You’re walking down a tiled underground corridor, which at first looks like a passage in a typical Japanese subway station. There’s fluorescent lighting overhead, advertisements on the walls, other commuters occasionally walking by. But then things start to get strange—you see the same commuter over and over again, the posters on the walls repeat, and it seems there may be no exit at all. This is the game “Exit 8” developed as a low-budget indie by a solo Japanese creator known as KOTAKE CREATE. It became a surprise global hit in 2023, spread largely by players streaming their bewildered attempts to escape online, and has now even been adapted into a critically acclaimed feature film. The unlikely success of this scrappy indie game illustrates an interesting moment: a creative resurgence from the country that did more than any other to build video games as both an industry and an art form.
Today, video games are big business—bigger than movies and music combined, with the global market projected at $326 billion USD in 2026. And while the global gaming landscape is diverse, with major new titles from studios in the US, Europe, and China, Japan was one of the pioneering players, shaping it along the way through cutting-edge technology and innovative design. This June in Los Angeles, many of Japan’s most exciting and creative game developers and titles will appear at the city’s popular Summer Game Fest 2026, making this the perfect time to look back at the history of the medium in Japan.
Perhaps surprisingly, the roots of Japan’s gaming industry can be traced back to a playing card company. Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of hanafuda, the beautifully illustrated traditional Japanese playing cards. Other companies like Sega, Taito, and Namco all arose from the country’s postwar toy industries that set the stage for Japan’s transformation into an electronics manufacturing powerhouse in the 1970s and 80s. In the early 1970s, when Atari helped launch the arcade video game business in the United States, Japan already had a growing homegrown amusement scene: electro-mechanical games and rooftop amusement park rides that became a lucrative business in the postwar period. Experience with these mechanical amusements enabled them to innovate easily with electronic games. Taito’s “Space Invaders” arrived in 1978 and quickly became so popular in Japan that the demand for 100-yen coins to play them supposedly led to a nationwide shortage. In 1980, Namco’s “Pac-Man” (originally called “Puck-Man” in Japanese) featured colorful characters and playful sensibility, attracting a far wider range of players than the mostly young men who had dominated arcades up to that point. These games quickly spread overseas, becoming sensations in American and European arcades as well.
But most video game makers saw that the final frontier was the home—after all, not everybody wanted to trek to an arcade to play a game. In the 1980s and 90s, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony pioneered the home console systems that the world played on for three decades, and Nintendo’s portable Game Boy (1989) first introduced the idea of mobile gaming. It’s hard to imagine the video game canon without characters like Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and Sonic the Hedgehog—all of which originated in Japan.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, rising development costs and the growing dominance of Western genres like first-person shooters meant that Japanese studios were no longer the center of the industry. But more recently, there has been a renaissance of creativity in Japanese game design that has resonated worldwide.
Some of this wave has been seen in big studio releases like FromSoftware’s “Elden Ring” (which in 2022 became the fastest-selling multiplatform Japanese game in history) and Capcom’s revived “Resident Evil” and “Monster Hunter” franchises. Several visionaries have brought energy back to Japanese games and created a renaissance of sorts in the Japanese video game sphere. One of the most visible figures is director Kojima Hideo, who first made his name with the “Metal Gear Solid” series in the 1990s. His 2019 game “Death Stranding” features the voices and likenesses of Hollywood actors Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen in a cinematic world where players act as couriers traversing a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape to deliver items to isolated communities. The game, with its themes of human connection through adversity, was particularly embraced by players during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its highly anticipated sequel “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” came out in 2025 to equal acclaim.
Kojima’s moody, sweeping epics are different from KOTAKE CREATE’s claustrophobic nightmare of “Exit 8,” but both reflect an auteur-like approach (Kojima’s fans have even compared him to the David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick of gaming). Perhaps these individual creators illustrate an inherent craft sensibility that runs through Japanese game culture and continues to be supported to this day. As critic Ono Kenji has described in a recent article, so many qualities that are prized by game fans have their roots in Japan, and the influence is often hidden in plain sight. One is character-driven storytelling, which was shaped by Japan’s history of character design and the emotional intensity of manga and anime genres. Another is the tactile and spatial aspects of gameplay, even when one is navigating a virtual space on a screen; many conventions and expectations have been shaped by Japan’s console engineers and designers of handsets and consoles, which of course started in the realm of hardware before turning to software. Nintendo Game Boy is still beloved not just for its nostalgia value, but for its highly tactile engineering that makes even a tiny screen feel like an enveloping experience.
As various entertainment fields start to contend with the controversial arrival of generative AI, some game companies are adopting this tool, but there are many within the video game world who are insisting even more on the human element behind the pixels. Japan’s own Capcom recently announced they would use AI to speed up laborious tasks but emphasized that they would keep creative assets entirely human-made. In an industry that keeps transforming, it’s reassuring to see one-person labors of love like “Exit 8” succeeding and showing that Japan’s long history of craft and creativity in games is more valuable than ever. And if you’d like to get an up-close look at some of the most anticipated Japanese games without ever leaving LA, stop by Summer Game Fest this June to play, connect, and maybe find your new gaming obsession.
*Note: Japanese names in this article are written in the traditional Japanese order, with the family name first and personal name last.
