About

Hi there! I’m Chris Gliddon, a Canadian who loves Japanese video games.

JGH is a hobby project I started in 2015 to document Japanese game history – from the games and related media to the development process to the companies behind them.

All views are my own, and don’t belong to any company.

Dedication

This project is dedicated to the many Japanese game developers who have inspired me over the years.

Thank you to the many talented Japanese creative and business people who shaped my childhood. Japan continues to inspire me, from its art to its music to its people.

It was games like Nobunaga’s Ambition and Inindo: Way of the Ninja that first piqued my interest in Japan and its history. (Yes, I played these when I was a 12-year old kid.)

Please forgive any inaccuracies in my research and translations. Sadly I’m not a native Japanese speaker, so I will likely make mistakes. I will make my best effort to be as accurate as possible, but many of these games are quite obscure and expensive to research.

I hope that this site can in some small way honor the many Japanese creators who have inspired me over the years.

Goals of this project

Learn about the history of video game development in Japan.
Learn Japanese.
Focus on game companies that aren’t already well-documented. That’s one reason I’m focusing on Koei Tecmo first. Koei Tecmo is a large company, but their early history is still poorly understood outside of Japan in my opinion.
Share what I learn with others.
Create a database of Japanese game history that is freely accessible to everyone. Make the history of obscure old Japanese video games more accessible.
Write a book to capture the history of Koei Tecmo. Choose a publisher who could help spread Koei’s story to a wider audience in the west.
Design a game that celebrates the history of Japanese game development. Obviously that will take a long time, so this is further down the list.

Why me

Sharing a bit about me just so you know that I’m not some random, faceless, inexperienced internet person. I mean, I am a random internet person, but I do have some random experience.

I was a manager, writer, and archivist at Disney from 2006-2015, working on the Club Penguin MMO. Did you know you could build an MMO with Flash that runs in browsers and can grow to almost 400 million players? Neither did I.
One Disney executive producer called me “The Napkin Collector” because I used to collect all the random scraps of paper and notes from the creative team. Why? See #3.
I became the Club Penuin archivist in 2007 after I shared that I wanted to write the Club Penguin book and make the Club Penguin documentary film one day.
Re: #3, I may have news about one or both of those in the next year. But I shall be confidential about said things right now because contracts.
Prior to Disney, I would slack off in my finance job by writing for music publications like Tiny Mix Tapes and Prefix Magazine. Accounting is my Kryptonite.
I am a Canadian husband and father of three.
Re: #6, I have limited time, so I’ll chip away at this project when I can.

About this site

Just a heads up: this will be slightly different than other video game history projects. Not by much, just some small subtleties:

Alongside my research and the facts I’ve gathered, I may dip my toes into personal asides.
I mention in case you prefer an “all facts, no personal stories” approach.
My promise is to keep any Personal Asides relevant, short, separate when needed, and only included within the content when it seems necessary.
In a world of AI-generated content, I’m hoping the slightly more personal approach will make this site more unique and human. Heck, maybe I’ll even make iNtEnTiOnAl mistaks just to prove that I am, in fact, human.
If you want to read AI garbage, feel free to check out CNET or any of the other big media outlets that destroyed journalism.

Thanks for visiting! Please feel free to reach out if you have any feedback or information to make the site better for everyone.