PC-88 and PC-98 software is super fascinating. Thousands of games, many with mind-blowingly beautiful pixel art which was leaps and bounds better than their American counterparts. Displays really needed to be better in Japan because of the challenge of displaying elaborate Japanese characters.
As an aside, both were infamous for huge libraries of pornographic games (eroge). Game companies like Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom made eroge for those platforms before they found mainstream success.
Anyways, there's a ton of very cool and cutting edge gaming history, and the sad thing is how inaccessible a lot of it is since most of it never saw translations. For example, Yu-No was a groundbreaking visual novel that influenced games like Steins;Gate (both had similar themes of parallel worlds), but never got brought over because it was text heavy and (unsurprisingly) laden with smut. Many japanese games and series that we now consider classic first came about on PC-88/PC-98/MSX2 or had side games on them.
One of my favorite twitter bots is PC-98 Bot, which posts screengrabs of PC-98 games: https://twitter.com/PC98_bot
As an aside, both were infamous for huge libraries of pornographic games (eroge). Game companies like Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom made eroge for those platforms before they found mainstream success.
Anyways, there's a ton of very cool and cutting edge gaming history, and the sad thing is how inaccessible a lot of it is since most of it never saw translations. For example, Yu-No was a groundbreaking visual novel that influenced games like Steins;Gate (both had similar themes of parallel worlds), but never got brought over because it was text heavy and (unsurprisingly) laden with smut. Many japanese games and series that we now consider classic first came about on PC-88/PC-98/MSX2 or had side games on them.
One of my favorite twitter bots is PC-98 Bot, which posts screengrabs of PC-98 games: https://twitter.com/PC98_bot