I was thinking aboiut how Wizardry was the original western CRPG, but now it’s Japanese. Likewise, a few Brøderbund titles, live on after the company’s demise wholly run by the former licensees in Japan like Spelunker and Lode Runner. On the flipside, of games becoming western, we have Midway going nuts in the 80s with their own Pac Man spinoffs, the period when the Metrod franchise was handed off to Retro, and the WayForward catalog.
Anybody else have any good examples of games culturally belonging to the some place other than their point of origin?
I feel like some of Tencent’s acquisitions might fit? Mostly thinking of PUBG and how the Tencent developed mobile version has by far eclipsed the popularity of the original PC game globally. A bit more of a stretch: When Riot Games refused to make a mobile version of League of Legends after getting acquired Tencent they instead just copied Riot’s homework extremely closely and made Honor of Kings, a top down MOBA that went on to become the second highest grossing mobile game globally.
In terms of pure cultural belonging, the US kind of co-opted Japan-made Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
Oh and from somewhere between 1999 and 2004, maybe, up until as recently as 2021, Capcom USA owned the publishing rights to Street Fighter. Apparently.
i’ve seen it said a few times that contra is the mario of china and russia. i think battle city has a similar status but to a lesser extent. both thanks to their ubiquitous presence on early multicarts
the master system was famously a lot more popular in europe, australia, and especially brazil than it was in japan
according to ye olde mame history.dat, cadillacs and dinosaurs was hugely popular in india, where it was colloquially known as “mustapha’s name”, though i don’t know if that’s true
This reminds me…the MSX was popular in the Netherlands and the ZX Spectrum was somewhat popular in Eastern Europe. List of ZX Spectrum clones - Wikipedia
Can’t believe I get to be the first one to bring up Sega!
They were founded by an American dude who wanted to position arcade games at military bases in Hawaii. He eventually spread out to other bases, including Japan, the Japan arm grew, began repairing their imported stuff locally, started making their own stuff, made the SG-1000 during a low point for arcades, and ultimately the Japanese arm bought themselves from the ownership in 1984.
Sega Europe and Sega USA were opened after this, and I don’t think there was any personnel connection. So, the US origins probably don’t have much to do with the strong foreign offices that developed later. But there you go!
The dev team of that swore up and down that they were fans of the series, and I think I believed them. But they proved that they didn’t really “get” EDF. On the other hand, I think they were explicitly told to figure out a way to appeal to Americans, and…yeah: the most obvious way to do that is to shave off the rough edges that are the series’ core appeal.