Video Games

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 by Yamauchi Fusajirō as a maker of hanafuda playing cards. It moved into toys and then electronic games, and Miyamoto Shigeru's Donkey Kong (1981) introduced the character later called Mario. Super Mario Bros. (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) set standards for game design, the Game Boy (1989) made handheld gaming mass entertainment, and Pokémon (1996), developed by Game Freak, grew into one of the largest media franchises in the world.

Nintendo's strategy of new ways to play, such as the dual screens of the DS (2004), the motion controls of the Wii (2006) and the hybrid Switch (2017), succeeded by the Switch 2 in 2025, broadened the audience beyond traditional gamers. The Nintendo Museum opened in 2024 in Uji, south of Kyoto, in a former factory where hanafuda and playing cards were made.

Sony entered the market with the PlayStation in December 1994, using CDs and 3D graphics to attract older players and third-party studios. The PlayStation 2 (2000) became the best-selling home console of all time, and the series continued with further generations. Sony Interactive Entertainment moved its headquarters to California in 2016, while many of its studios remain in Japan.

Sega, known for its arcade machines, competed with Nintendo in the console wars of the late 1980s and 1990s with the Mega Drive (1988) and its fast mascot Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). After the Dreamcast (1998) Sega withdrew from console hardware in 2001 and became a software publisher; it merged with the pachinko maker Sammy in 2004.

Osaka-based Capcom created Street Fighter II (1991), which launched the fighting-game boom in arcades, Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan, 1996), which defined survival horror, and the cooperative hunting series Monster Hunter. Enix's Dragon Quest (1986) and Square's Final Fantasy (1987) shaped the Japanese role-playing game; the two companies merged as Square Enix in 2003. Konami (Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Castlevania) and Bandai Namco, formed in 2005 from the toy maker Bandai and the game maker Namco (Pac-Man, Tekken), are other major names.

Many designers became known by name, among them Miyamoto Shigeru, Kojima Hideo of Metal Gear, Sakaguchi Hironobu of Final Fantasy and Horii Yūji of Dragon Quest, as did composers such as Kondō Kōji (Mario, Zelda), Sugiyama Kōichi (Dragon Quest) and Uematsu Nobuo (Final Fantasy), whose game music now fills concert halls.

Game centres (gēsen) with crane games, rhythm games, photo booths and fighting-game cabinets are still found around stations and in districts such as Akihabara. Games cross over constantly with manga, anime, toys and music, and franchises such as Pokémon or Dragon Quest are part of shared childhood memory across generations. Since the 2010s mobile games have become the largest segment of the domestic market.

The annual Tokyo Game Show at Makuhari Messe in Chiba is one of the world's largest game fairs. Game music, pixel art and design are increasingly treated as cultural heritage, and archives and university research centres collect early games and hardware.