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ATARI TO ZELDA: Japan's Videogames in Global Contexts. By Mia Consalvo. Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 2016. viii, 259 pp. (mustrations.) US$32.00, cloth. ISBN978-0-262-03439-5.
Mia Consalvo's Atari to Zelda.\ Japan's Video Games in Global Contexts is a welcome examination of how Japanese games reach audiences in the United States, and the choices and challenges game developers and distributors face in seeking to make that translation a successful one. The strength of the book lies in the later chapters focusing on specific strategies game studios and localization companies in Japan and North America use to navigate the challenge of shaping Japanese games for American players.
Before delving further, a warning: the title of the book is misleading. The first paragraph opens with a vignette of the author playing Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 as a child, but quickly moves on to other topics and never returns to Atari. In a footnote Consalvo also admits both the book and her experience with video games largely skips over the platformer era, when the Zelda franchise was at its height. Instead, almost all of the text is dedicated to discussing games and studio activities of much more recent vintage. Similarly, the "global contexts" promised by the subtitle turn out to be almost entirely from the United States.
While the title was most likely a marketing decision, a similar tension between the core of the text and its outward packaging surfaces...