The Old School Otaku Lounge

Nowadays I think the popular perception is that American anime fans who were not originally gamers are in the minority -- when I first became involved as an anime-fandom-middle-schooler, the import gamers were a subset of anime fans, not everybody but noticeable.

So when did the connection start?

Did this start with AnimEigo fans? I know that JRPG designers were fans of Wizardry, at least, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some exchange going on.

In the mid 1990s I noticed a lot of the people showing up to our anime club meetings were setting up TVs and playing video games in the back of the room, and I suppose a lot of those were import Japanese games? I was not much of a video game person, and am still not much of a video game person, so I have no idea when those two fandoms merged, if they ever merged.

The extent of my interest in import games would be me finding out there was a Japanese video game based on an anime I like, and then I'd track the game down and play it, and generally the game was pretty awful.

I liked a few NES and SNES games, and the folks who said they had games from Japan that hadn't come out here did seem kind of cool, but I was never involved in the import scene myself Same goes for fighting games and rhythm games, as I could never do the complex moves. My interest in anime developed relatively independently to that, although I'm sure a background level of Mario-radiation must have had some effect.

Maybe it was a supply-line thing? I suppose if you knew someone in Japan who would send you anime in exchange for American shows, maybe they would send you Japanese games in exchange for American ones? That seems a little more expensive though, since it wouldn't just be recording things off of TV- I can't imagine there was a hot market for NES copies of The Adventures of Gilligan's Island, although I can understand how the quest to just see in person things they've heard about can convince them to do things you wouldn't expect them to do.

I think anything in the "Otaku" sphere was eventually brought over. If you look at Mail Order stores from the early 90's, a lot of them offer not just anime, but import games, garage kits, CDs, etc. The Ranma game on SNES actually getting localized could have also gotten people curious about what other anime games were out there.

Anecdotally, I also think arcade games like Street Fighter, Samurai Shodown, and Fatal Fury were popular among 90's anime fans. These were officially imported, were geared towards an older audience, and often got adapted into movies or OVAs themselves. (Thus bridging a connection between anime fandom and video games)

It was actually earlier than that.

Some people (like Wvern's Web or Kimono My House) were importing anime (untranslated, since that was all there was) in the mid to late 1980s.

Games were a natural extension, since you could get Japanese anime magazines, and could see the games. I'm sure someone asked, and they pulsed their exporter and bam - it happened.

I was buying from those sources, generally paying $100 for a VHS tape, untranslated back in the day.