodes across two different TV series in the 80s & 90s (which act as bookends to a literal ~18.5-year run of weekly TV anime based on Akira Toriyama manga in Japan!), 10 theatrical films (+ 1 short) between 1981 & 2007, and eight different video games between 1983 & 2008; I won't even bother to count all of the cameos/appearances Arale & Co. have made in other productions, too. As for how the very first Dr. Slump video game fares, it's not good... at all. First off, the entire gameplay loop behind it is kind of bizarre & not immediately obvious. Naturally, you play as Arale Norimaki (or, at least, a red monstrosity meant to represent her), the lovable robot girl created by the mad scientific genius(?) Senbei Norimaki, a.k.a. the titular "Dr. Slump". However, upon starting a game, all you see is a crude visual of what's meant to be Penguin Village (even considering the hardware, which was slightly better than the Atari 2600, this looks terrible!), followed by a pair of "creatures" moving around. Those would be servants of King Nikochan, who initially led an alien race to Earth with hopes of planetary destruction, only to be left stranded when Arale's buddy/sibling Gatchan ate the UFO they landed on Earth with. King Nikochan's servants wander around the screen, grabbing parts of the environment & taking them to the platform at the top so that they can build a UFO, and you lose a life by allowing them to escape in their completed UFO.
How do you stop them from building the UFO? By pressing the action button next to one to make Arale open her mouth & emit a horrific sound, which is meant to be her iconic "N'cha!", which will make the servant fall over, upon which Arale can grab the object & return it to where it was stolen from. However, being a robot, Arale can only operate for so long, so every now & then a figure will appear in the bottom right of the screen emitting what can only be described as an alarm clock buzzer, before changing into a pink oil can. My best guess is that the figure is Senbei, and the more "health" Arale needs to recover, the longer she spends next to the oil can, allowing the servants to continue unabated for longer periods of time. If the UFO gets completed, Arale's last chance is to reach the top of the screen & shoot out her N'Cha Beam to strike it down, and if Arale runs out of health the servants quickly finish up the UFO & fly away. Simply put, this game is a giant mess that doesn't play well at all. Arale doesn't move all that quickly, and when combined with the fact that Arale's health drains faster than you'd expect, & Senbei only appears in one location, it means that it's often not worth going any further than the right half of the screen. Also, Arale's "N'Cha" to knock over King Nikochan's servants is absurdly erratic in whether it'll work or not, as I was literally overlapping servants numerous times when having Arale scream (which, by the way, only works if you're holding a direction when pressing the button, which isn't natural at all), only for absolutely nothing to happen. And if the servants manage to build the UFO the game might as well just take your life right then & there, as you'll often be too far away to position yourself to shoot it down, and the N'Cha Beam itself is ridiculously slow, even if you do make it in time. The end result is just a very bad game from start to finish, to say the least; there's also what looks like a watch mode where the game plays itself... but does so very badly.
In the end, the very first Dr. Slump video game is absolutely terrible, and even when I think I got a bead on how to actually play it I never really had a fun time at all; even the game's attempt to reproduce parts of the show's iconic theme song aren't good. If Doraemon is a solid copycat of another game, then Dr. Slump - Arale-chan is an "original" concept that's executed absolutely poorly. Also worth noting here is that the back of the box art for these games don't actually 100% match what you get on-screen, but while it wasn't anything egregious for Doraemon (just some different colors), it's absolutely a different matter with Dr. Slump - Arale-chan. This game's back cover shows a decent representation of what the devs likely intended, but then just look at the yellow & blue hellscape of a screenshot above, which matches the experience I had when I played this via FPGA hardware emulation on my Analogue Pocket; talk about lying to your customers. The only thing actually good about this game is the large image of Arale it shows in place of a traditional title screen, which is admittedly really impressive. Meanwhile, following this Arcadia game, Dr. Slump's future video games would mostly be for Japan's various computers during the 80s, and it wouldn't be until the 1999 adaptation of the reboot anime for PS1 that there'd be another console game!
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| So, according to that title screen, would this be "The Original G Gundam"? |
After that we have Mobile Suit Gundam, which would (possibly) also make this the very first anime video game to come out after the series it's based on had already ended. Running through most of 1979 & the very start of 1980, there's no introduction needed for "First Gundam", as it has gone on to become easily one of the most iconic franchises in the history of mech anime, if not THE most iconic. Originally an underperforming anime that couldn't even make it through its originally planned 52 episodes (negotiations allowed it to end at 43, instead of 39), the anime found a second life once Bandai got a hold of the license & released the first model kits, followed by it finding an audience via re-runs (ala Space Battleship Yamato), & then a massively successful theatrical movie trilogy retelling from 1981 to 1982. To be fair, it is a little tricky to really tell if the Bandai Arcadia game is technically the first ever Gundam video game, as Bandai did release an 8-bit micomputer in July of 1983 named the RX-78 (cute), which naturally had its own Mobile Suit Gundam video game, subtitled Luna II no Tatakai; there wouldn't be a Gundam game on Famicom until 1986, & that was actually a Zeta Gundam game! To be honest, I am going off of the assumption that Bandai had developed all four of these Arcadia games to launch with the console in Japan that March, as that would make sense.
Gundam for the Arcadia is a simple shooter split between two phases, both of which have you play as the RX-78 Gundam. Phase 1 is a Space Invaders clone (only with full freedom of movement) where you're tasked with shooting down 12 Zeon DOPPs that are above you, though only two are allowed to actually come down & shoot at you at any time. Meanwhile, there are GAWs that fly in the sky at points & ground-based Magellas, with each simply going from one side of the screen to the other, occasionally firing a shot or two; these are both mainly for bonus points. After shooting down all 12 DOPPs, the game switches from an Earth-based battlefield to one that takes place in space, where you seemingly just have to survive for a certain amount of time (or get a specific score) against a trio of Zakus, the occasionally appearing Char Aznable in his red Zaku Custom (though he doesn't move "three times faster"), and even more rarely a Musai that goes from one side of the screen to the other. After finishing Phase 2, the game returns to the Phase 1 & repeats over & over until you get a Game Over. In all honesty, there's really not much to say about this game, as it's quite simply a case of "What you see is what you get", and overall it's nothing more than decent. Shooting can be a bit stiff & finicky at points, though you do have 8-directional firing, which is actually a little remarkable for this type of game at the time; however, only one of your shots is allowed on screen at a time. Hitboxes are also a bit unfair, as there were numerous times my shot simply went through an enemy because I wasn't dead center (this was mainly for the Zakus in Phase 2), while your entire sprite is a giant hitbox. Also, dying respawns you in the same spot near the bottom center every time without any short-term invincibility, so it's entirely possible to lose multiple lives in mere seconds, and you only have five. Still, compared to the Dr. Slump game before, the Gundam game on the Arcadia is at least something you can get used to playing, & even have a little bit of basic fun with it, so I can't harp on it much; this is essentially what a Gundam game on the 2600 would have been like. Also, while the green background color for Phase 1 is kind of ugly, the blue for space in Phase 2 (combined with white pixels for stars) is actually really good, and the simple recreation of portions of "Tobe, Gundam!" is admittedly kind of endearing.
So far we're 2-1 in terms of these anime games for the Bandai Arcadia being (at the very least) decent, so let's see if we get a definitive victory overall, or a draw.
Finally, we end with Super Dimension Fortress Macross, based on the iconic mech anime by Big West, Studio Nue, Artland, & Tatsunoko Pro (based on a concept by a young Shoji Kawamori) that ran from late 1982 to mid-1983, and (in the inverse of Gundam) was so massively popular in its original airing that it was expanded from 24 episodes to 36; it was also the start of the Super Dimension Trilogy, though neither Orguss nor Southern Cross saw quite as much success. Much like Gundam, Macross has since become a notable franchise in its own right, with three different TV sequels (one every new decade), various OVA & movie sequels/spin-offs, numerous manga, & a metric ton of video games, both direct adaptations & original stories. By the time the Bandai Arcadia launched in Japan, SDF Macross was nearing the end of its originally-planned 24 episodes, & would fully end just a couple of weeks shy of the launch of the Famicom & SG-1000, so it's entirely possible that the SDF Macross game for the Arcadia very well may be the only video game in the entire franchise to actually come out while the original anime was still airing, as the next two (both of which only saw release on Japanese PCs) wouldn't come out until 1984; just as with Kinnikuman, Macross' first Famicom game wouldn't be until 1985.
Similar to the Gundam game, Macross for the Arcadia is a game of two phases. Phase 1 is another Space Invaders clone (though again with full freedom of movement), this time seeing you pilot a VF-1S Valkyrie (in Fighter mode) in space as you shoot down down Zentradi Regulds that come out of a giant Thuverl-Salan-class battleship; unlike Gundam, though, you can fight as many as four Regulds at once. After some time, the Thuverl-Salan will stop moving & start flashing colors while a siren goes off, which is the game telling the player that they can now approach the battleship & enter Phase 2. However, this is a limited time situation (roughly 5 seconds, or so), and if you miss you have to wait until its available again. Should you successfully approach, though, you're treated to a short little cutscene of your Valkyrie transforming from Fighter to GERWALK to Battroid mode, and it actually looks pretty good, for the hardware. Afterwards, you start Phase 2, which is a two-screen trek down the innards of the Thuverl-Salan in order to blow it up; you can actually prematurely leave the battleship, too, which instantly takes you back to Phase 1. You make your way down small corridors patrolled by Glaugs, which fire shots even when you're nowhere near them, but if you make it to the core it only takes one shot to set it off. However, you now have to make your way back up & escape before the ship explodes in "100 seconds" (in reality it's more like 30-45 seconds, depending on the slowdown), and Glaugs do respawn when you go back to the first screen. Should you manage to escape the Thuverl-Salan explodes, only to be replaced instantly with a new one, and you start a new loop; rinse & repeat until lose all of your lives & get a Game Over. While the Gundam game is a decent little title, Macross really outshines it in every way here. Though you have much more restrictive shooting in this game (you can only shoot up in Phase 1, & only four directions in Phase 2), the game controls much better than in Gundam, and even movement is a bit less stiff than any of the other Arcadia games; going from one corridor to another in Phase 2 isn't anywhere near as stiff as in Doraemon's zoomed out perspective, for example. Sure, there is still the occasional moment where you might shoot through a Reguld in Phase 1 instead of destroying it, while there is some notable slowdown in Phase 2 until you clear out a room, but overall there is a strong level of polish in this game that's remarkable, when compared to the other games.
Simply put, Super Dimension Fortress Macross for the Bandai Arcadia is the absolute best game of these four, and it's not even a contest. A straightforward but solid gameplay loop, relatively good controls, probably the best visuals overall, and even a decent attempt at recreating the first verse of the iconic theme song (though no equivalent to "Mah-coo-ross!! Mah-coo-ross!!", unfortunately) makes this possibly the first truly great (or, at least, really good) anime video game for consoles ever made.
Going into this, I really had no idea what to expect from these games, as the second generation of consoles really was a true wild west environment, one where anything was seemingly possible because very little was truly established & proven as reliable. Luckily, the end result here wound up being better than thought it'd be, with only one truly bad game, while two are at least fun little diversions, & the last one is actually remarkably good. While I can respect Dr. Slump - Arale-chan's game for what it tried doing in terms of gameplay, it wound up being nothing more than a botched execution surrounded by an absolutely terrible presentation; avoid it at all costs, even if you're a hardcore Dr. Slump fan. Meanwhile, both Doraemon & Mobile Suit Gundam's games are decent in their own respective rights, with the former being an amusing variant on the maze game genre, while the latter is an OK (if somewhat stiff) early shooter; that being said, though, both are arguably a little too derivative of other (better) games. Finally, Super Dimension Fortress Macross honestly shocked me at just how good it really is, even close to 40 years later, with a solid gameplay foundation, a bit of an addictive loop, & even an early example of a video game cutscene for some bonus points for presentation; if you are curious about any of these, I fully recommend this one. Unfortunately, these anime games did nothing to help make the Bandai Arcadia a sales success in Japan, with Bandai eventually just signing on to become an officially licensed third party for other companies' consoles, starting with the Nintendo Famicom (see: the Kinnikuman game I mentioned at the start). Not counting the Terebikko in 1988, which utilized VHS tapes, Bandai wouldn't give releasing its own game console another go until the Playdia in 1994, which also bombed, followed by the Bandai Apple Pippin in 1996, which bombed even more so, & it wouldn't be until the WonderSwan family of handhelds starting in 1999 that Bandai finally had a (somewhat) successful piece of gaming hardware, though after discontinuing it 2003 Bandai has since remained third-party-only.
Over time, all four of the franchises seen here would see other video game adaptations, so by this point these Bandai Arcadia games are truly nothing more than curiosities for only the most hardcore of fans, or those who still have an appreciation & love for console gaming from this far back, which is admittedly becoming a smaller & smaller group of people. However, when it comes to the history of the symbiotic relationship between anime/manga & video games, these four titles are truly the pillars that all others stand on, even to this day, and for that they should at least be respected. And, hey, at least one of them is actually really damn good, too.
Doraemon © Fujiko・Shogakukan・TV Asahi © Bandai
Dr. Slump Arale-chan © Akira Toriyama/Shueisha・Fuji TV・Toei Animation © Bandai
Mobile Suit Gundam © Sotsu・Sunrise © Bandai
Super Dimension Fortress Macross © MBS・Big West © Bandai
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