SAVED GAMES
It’s late afternoon in Tokyo, and in the narrow three story home that serves as the headquarters of the Game Preservation Society, I’ve just learned about Jesus. In the west, when we talk about videogame developer Enix, we’re probably talking about Dragon Quest, which inspired an explosion of console JRPGs in the ’90s. Joseph Redon would much rather talk about a PC game like Jesus, which was made by Enix around the same time as the first Dragon Quest, back in 1987.
Like most of the thousands of games in Redon’s collection, I’ve never heard of Jesusuntil he shows it to me. The mission of the Game Preservation Society, the non-profit he co-founded, is to collect, archive, and protect Japan’s PC games, most of them made in the ’80s and ’90s before consoles took over and doomed them to obscurity. Any game I point to he can tell a story about, casually dishing out some of the history of who made it and why it’s special.
He loves every second of it. When he begins to talk about Enix, he slips into the role of
