In October 2013, a typhoon was bearing down on Tokyo when Japanese game designer Yoshiro Kimura invited a visiting British writer into his home. They ate pizza, drank beer, and began talking about Kimura’s past. The conversation wandered through moon, Rule of Rose, Chulip, and the people and studios behind them. Kimura later remembered that his guest’s questions were unusually detailed. They were not the kind of questions designed to promote a new release. They were questions about old offices, forgotten projects, former coworkers, decisions made years earlier, and stories that might otherwise disappear.
The visitor was John Szczepaniak, a games journalist who had traveled to Japan after raising money through Kickstarter to document the people behind Japanese video games. Kimura jokingly called him the “man of typhoon,” but his account of the meeting also captured something more important. Szczepaniak seemed driven by the belief that the history he was chasing needed to be recorded while the people who had lived it were still available to tell it.
That journey eventually produced the three-volume The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, hundreds of hours of interviews and research, documentary footage, the later Japansoft: An Oral History, academic presentations, and a growing body of journalism devoted to corners of game history that rarely received sustained attention in English. His books became collections of primary testimony as much as conventional histories, preserving the recollections of programmers, artists, musicians, designers, executives, translators, and other people who helped build Japanese game culture.
For a medium whose early history was often documented through advertisements, corporate publicity, game boxes, and memories recorded decades after the fact, Szczepaniak’s contribution came from asking a simple question: what happens if someone actually goes looking for the people who were there?
From South Africa to the British Games Press
Szczepaniak was born in South Africa, is of Polish descent, and grew up in Britain. He studied Japanese, an interest that would eventually become particularly important as his attention shifted toward the history of games that had received comparatively little English-language documentation.
His professional trail through games journalism begins around 2004 and 2005. An official biography prepared for the 2024 History of Games conference dates his start to 2004, when he contributed to issue 27 of GamesTM, while later Time Extension biographies describe him as documenting video games since 2005. Rather than representing a meaningful contradiction, the two dates place his emergence in the same period, when British games journalism was experiencing a renewed interest in retro games, imports, and the people responsible for older software.
Szczepaniak went on to write for publications and websites including Retro Gamer, Hardcore Gaming 101, Official PlayStation Magazine, Game Developer, The Escapist, and others. In 2006, he became a staff writer for Retro Gamer. His later recollection of that period was not sentimental. Speaking in a retrospective for Retro Gamer issue 257, he remembered joining Imagine Publishing after the collapse of Live Publishing and described the experience as “bittersweet,” particularly after losing money when the previous publisher failed.
Those magazine years mattered for reasons beyond adding recognizable publications to a résumé. They trained Szczepaniak to work through interviews, old magazines, obscure releases, fan communities, translations, and the testimony of people who had actually made games. In 2006, for example, he interviewed members of the ROM-hacking and fan-translation community for a Retro Gamer article. Much of that material went unused at the time. Nearly two decades later, he worked with Gaming Alexandria to preserve the original discussions, turning discarded research into a historical source on an early period of fan translation culture.
That instinct, to save the material rather than merely extract enough information to finish an article, would become central to his later work.
Looking Beyond the Famous Names
English-language histories of Japanese video games have often revolved around familiar companies and personalities. Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Capcom, Konami, Shigeru Miyamoto, Yu Suzuki, Hideo Kojima, and other major figures naturally attract attention. Szczepaniak became increasingly interested in what existed beyond that familiar narrative.
He later described the problem in an academic article published in the 2015 cultural history issue of Kinephanos. Japanese games had exerted enormous international influence, yet English-language interviews with Japanese developers remained comparatively scarce. When interviews did appear, he argued, they were frequently connected to current products and passed through corporate public-relations systems. That encouraged safe questions about already familiar subjects rather than historical investigation.
Szczepaniak wanted something different. He wanted to ask about strange computer games, abandoned hardware, companies that had disappeared, employees whose names were barely known outside Japan, canceled projects, office culture, working conditions, and the chains of influence connecting one developer to another.
It was an approach that treated game history less as a parade of successful products and more as a network of people.
This also meant taking oral history seriously. Memories can be imperfect, contradictory, and shaped by the passage of time, but they can preserve information that never entered company archives in the first place. Game development was especially vulnerable to that kind of loss. Studios closed. Companies merged. Source code disappeared. Computer disks deteriorated. Employees changed careers. Design documents were discarded. The people who had made important games grew older.
Szczepaniak believed there was a limited window in which some of those stories could still be recovered.
The Kickstarter That Became a Research Expedition
In May 2013, Szczepaniak launched a Kickstarter for The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers. His original goal was £50,000. By the time the campaign closed on June 30, 1,549 backers had pledged £70,092.
The money made possible something considerably more ambitious than conducting a few interviews by email. Szczepaniak planned to travel through Japan, employ interpreters when necessary, meet developers in person, photograph material, record footage, and seek out people who had rarely or never been interviewed for English-speaking audiences.
He ultimately spent three months living in Japan in 2013 and interviewed more than eighty people, according to both his later account and the official History of Games biography.
The distinction between traveling there and simply arranging remote conversations became one of the defining features of the project.
Szczepaniak visited homes, offices, archives, restaurants, and other locations associated with developers. He interviewed people individually and in groups. Sometimes he asked them to remember colleagues who had vanished from the industry. Sometimes the discussion moved toward labor conditions or company politics. Sometimes an obscure game opened an entirely different path through the history of a studio.
Kimura’s description of the typhoon meeting provides an unusually intimate contemporary record of what this looked like from the interviewee’s side. He remembered being surprised at how deeply Szczepaniak wanted to explore his past, including both positive and negative memories. Kimura came away believing that the project represented something personally important to the interviewer, not simply another assignment for a magazine.
Asking About the Things Nobody Asked About
The interviews were unusual partly because of the questions.
Szczepaniak repeatedly asked developers about unreleased games. Canceled software can expose entire branches of development history that disappear when historians concentrate only on finished products. An abandoned project might reveal where designers were experimenting, why a company changed direction, how hardware limitations affected development, or how concepts from one failed game migrated into another.
He was similarly fascinated by physical workplaces.
For The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Szczepaniak sometimes asked interview subjects to draw maps of their former offices from memory. Desks, departments, equipment, doors, and neighboring coworkers could become clues to how games were actually made. Years later, he devoted an entire Game Developer article to explaining the reasoning behind those maps. Reconstructing a studio’s physical arrangement could help readers understand how people interacted before modern remote development and communication tools changed the nature of production.
That level of detail could appear eccentric if a reader expected a conventional collection of celebrity interviews. It made considerably more sense if the objective was preservation.
The books also went beyond the comfortable mythology surrounding beloved games. Interviews addressed exhausting schedules, corporate failures, disputes between companies, difficult personalities, financial problems, and connections between portions of the Japanese entertainment business and organized crime. Szczepaniak later explored some of those subjects in his 2016 Game Developer article “Dark Side of the Sun,” explaining that the Japan trip had shown him how much human struggle existed behind products usually remembered simply as cartridges, discs, and software.
The result was often messy, personal history. That was precisely its value.
Building The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers
The amount of material collected in Japan quickly outgrew the idea of a single manageable book.
The first volume, published in 2014, ran more than five hundred pages and included thirty-six interviewees. Its subjects stretched across companies and series associated with Konami, Enix, Falcom, Game Arts, Telenet, Love-de-Lic, WARP, Capcom, Sega, and many others. Interviewees included figures such as Yuzo Koshiro, Keiji Inafune, ZUN, Kotaro Uchikoshi, Yoshitaka Murayama, Yoshiro Kimura, and people whose names were far less familiar to Western players.
The emphasis on lesser-known developers distinguished the project almost immediately. Readers could learn about famous games, but the books continually pulled attention toward the surrounding ecosystem that allowed those games to exist.
Volume 2 followed in 2015 and pushed farther into companies such as Hudson Soft, Westone, Human Entertainment, Masaya, Falcom, and others. A contemporary Time Extension review praised the decision to conduct the interviews in person, arguing that Szczepaniak had obtained stories that probably would not have emerged through more formal or distant questioning. The review also revealed how precarious the project remained. Despite the Kickstarter’s success, producing the books was expensive, and sales of the first volume had not necessarily matched the amount of labor and money required to continue.
The third volume eventually appeared in 2018, completing a project that had consumed roughly five years. Across the trilogy, the original research spread through hundreds of thousands of words of interviews and historical investigation. The attached research supplied for this article identifies the trilogy as the centerpiece of Szczepaniak’s historical work and emphasizes an important distinction: these books are not simply secondary histories about the games industry. Much of their value comes from the primary oral testimony they created and preserved.
That distinction may ultimately be the most important part of Szczepaniak’s legacy.
Recovering a History Before It Disappeared
One of the recurring ideas in Szczepaniak’s work is historical urgency.
In his 2015 Kinephanos article, he argued that developers were aging and dying while the technology on which their work survived was deteriorating. Games themselves could be preserved, but preserving a ROM image or disk was not the same thing as preserving the circumstances surrounding its creation.
Who proposed an idea? Why was a feature removed? What other game influenced the designer? Who occupied the desk beside the programmer? Why did an employee leave one studio and establish another? Which canceled project quietly supplied ideas for a later success?
Those questions can rarely be answered by playing the finished game.
Oral history therefore allowed Szczepaniak to chase something that preservation of software alone could not provide. The interviews could reconstruct relationships between people and companies, sometimes revealing what his 2024 academic keynote described as forgotten “family lineages” in game development.
At the History of Games conference that year, Szczepaniak presented “Tracing forgotten family lineages through oral histories.” The conference placed him alongside academic researchers examining game history from different directions and described his two decades of industry documentation, Japanese research trip, books, and previous academic talks.
That appearance was not his first entry into academic discussions of game history.
In June 2014, while the original book project was still relatively young, Szczepaniak was one of four keynote speakers at Montreal’s Cultural History of Video Games symposium alongside journalist Tristan Donovan, game-studies scholar Mia Consalvo, and Cryo cofounder Philippe Ulrich. The symposium’s institutional record and program document his place on the schedule, while the resulting Kinephanos issue transformed part of his argument about preservation into a published academic contribution.
The boundary between enthusiast, journalist, archivist, and historian had become increasingly difficult to draw.
Japansoft Gives the Interviews Another Life
Completing the trilogy did not end the project.
The enormous original series was eventually re-edited into Japansoft: An Oral History, with Szczepaniak’s research shaped into a more compact hardcover presentation. Read-Only Memory describes the book as an interview-led exploration of the formative Japanese games industry, drawing voices from developers associated with Sega, Enix, Capcom, Hudson Soft, Nihon Falcom, and other companies. Alex Wiltshire edited the material, and the book turned the sprawling self-published trilogy into a work aimed at a wider audience of game-history readers and collectors.
Later editions added further interviews, while the work also reached readers through translations outside the English-speaking market. The official 2024 History of Games biography notes publication in France, Russia, and China.
The transformation into Japansoft was significant because it demonstrated that material gathered during one difficult three-month research trip could continue circulating in new forms years afterward.
The books were no longer merely the fulfillment of a Kickstarter campaign. They had become an archive from which future articles, books, discussions, and historical investigations could draw.
A Historian Who Keeps Returning to the Interview
Szczepaniak continued to publish interviews and historical research long after the original Japanese trilogy was complete.
His Game Developer archive includes work on Japanese computer history, forgotten development stories, working conditions, unreleased games, BASIC, Apple history, the PC Engine, Sonic, and other subjects. His more recent Time Extension work has similarly ranged across obscure hardware, arcade culture, individual developers, game localization, abandoned projects, and neglected pieces of industry history.
Current Time Extension biographies credit him with interviewing more than 250 people. The precise count has naturally increased over time, but the larger point is more revealing than the number. Interviews have remained the foundation of his historical method.
In 2023, The Untold History of Game Developers: Volume 5 broadened the concept beyond Japan. Rather than functioning as another installment devoted exclusively to Japanese developers, it gathered investigative journalism and interviews accumulated across years of work. Time Extension described it as a companion to the earlier trilogy and a repository for material that had sometimes remained unpublished.
The title “Volume 5” also reflected the unusual shape the project had taken, with filmed material effectively occupying another part of the wider archive.
This willingness to preserve raw or previously unused material may prove increasingly valuable as game history matures. A magazine article can disappear when a website closes. A forum can vanish. An interview recorded for one feature may contain dozens of answers that never make the final edit. Szczepaniak’s work repeatedly returns to those leftovers and asks whether they deserve to survive.
Why John Szczepaniak’s Work Matters
Video game history has often been written backward from success.
A famous game becomes a classic, so historians search for the story of how that classic was made. A company becomes dominant, so its early years suddenly appear inevitable. A designer becomes famous, and hundreds of coworkers disappear into the background.
Szczepaniak’s work frequently moves in the opposite direction.
He asks about the unsuccessful prototype. He asks about a programmer who left the industry. He asks about the company whose name disappeared after bankruptcy or acquisition. He asks someone to draw the room where a game was made. He asks about the coworker sitting at the next desk. He asks what happened to the source code. He asks what never came out.
This method can make history less tidy, but also more human.
The Japanese game industry preserved in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers is not simply the industry of Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Konami, Square, and other familiar giants. It is a web of programmers, artists, contractors, composers, independent studios, publishers, failed businesses, ambitious experiments, personal friendships, harsh workplaces, technological accidents, and ideas that migrated from one project to another.
The importance of Szczepaniak’s work therefore rests not only in the facts he uncovered. It rests in the primary sources he caused to exist.
Without the interview, there is no transcript. Without the trip, there may be no interview. Without asking an obscure developer about a forgotten project, a piece of game history may disappear with the person who remembers it.
In that sense, the most important thing Szczepaniak collected in Japan in 2013 was not information about old video games.
It was memory.
Preserving the People Behind the Games
More than a decade after that typhoon-soaked meeting with Yoshiro Kimura, the interviews continue to circulate. They appear in books, magazine features, academic discussions, podcasts, preservation projects, and new articles. Developers who once received little attention in English now have lengthy first-person testimony available to researchers and enthusiasts.
When Szczepaniak appeared on The Retro Hour in 2024 to revisit the project, the conversation returned to discoveries involving developers associated with games such as Streets of Rage 2, Illusion of Gaia, and Metal Gear Solid. The subject was nominally classic video games, but the larger story remained the same one that had taken him across Japan years earlier: history becomes much richer when somebody finds the people behind the software and allows them to speak.
For Playloreum, that makes John Szczepaniak an important figure not because he designed a famous console or programmed a landmark game, but because he helped preserve the stories of many people who did.
Game history depends upon surviving cartridges, computers, advertisements, source code, magazines, photographs, and design documents. It also depends upon something more fragile.
Someone has to remember.
And someone has to ask.
Sources & Further Reading
Szczepaniak, John. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Volume 1. SMG Szczepaniak, 2014. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Untold_History_of_Japanese_Game_Deve.html?id=hLLLoQEACAAJ
Szczepaniak, John. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Volume 1. Alternate edition. SMG Szczepaniak, 2014. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Untold_History_of_Japanese_Game_Deve.html?id=-1_GrQEACAAJ
Szczepaniak, John. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Volume 2. SMG Szczepaniak, 2015. https://books.google.com/books?id=lBGjjgEACAAJ
Szczepaniak, John. The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Volume 3. SMG Szczepaniak, 2018. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/books/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-volume-3/
Szczepaniak, John, and Alex Wiltshire. Japansoft: An Oral History. Read-Only Memory. https://readonlymemory.com/products/japansoft-an-oral-history
Szczepaniak, John, and Alex Wiltshire. Japansoft: An Oral History. Thames & Hudson. https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/japansoft-an-oral-history
Szczepaniak, John. “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers.” Kickstarter, 2013. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748556728/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers
Kicktraq. “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers by John Szczepaniak.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1748556728/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers/
MSX Resource Center. “Kickstarter Project: The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers by John Szczepaniak.” May 28, 2013. https://www.msx.org/ja/node/42580
Szczepaniak, John. “History of Japanese Computer Games.” Game Developer, March 4, 2014. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/history-of-japanese-computer-games
Szczepaniak, John. “Maps to the Stars (of Development).” Game Developer, April 14, 2016. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/maps-to-the-stars-of-development-
Szczepaniak, John. “Dark Side of the Sun.” Game Developer, September 21, 2016. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/dark-side-of-the-sun
Game Developer. “John Szczepaniak.” Author archive. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/author/john-szczepaniak
Hardcore Gaming 101. “John Szczepaniak.” Author archive. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/author/jsczepaniak/
Time Extension. “John Szczepaniak.” Author profile and archive. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.timeextension.com/authors/Sketcz
Nintendo Life. “John Szczepaniak.” Author profile. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.nintendolife.com/authors/Sketcz
Szczepaniak, John. “A Memorial for Hidenori Shibao.” Nintendo Life, April 9, 2018. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/04/feature_a_memorial_for_hidenori_shibao
The Retro Hour. “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers.” Episode 441, August 8, 2024. https://theretrohour.com/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-the-retro-hour-ep441/
Source Gaming. “SourceCast #14: Straight from the Source: John Szczepaniak.” May 26, 2016. https://sourcegaming.info/2016/05/26/sourcecast-14-straight-from-the-source-john-szczepaniak/
Tokyo Game Life. “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers with John Szczepaniak.” April 5, 2026. https://tokyogamelife.com/episode/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-with-john-szczepaniak-balloon-kid-ooo
Retro Gamer. “John Szczepaniak: Contributor Q&A.” Issue 257. https://pocketmags.com/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-257/articles/john-szczepaniak
Szczepaniak, John. “Obscurity Below the Radar.” The Escapist. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/obscurity-below-the-radar/
Szczepaniak, John. “Bankrupt British Freelancers.” The Escapist. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Bankrupt-British-Freelancers/
Hubbard, Dustin. “Fan-Translations and ROM Hacking Interviews by John Szczepaniak.” Gaming Alexandria, July 29, 2023. https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/2023/07/fan-translations-and-rom-hacking-interviews-by-john-szczepaniak/
History of Games. “Keynotes 2024: John Szczepaniak.” 2024. https://www.history-of-games.com/2024-keynotes/
History of Games. “History of Games 2024: Birmingham.” 2024. https://www.history-of-games.com/2024-programme/
Birmingham City University. “Experts Converge on BCU to Map the DNA of Video Games.” 2024. https://www.bcu.ac.uk/news-events/news/experts-converge-on-bcu-to-map-the-dna-of-video-games
Symposium Histoire du Jeu. “Cultural History of Video Games.” 2014. https://www.sahj.ca/en/2012-2013-program/2014-2/
Kimura, Yoshiro. “KickStarterMan of British with Typhoon.” Onion Games, October 29, 2013. https://oniongames.jp/diary/kickstarters-man-of-british-with-typhoon
Time Extension. “Review: The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2.” November 25, 2015. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2015/11/review_the_untold_history_of_japanese_game_developers_volume_2
Time Extension. “John Szczepaniak’s Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Is Reborn as Japansoft: An Oral History.” October 19, 2018. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2018/10/john_szczepaniaks_untold_history_of_japanese_game_developers_is_reborn_as_japansoft_an_oral_history
Time Extension. “‘Untold History of Game Developers’ Is a Treasure Trove of Retro Knowledge.” July 25, 2023. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/07/untold-history-of-game-developers-is-a-treasure-trove-of-retro-knowledge
Unseen64. “The Untold History of Japanese Video Game Developers Book.” December 20, 2014. https://www.unseen64.net/2014/12/20/untold-history-japanese-video-game-developers-book/
Unseen64. “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers DVD.” November 21, 2014. https://www.unseen64.net/2014/11/21/untold-history-japanese-game-developers-dvd/
Source Gaming. “Review: The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 1.” March 19, 2016. https://sourcegaming.info/2016/03/19/review-the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-vol-1/