Ihave been lucky enough to go to Japan three times. The last two times have been visits with my then partner while the first was a short trip to film interviews for a videogame documentary called Thumb Candy. I’ve wanged on about Thumb Candy a lot in the past so I shall try and keep this brief. Pay attention at the back, there will be questions.
Riding high from the success of the 11 O’Clock Show, I was given a vanity project, a common practice back in the early 2000s. This is a relatively cheap doc that will never get a huge audience but is a kind of thank you for making a show successful and also a little audition to see if one could pull of something a bit more serious. I chose to make a short film about gaming. I travelled the world meeting the grandfathers of the gaming world. And they really were all grandfathers. No women. I’m not saying women weren’t involved and often integral to videogames, but like most of history they’ve been airbrushed out.
Japan was wild. We only had a few days and we crammed so much in. Toru Iwatani, Shigeru Miyamoto and Tomohiro Nishikado were some of the absolute legends we met. I wish I’d allowed myself to take it all in a bit more. Instead I was mainly hungover and nowhere near as grateful as I should have been.
Jump forward over 20 years and I get to take my boys for the first time. This has been in the pipeline for a while. It was originally a Christmas present from 2021. However when I told them about it, I hadn’t done my research and didn’t know that Japan was effectively closed due to COVID. This was actually a turn up for the books because I had nowhere near enough money for the trip. I’ve spent the last 18 months selling quite a lot of stuff and saving every penny I can.
