By the time you’re hooked a couple of dozen stages in - once you have a decent grasp on the game’s basic mechanics - the heat turns up, and from then on the game is just flat-out rude. If anything, Mitsuji wanted to give young women in arcades the chance to experience something with real depth that would normally be developed for The Boys. You can probably guess which they, and everyone else that followed suit, went with. girls dichotomy to the point that even today you won’t find women characters from franchises like Toy Story on boy’s clothing, that meant they had to choose whether it was boys or girls who were going to be their moneymaker. Nintendo marketed the NES as a toy rather than as a video game console given the sour attitude retailers had towards games at the time, and since it was a toy, and toys as well as clothing made for kids are broken down into a boys vs. ” Please excuse Mitsuji’s word choice there: this was the mid-80s we’re talking about, and his point was that arcade games were often dominated by men in production, design, and for whom they were seemingly tailored toward. Its creator, the late Fukio Mitsuji, intentionally created a game that was cute with the idea being to “ make a game that girls could enjoy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on.

Bubble arcade