Crashing through the immense cultural barriers that separate the world’s gamers is something every developer has been trying to accomplish since Nintendo first used Donkey Kong to seduce America. But no matter how close they might get, and no matter how many games unexpectedly capture the attention on an unintended market, the complex parameters of cross-cultural appeal seem altogether too intricate to quantify.

Indeed, it ultimately seems that gamers are gamers no matter where they live, and playing trends have evolved not because of a cultural temperament (after all, there was no ancestral precedent in any country’s history for videogame preference) but simply due to good, bad, indifferent and available marketing of particular systems. People in general, it would seem, love to play computer and videogames; it’s just a matter of what they could get their thumbs on. So here we take a look at how gaming systems made their way across borders, and see how those early systems ingrained themselves into a country’s culture and shaped its gaming habits for the next three decades.

In the very beginning, Pong caused a smash sensation in America, the UK and across Europe, yet the country that would quickly take the lead in videogame design never really saw the appeal. In the late ‘70s, companies like Nintendo and Sega were experimenting with all manner of electronic games, such as submarine simulation games, lightgun clay pigeon shooting, electronic love testers (which actually worked on stray capacitance of the user’s clammy hands, rather than real love) and shooting ranges. None of these, however, could really be classed as videogames as we see them today.

This was also before the UK became an industrial dustbowl, and found itself in the perfect position (with many of the world’s leading technicians at its entertainment disposal) to get fully on board the electronic bat’n’ball bandwagon. Every company from corner store to powerful conglomerate began developing Pong derivatives to such an extent that the estimated number of individually developed systems neared the 500 mark; so prolific no one has yet managed to catalogue Britain’s impressive Pong clone history.

But the craze was short lived, and back in the Far East, the Japanese were switching onto videogames with a passion, despite its government making it incredibly difficult for importers to meet the demand. Subsequently, internal development began to spring up all across Japan, and with such a naturally dedicated workforce at its disposal, the technology progressed in leaps and bounds. By the time Space Invaders, Donkey Kong and Pacman had caused world coin shortages, videogames were fully considered the hard earned property of the Japanese, and gamers across the globe wanted to sample their wares.

This meant Japanese developers had a wealth of exportable code for most any country it chose to regionalize games for, and yet its own developers still had to cater specifically for local gamers. Once the Japanese public had embraced games it fully dedicated its time to them, naturally and very quickly becoming connoisseurs of the medium. The twitch shooters and violence packed games being developed by the US and other Western countries held little appeal to the Japanese gamer, who preferred a longer, more engrossing and realistic adventure to the hard hitting quick fix of many arcade titles.