What was the first Akira video game?
The first Akira game is a film you read, and it punishes wrong answers with death.
Five months after the film opened, on December 24, 1988, Taito released Akira for the Famicom, in Japan only. It is not an action game. It is a graphic adventure in the Famicom tradition: stills, text, and menus, retelling the film’s story with the player in Kaneda’s place, beginning where the film’s gang begins its plot, in police custody after the crash.
Its reputation was made early and has never recovered. Famitsu’s four reviewers scored it 17 out of 40, and the game became a byword for the hostile adventure design of its era.
HOW IT PLAYS
Menus, memory, and instant consequencesChoose, then live with it
Progress means picking the right command or the right line of dialogue in each scene. Specialist accounts of the game dwell on its wrong choices: options that end the game on the spot, and sequences that demand painfully illogical selections, sometimes more than once, to move forward.
The film, held still
With no action engine to lean on, the game’s pleasures are pictorial: the film’s Neo-Tokyo redrawn at Famicom resolution, scene by scene. It plays less like an adaptation than like an illustrated retelling you can fail.
Japan only
The game was never localized. For the West, Akira would not be a game at all until a British studio tried, six years later, on a very different machine.