Taito Paid Students 180,000 Yen to Show Games and Kept No Code

Taito paid the students when they showed up with a game. Whether the audience liked it apparently wasn’t the condition that released the money.

In John Szczepaniak’s interviews, Akira Takiguchi tells him the group had access to a computer room and could present their work for 180,000 yen a game. “We did not give them any code,” he recalls. His description makes the paid milestone unusually clear: showing the game satisfied the arrangement, even when Taito’s staff didn’t like it.

Szczepaniak’s reporting draws on interviews with the people involved; the payment account comes from Takiguchi’s recollection. “Maybe they were recruiting?” Takiguchi wonders, but that’s his speculation. A remembered payment arrangement doesn’t establish the company’s motive.

The computer room gave Takiguchi somewhere to make the first PET version of Nostromo. Its later PC-6001 incarnation reached retail. Treating the two as one release would be a little like putting a restaurant opening date on the first meal somebody cooked while testing the menu.

The deal also left him with a practical complaint. Presentations paid, but the work wasn’t moving toward something customers could buy. That limited his motivation. A room full of computers and a check could get an experiment made; getting it into somebody else’s hands required another step.

Dojin, another PET game in the friends’ circle, suffered a more permanent distribution problem. Hiroshi Suzuki showed it at a university festival and to Taito employees. The interviewees said no original materials survived. Decades later, Suzuki and Masakuni Mitsuhashi recalled its mechanics differently, and Suzuki revised his account after hearing his friend’s description.

A remake now gives that uncertainty something you can actually play. Jim Gerrie’s development notes describe a reconstruction in which enemies chase the player around an obstacle that can crush them. His son Charlie play-tested it. The moving obstacle kept killing enemies on its own, leaving the player with less to do.

Gerrie checked the old sketches and shortened the obstacle by two blocks. With more enemies surviving the crossing, the player had to lure them toward the ends where they could be crushed, and Gerrie was still deciding whether he needed to slow the game down further.

Play the video on YouTube

Gerrie links a playable copy through Game Jolt: select the green-bordered Play button, then DOJIN in the classic BASIC or Japanese collection. Movement uses WASD. The recreation gives you a way to feel the design choices while the interviews preserve the gaps in what anyone remembers.

Future reconstructions will need to keep those decisions visible. A working game can make an uncertain detail feel settled simply because somebody had to choose a value for it. The width of Gerrie’s obstacle already shows how much that choice can change the result. A surviving contract could still answer the question the recollection leaves open: what Taito expected to get from paying for the demonstrations.