Hideki Kamiya’s banana yellow minivan idles quietly outside PlatinumGames’ Osaka headquarters. The air conditioning inside is a welcome escape from the swelteringly humid heat of the Kansai summer. Kamiya laughs as he zips through the narrow back streets of Umeda, explaining why this is the perfect car for him. Although apparently a point of contention with his wife, the car is also the exact right size to transport the arcade cabinets he’s has been installing in his home arcade. So why would he ever get rid of it?

That’s the thing about Hideki Kamiya. Everything seems to come back to video games. He talks and thinks about video games in a way that requires growing up with them as a sort of lifeblood. As a game director, he infuses everything he’s worked on with a playful gaming literacy, from 1998’s Resident Evil 2 to 2013’s The Wonderful 101.

Hideki Kamiya served as director on beloved games like RE2, DMC, and plenty more.

“Games don’t come out of vacuums, “ Kamiya explains. “They’ve developed over time and this game, and this game, led to this game. You can see all the games that I’ve played and that I’ve enjoyed and learned from show up in my work in different ways. That’s game culture to me.”

The Gamer

Growing up in the 1980s in rural Japan, Kamiya squandered his middle-school allowance on the few precious plays he could squeeze in at the local arcades. Often spending hours watching others play, he would strategize the best way to approach each game, maximizing the fun he could have with each coin. In ways it seems that he still looks at games through the perpetual cigarette smoke haze of those arcades.

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“ The dot graphics, the beeps, and the bloops, and the computer sounds back then really pulled me in.

During his youth in the early to mid-80s, Kamiya explains, “there were so many trend-setting definitive games that came out, like Gradius and Space Harrier. All these game creators were trying to make original, really creative games that had never existed before.”

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Kamiya continues, saying that the 80s were a special period. “I feel that I was lucky to experience that period in real-time, as a teenager, when you’re at your most receptive stage. I try to hearken back to that feeling in the games that I create. Being in that receptive stage of life, every time you go to arcades you say ‘Wow! This is new. This is amazing,’ and you can’t stop thinking it even after you go home and close your eyes. Experiencing that was really powerful for me.”

Kamiya unlocks the door to his arcade and we remove our shoes in the apartment’s traditional genkan. He flips a few switches and the room fills with the analogue hum of CRT monitors warming up. The nostalgic chimes of multiple games’ attract modes add to the song.

“ Kamiya walks over to a huge shelf of bubble wrapped arcade boards and begins rummaging around...

Several other machines are more permanent fixtures, like the tabletop installed with a 1985 Gradius ROM-repaired bubble memory board. Scanning the mess of multi-colored bubble wrap for a specific handwritten label, Kamiya recalls these favorites with child-like wonder.

“ Gradius is a game that took a lot of my concentration and passion and money away from me when I was younger.

Next to the Gradius tabletop are two Sega Blast City cabinets, one currently running Konami’s 1985 cartoon inspired vertical shooter TwinBee (also a ROM-repaired bubble memory board), and the other Sega’s candy-colored Fantasy Zone from 1986. Both are incredibly rare and displayed on worthy monitors with correct alignment. Despite how lovingly these games are presented, it’s hard to ignore the original 1986 sitdown Space Harrier cabinet on the opposite side of the room that was expensively imported from the US after a complex holdup in Japanese customs.

Space Harrier

“When Space Harrier finally came out in the arcades, I went to see it, and I had no idea just how fast things would come at you in this game. I saw someone playing it and I was like, ‘Wow. That’s impossible. I could never play this game. This has got to be like the last stage or something.’ Then I played it and I realized it was the second stage.”

He laughs. “Space Harrier was an interesting one.”

All of these games, while apparently straightforward in their execution, were designed to be incredibly difficult to master. Relying on white-knuckle reflexes and refined skill, there was glory for those who could tame them. Eventually Kamiya’s strategy of watching others to perfect his approach paid off.

Ninja Warriors

“If you think about what it was like back then, once you got good, then you had the people behind you watching you. If you could play a game and get good enough that you would get a gallery…watching you play instead of you being the one watching, it was almost a status symbol.”

“ I had a gallery behind me, and to be honest, I really wanted to watch the ending of the game. But if you could beat a game and stand up and walk away that was really cool.

Finally finding what he’s been searching for, Kamiya pulls a 1987 Ninja Warriors board from the shelf. Like Darius, this sidescrolling beat ‘em up was also built specifically for Taito’s triple monitor setup. A perfect showpiece. Carefully unwrapping it, he runs his hand over the silicon as if feeling for a pulse.

“This is something that I realized after I started buying arcade boards,” he says. “When you look at those boards, right -- I like games from 85, 86, 87 -- when you think about it, they’re almost 30 years old. When you look at these boards, they’re essentially just antiques. They’re all dusty. But if you think about that old machine, it was in an arcade for so long. All of these gamer kids were putting their money into it and have all of the games that they played on that board, right there. When you think about the weight of that history, it becomes another thing that’s fun about owning those boards and games.”

“ When you think about the weight of that history, it becomes another thing that’s fun about owning those boards and games.

Looking at the towering rack of arcade boards it’s easy to imagine that one of them saw a few plays from a teenaged Hideki Kamiya. Perhaps even a high score is still sitting on one. Somehow this cultural relic has made its way from the rural Japanese arcade of his childhood through the hands of multiple collectors and back to Kamiya himself. Maybe.

Kamiya finishes connecting the circuitry on the Ninja Warriors board to cables for all three monitors. He pulls a stool up to the detached control panel he’s cobbled together with the triple CRT setup and begins to fight his way through the first stage. Like Darius earlier, it’s incredibly impressive to see a 27 year old game designed to play out horizontally across three separate monitors. This is a unique arcade experience, completely ahead of its time, that can still not be replicated authentically on home consoles. Kamiya bemoans this fact as he flips over rival ninjas, tossing shurikens between pummeling kicks.

One of Kamiya's numerous beloved arcade boards.

As the conversation turns to console gaming, it becomes apparent for the first time that the room we’re in is completely devoid of home consoles. Although Kamiya’s home arcade is truly an arcade, gaming at home was also a tremendous part of his childhood experience. While taking a break from the arcade machines installed at the local department stores, Kamiya fell in love with Nintendo’s Famicom. Although the system was still in short supply in Japan at the time, and he’d yet to even secure one himself, he purchased a copy of Hudson’s platform puzzler Nuts and Milk. His first video game purchase opened the floodgates. If the arcades were Kamiya’s essence, early console games were what formed him.

Although particularly fond of the Famicom Disk System version of The Legend of Zelda, it was almost by accident that he stumbled on one of his favorite games, its Super Famicom followup, A Link to the Past. Initially not very interested in Link’s 16-bit outing, Kamiya first took notice when it was sold out from department stores on its launch day. Suddenly he had to have it.

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“You put Link to the Past in a Super Famicom and the jump it makes is just incredible from a hardware standpoint -- and you’re just like ‘wow.’ Then you start playing it, and the puzzle solving, the way they built the map, the item placement, and the progression as far as difficulty curve…. For somebody who wanted to be a game designer, it was amazing to think that you could have a game with such consistently high bar for game design, and then to think that there’s a team of people who can make a game that’s this good was something that shocked me and really made the game stand out.”

“ Every time time I look back at that game I think, ‘could I even today be good enough to make this game?’

Finishing the first stage of Ninja Warriors with flair, Kamiya stands up and carefully begins to disconnect the board from the tangle of wires. He rewraps it in bubble wrap and nestles it back on the shelf. Before powering down the monitors, he reconnects Darius and we watch the attract mode play out just a bit longer. And suddenly the room is silent.

We put our shoes back on and emerge, blinking, through a wall of heat and into the sunlight. Kamiya closes and locks the door to his arcade, thousands of gaming experiences sealed in time.