> The game in question is a PC-8800 series title called 3156 Coro Coro, which is pronounced saikoro koro koro in Japanese, and means “rolling dice.”
This is a numeric pun[0] based on the readings:
3 sa (short for "san")
1 i (short for "ichi")
5 ko (variant of "go")
6 ro (short for "roku")
The final "koro koro" is an onomatopoeia that generally represents the sound of any small thing(s) rolling, in contrast to "goro goro" which is used for big things.[1]
As Chris notes in the article, the 1980s "micom" history in Japan is largely undocumented (in Japanese or English), despite being a main part of the foundation of the Japanese gaming industry. There are countless undocumented games from the era, many of them being type-in programs that were printed in magazines. Thankfully, more and more of these magazines are being preserved online nowadays, making discoveries like this one possible.
I wonder if there are cultural differences that mean the Japanese don't have a strong sense of nostalgia and thus are not as interested in preserving history in general.
I've thought about this as well. This mindset of preserving digital media seems to have been largely driven by Western organizations/individuals. An example of this cultural difference is the number of takedown requests by artists against Western sites like Danbooru that repost their art from Pixiv. There was also a notable case of a game developer requesting that all her future games not be translated into English after seeing people repost her art without her permission.
Segawa has requested that English translations of her games (TOWER of HANOI and onward) no longer be made. Though she understands it's ultimately a small minority, the frequent reposting of her art and the like by English users upsets her whenever she sees it, impeding her ability to create and forcing the difficult decision to forbid translations.[0]
The overall feeling I get is that the community generally considers the author's will to be of highest priority, even if following it is detrimental to the long-term public cultural heritage.
Creators can and will occasionally use it as a weapon - when someone uses their art in a way they deem offensive, they may retaliate by pulling their art from the primary distribution site, and requesting anyone who has them to not re-upload them. The community will generally comply, and will berate the offensive-art-user (not the author) en masse for causing the loss to happen. The general distrust against danbooru et al I think stems from the lack of conformance to this "word of god overrules everything" mindset.
Not sure if it's related to the above, but Japanese copyright law protects moral rights (chosakusha jinkaku ken 著作者人格権) much stronger than the US does: they apply to all works, and cannot be transferred nor waived. The most you can do is sign a contract agreeing not to exercise them. There have been lawsuits in the past where selling a PlayStation memory card with a hacked save data of a game was ruled as a breach of the work's integrity. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%E3...
Reposting other people's work is extremely looked down upon in Japan. Danbooru-like sites won't survive a day if hosted in Japan. (People do secretly use them though.)
I have a suspicion that what we did to them in 1945 could certainly have had an effect on causing them to become not too interested in preserving history.
While that might have some effect, my understanding is that it predates that by hundreds of years. For example, they regularly tear down and rebuild some structures of historical significance.[1]
I suspect it's to do with copyright law. Copyright is extremely strong in Japan and there is a cultural pressure not to do the "wrong thing". Preserving old games etc is legally ambitious and this is often ignored in the west. EDIT: person below me posted the same opinion!
I used to be super into reading up about obscure PC-88 and PC-98 titles way back before high school. Here is one English website/forum centered around Japanese computing I used to browse back then, Tokugawa Corp.
I remember browsing through weird Taiwanese ROM hosters around 2009 trawling for any sort of floppy/disk image I could get my hands on and spending dozens of hours downloading weird games on cross-country dialup speeds, since you couldn't find them nearly anywhere else. It was so strange and foreign to my teenage mind, even though I couldn't understand any Japanese back then, and it was quite stimulating since most people weren't interested enough to uncover it all.
As the article mentions, reading though some of the contemporary magazines on archive.org, there's a wealth of interesting stories about that era in Japanese gaming that are largely missing from today's Internet. One example was a teenage game developer that coded his own homebrew SNES assembler in the mid-90's to sell original unlicensed games on Akiba's illicit markets (and sold tens of thousands of copies, if I recall correctly).
If you are playing it in your browser then it is being distributed, unless you have some sort of stadia, play via video type service, then, to get all sorts of pedantic "this is technically legal" the owner would have to have to make sure no more than then the number of legal copies of the game were played at once.
Personally I don't worry too much about a bit of copyright infringement, especially in cases like this where there are no plans to ever publish the title again.
Last I checked you can download permanent copies of old roms on archive.org. I don't know how that's legal, I've always assumed it was just that nobody cared to DMCA any of it. I'm fine using it, but if you're being a huge stickler for legality I don't think it's clear.
Nothing in that article suggests hosting ROMS for download is legal. Said article states the original media is required for the exemption. Hosting ROMS does not require the Downloader have the original media.
Nor does archive.org have any special "exemption".
This is a numeric pun[0] based on the readings:
The final "koro koro" is an onomatopoeia that generally represents the sound of any small thing(s) rolling, in contrast to "goro goro" which is used for big things.[1][0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wordplay#Numeric_subs...
[1] https://linguaholic.com/linguablog/japanese-onomatopoeia/