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Kodansha Halts Sales of Error-Filled Game History Books, Offers Refunds With Apology

The three-volume The History of Games book series has been pulled from shelves by its publisher, Kodansha, after those related to the events and companies mentioned in the books pointed out numerous inaccuracies.

One prominent example is how the books describe the creation of Pokémon. While The History of Games states that the idea for Pokémon came from the traditional Japanese card game “menko,” Akihito Tomisawa, a scenario writer and game designer for several of the mainline Pokémon games noted on Twitter that this was far from the truth. Instead, the idea came from the Capsule Kaiju seen in Ultraseven and wanting to be able to trade rare items with friends in Dragon Quest when they were kids. With the invention of the Game Boy's link cable, they realized they could trade monsters instead of items, and that's how Pokémon was born.

In another example, Ryoichi Hasegawa, a video game developer for Sega during the Genesis and Sega Saturn eras, weighed in on the inaccuracies he noticed. One of these is a statement in the The History of Games' second volume, "Sega completely ignored the wider market beyond the gamers that they needed to capture for the home video game console business." However, this completely disregards Sega's numerous products that were a big hit with the general public—including everything from trading card arcade games to crane games and photo booths.

Users on Twitter also noticed that the book series has some glaring omissions. When describing the history of Nintendo gaming, the books create the narrative that there were three golden ages for the company: 1) The NES, Game Boy, and Super NES; 2) The Nintendo DS and Wii; and 3) The Switch. This section doesn't mention the existence of the Game Boy Advance, which was not only a worldwide hit but the best-selling handheld console during the Nintendo 64 and GameCube era.

The History of Games was planned, composed, and dictated by Natsumi Iwasaki, the author of Japan's best-selling book of 2010, What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker's “Management”? (Moshidora) with the actual manuscript written by Toyoshi Inada. While he originally defended his work on Twitter , he has since deleted his account.

For its part, publisher Kodansha released a statement on March 17 that they were aware of the situation and looking into it. Then on April 10 Kodansha announced that numerous factual errors were found in the books and their sources could not be confirmed. As such, they stopped direct sales of the books and ordered a recall to bookstores. Kodansha also took some blame for the situation, apologizing and noting that the editorial staff failed to fact-check the book series properly. They also offer refunds to anyone wishing to return a purchased copy.

Source: Kodansha via Hachima Kikō