Hello! Today I have an interview with the Famidaily Guy, AKA, David Mathis. Since last June, I’ve been making Famidaily a regular routine in my youtube watching habits, and with David having finished reviewing every single Famicom Cartridge game as of November 2023, I figured it would be fun to interview a youtuber who really nails the retro review aspect, and honestly provides the best context for most of these games that I’ve seen on the english speaking web; so much so, that some of his vids for the most obscure Famicom games, are the only english documentation of that title.
Now he’s moved on to the Year of FDS, covering Disk System titles, and I managed to catch up with him to ask some questions about his show, and I really hope you guys enjoy this interview, and maybe find some cool new content to watch! Here’s my personal favorite episode, down below.
Well, onto the interview!
Q1: What were your internet contributions before the famidaily project, and how long was it in the works? Would you like to introduce yourself?
A1: I’ve been lurking at the edges of nerdom online since 1989. I’ve had my share of websites and projects and experiments, very few of which got any traction or attention. The thing that’s my most lasting and well known contribution is the work on fan translations of the television show Game Center CX where thanks to being in the right place at the right time I did timing and editing on over a hundred hours of the show. For those unfamiliar with Game Center CX, it’s a Japanese television program that started in 2003 where comedian Shinya Arino is challenged each week with beating a retro game.
Game Center CX is what got me into collecting Famicom games. I decided I wanted to collect all of the games played as challenges in the show and a lot of those were only released in Japan. So on a trip there in 2012, I purchased my first Famicom and a bunch of cartridges. As I was collecting these games, however, I noticed that there weren’t any great resources for making Japanese retrogames accessible to people. Articles on particular games, people highlighting certain popular titles to import, but no comprehensive breakdown of what everything was, how to play it, and how accessible it was. So the concept of doing something about that was rattling around in my head for years before I really focused in on it.
Q2: So, explain what Famidaily is, to newcomers/unfamiliar readers? One of your inspirations for it was playing an obscure Family Fitness game and making a short video on it, so I’m curious what it was like going into a full console library based off that spark of inspiration.
A2: Famidaily is a comprehensive video based reference library for Nintendo’s Family Computer, or the Famicom. Every cartridge release is broken down on what it is, how you play it, and anything significant I could find out about it. It’s “Famidaily” because it was one episode a day, each covering one release, every day until the entire library was discussed. I posted the last episode, 1041, back in November of 2023, though thanks to some initial confusion on my part with my planning, it’s actually the 1042nd cartridge.
The Family Trainer game, Meiro Daisakusen, was my last attempt at “maybe I can just make some short videos about weird games I find interesting”. That ended when the Family Trainer pad, which was the original Japanese version of the Power Pad, broke while I was recording and then I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how it worked. Trying to understand that and fix the Family Trainer reiterated to me just how little there was bringing information on the Japanese side of retrogames to the rest of the world and so much of what was available in English was the perspective on the NES and what it did in the US.
At that point I was also heavily expanding my Famicom collection. We were in peak pandemic and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I bought big boxes Famicom games and started checking them off. Which meant another reason to make Famidaily was to justify those purchases: it’s fine to have 1042 cartridges for a system if you play them all, right?
Of course, going from “Oh, I think this weird little game that nobody talks about has some neat ideas in it” to “So here’s every game ever” is a pretty big leap. I couldn’t just throw away a video concept because I found a game boring or too overdiscussed or, in a few cases, outright offensive. Every cartridge needed its moment in the spotlight no matter how mahjong or baseball it was. And there was no time to pause or catch my breath, videos had to get done and if they didn’t then I was in trouble.
Q2B: Speaking of the homemade family trainer pad, how did you do it? Is it a one of a kind thing nobody else is able to recreate, or was it repurposed from the US powerpad in some way?
A2B: Well, it wasn’t the most complicated thing to reverse engineer. The way the Family Trainer, and Power Pad, work is there’s three lines of regular signals transmitted from the Famicom and the Famicom watches four lines from the pad for that signal. Inside the pad itself are two sheets of acrylic with foam separating them. Under the places where you step, the acrylic sheets come together and there’s electrical contacts embedded in them, so they’re switches though not ones you’d normally find. So if the Famicom sees signal 1 on return line A then it knows which pad was stepped on. There’s also a basic amplifier in there plus some protection diodes for all of the lines. Once I understood the principle, it was just putting something together out of my spare parts bin to give me push buttons instead of pads.
The Power Pad works on a similar principle but the wiring is completely different since there’s only seven lines on the controller connector instead of fifteen.
I’ve been tempted to scale it up and make an extra durable DDR stage scale pad, but that’s one of those things that would just be too bulky and have too little use. Maybe if I regularly went to retrogaming conventions it would be worth building and bringing along.
Q3: When you first started Famidaily, it appeared you weren’t fully sure if you could keep up the daily pace, hence uploading them after you started and finished quite a bunch of them. Were there any times you came close to being behind on your buffer period? Any games that eluded you to the point of a gap possibly happening? (Ala how in your Cassette vision series, one game is missing due to it not being released)
A3:I started recording for Famidaily over Thanksgiving weekend in 2020. Just dove headfirst into it. I figured if I could get enough runway by the time I started posting videos on January 1st, then I might have a chance.
I think the lowest the buffer ever got was 28 episodes. This was early on and I had to travel for work for over a week. I made nine episodes a week, usually: one every weekday and two for Saturday and Sunday. If I missed a day I knew I was losing ground and had to make it up.
There were two games that came perilously close to not having a copy in hand for recording: Abadox and Igo Meikan. Abadox is relatively common on the NES but the Famicom cartridge is one of the most sought after Natsume games in Japan and when the rare copies go up for sale they tend to move fast. Igo Meikan is the game I consider to be the rarest official Famicom cartridge release and in both of their cases I got a copy the week of recording after looking for months, or years in the case of Igo Meikan. My very last game I needed for the Famicom set was Die Hard, and that one was pretty close to missing the recording date, too, though not as tight as those two.
Q4: Around what time did you feel that the Famidaily Project was sustainable and thus, possible to do to completion? A lot of chrongaming series are very, very spread out, or often burn out once getting past the most popular games early in a console’s life.
The only other chronseries I see that seems close to being done is the Swan Song project, which almost has the BW Wonderswan games caught up. Did getting into the more niche, super text heavy games cause you to pause and have trouble discussing them?
A4: Around the time I hit episode 100 I felt like I had a rhythm down and momentum on my side, but it was at the end of the second year where it really sank in that I could pull it off. I had a complete set of Famicom games so I wasn’t going to run into any resource problems, my buffer was so deep that unless I had a fatal accident I’d be able to recover and keep going.
One of the things that put me off starting the project for so long was the fear of it stalling out. So many of these projects fall apart because it is very difficult to keep going and there’s a severe danger of scope creep or burn out. It’s one of the reasons I drew a hard line around the project right from the start: commercially released, Famicom cartridges. With that and a planned schedule, which wound up with two carts that weren’t Famicom cartridges on it and missing three things that were, I was at least able to always look ahead to the next goal.
Something people might not expect is that the hardest episodes were the ones on the popular games. I was making Famidaily because I wanted to share the weird and obscure with people, that’s what I love in video games. Shancara is a video game transparently inspired by two of the most influential board games of the 1980s, there’s something interesting to say about that because people aren’t familiar with it. Something like Super Mario Bros. 3, on the other hand, is well worn ground that anyone willing to watch someone talk about games is going to be familiar with. What am I adding to the conversation there?
When it came to the text heavy games, I don’t read Japanese fast enough to really give them their due in the time I had for recording an episode a day. So what I typically did was have a video walkthrough playing on a screen next to it and followed along. Those sometimes tripped me up because of a random factor or something non-obvious that you had to do to progress. The real problem there is that I wouldn’t want to get deep into the plot regardless. The whole reason to play one of the mystery adventure games or complex RPGs was to enjoy the story unfolding and I did want people to try things out if they saw something interesting even if it required a fan translation.
Q5: You appear to know some Japanese, as evidenced by a few RPGs you managed to play despite lack of documentation on the internet for a few. Any advice to fans who want to play imports in Japanese, or start collecting these obscurities? I personally know enough hiragana to get by and am importing a lot myself, but learning Katakana has been a weak spot for me… How did you end up learning Japanese, and did you use these skills before Famidaily kicked off, ie; to play a big Japanese game before a US release?
A5: I started learning a bit of Japanese on my own while helping with the timing and editing on Game Center CX. It helps get the lines lined up correctly if you at least understand a bit of what is being said. Then I went back to school for a while and took a few years of Japanese while I was there; I wanted to do a minor in Japanese but I couldn’t fit in one of the courses. At this point I know enough Japanese to get myself into trouble.
I wasn’t looking at playing Japanese releases early, it’s always been about playing old games! There’s so much out there that’s so influential and historically important that never left Japan. Things are getting better with fan translations these days as the hobbyists doing those seem to have an eye on historical significance and I’m glad that people will be able to check out these important works without jumping through the tough hoops.
As for advice regarding learning Japanese, getting over the kana hurdle is a big task. You need to drill your hiragana and katakana over and over again. It does help to get some primers written with beginners in mind. I have a set of Japanese graded readers that were helpful for those initial growing pains and when you can read a story, even a simple one, you’ll feel some progress and reading is perfect for building your vocabulary. For something a bit more advanced and still vital, the most accessible book on Japanese grammar that I have found is Japanese the Manga Way which is an illustrated guide to a lot of the significant applications of Japanese grammar.
Famicom games can actually be a bit harder to read than most Japanese works. They rarely use kanji which is absolutely vital to understanding written Japanese and Famicom games have many infamous typos in their text. Imagine trying to learn English from reading NES games and you can see the problem.
The real hurdle for finding games to import is finding places to import them from. My three primary sources have been j4u.co.jp which has low prices on almost every common game out there, suruga-ya.com which tends to have better stock of the more expensive games, and buyee.jp which is a remailing service that can be used with various Japanese marketplaces. As a general rule, shipping is the most expensive aspect of importing games so it helps to bulk buy; it might cost $20 to ship one game and $30 to ship ten which takes some of the sting out of the shipping.
Q6: With the Cart series done, which famicom game is still your least favorite? Any hidden gems that you never heard of before jumping into famidaily, and which of those are your favorite? Lastly, favorite non Nintendo publisher?
A6: The ones that I hate the most are the ones that were designed to rip people off. Things like the horse racing prediction cartridges where they’re preying on people’s credulity. In terms of least favorite games, Otaku no Seiza is hard to beat since even if it wasn’t an unfun game and even if its plot wasn’t horrifyingly offensive, it’s directly responsible for the end of traditional pachinko in Japan. I’m not even a fan of pachinko and I still think it made the pachinko parlors worse. The plot of the game was that in the distant future women have taken over and are oppressing men and it’s up to one nerd to deal with this by beating the women in charge until they fall in love with him.
When it came to hidden gems, any Famicom game that had a really positive reputation I usually played before I got to it in Famidaily. So for those I really wasn’t going in blind. A few that stood out that don’t get a lot of discussion, though, are Mitsume ga Tooru which was a Natsume platformer based on a Tezuka comic, Mashin Eiyuden Wataru Gaiden which is an action RPG based on the same show that Keith Courage in Alpha Zone is based on, and Gradius II which never gets the attention that the original and Salamander do but is an amazing feat on the Famicom.
My favorite non-Nintendo publisher on Famicom has to be Konami. They started out trying everything and then focused in on making amazing action games. And I can sneakily bring in Natsume to that since they were a group of developers who broke off of Konami.
Q7: When Famidaily wrapped up, you ended up going and doing the Cassette Vision and Super Cassette Vision series as a nice gap to the Year of FDS; how was it like sourcing all those super rare games, with emulation only *just* recently being possible for the former? Any plans for similar, smaller niche libraries to cover? What about summary videos, like the Atari in Japan one? I’m really curious on if you’ll end up covering certain obscure companies or whatnot.
A7: Sourcing Cassette Vision and Super Cassette Vision games was frustrating. I actually started about eighteen months before Famidaily ended and kept an eye out for every game. I wound up with doubles of many of them because I kept having to buy lots of games to get the one rare title in them. Bizarrely, the hardest game to get for the original Cassette Vision for me was Baseball of all things. Plenty of copies of the sequel were around, but not the original.
I absolutely want to do more niche libraries. The Gakken TV Boy had been on my radar for years, but Jeremy Parish got to that one before me. The Nichibutsu My Vision and the Casio PV-1000 are the last of the 1983 crop of Japanese consoles to not have a really great exploration of the games out there, so they’re ones I’m looking at. The Playdia is the last 8-bit console and has a small library, though it would be a lot of episodes about bad CD-ROM games where I have to keep making up jokes about not knowing what Dragon Ball is.
I like the summary videos for covering the topics where it’s either too broad or has too much overlap for me to do it in depth. I used that format for the Atari 2800, Atari’s very late attempt to break into the Japanese market, because it was all games that were extremely familiar to anyone who knew the Atari VCS. For my overview of video pinball, I couldn’t talk about every game but so many of them were the game, so I picked a representative batch and a few pinball developers to create a story around how pinball video games went from a way to extend Pong game mechanics to proper simulations of the machines.
The next overview video that I’m slowly acquiring the games for is trains: particularly train games beyond Densha de Go!. I love that series and a surprising number of people have tried to imitate it over the years. There’s four or five more train games on my radar to get before I start on that one, though, and they tend to not be cheap games to collect. Still, if you ever wanted to see a game series that’s all about racing trains, I’ve got something on tap. No multitrack drifting in it, unfortunately.
We’ll see if I get to the trains before I’m ready to do the video on dekotora games…
Q7B: Oh, Densha de Go! I recognize that from the recent plug and play. I was rather surprised they got a PS2 era game out on one of those plug and play, which reminds me, any thoughts on mini consoles in general? Do you think they recap the systems pretty well, or are there some with game selections that baffle you?
A7B: First, I love the concept of the mini console. I’ve got a whole pile of them, but they’re the more obscure ones like the Amiga 500 Mini. Packaging up a game collection in a cute shell for people is a pretty fun idea. I’ve been keeping my eye out for the PC-8001 Mini that Hal Laboratory made a few years back but they go for quite a bit.
The challenge for these packages is that it’s always constrained by licensing. The PC Engine/Turbografx Mini at least had Konami behind it which meant that all of their games, Hudson’s, and NEC’s were options. But for something like the Playstation Mini or the Commodore 64 Mini, it’s a lot more legwork to get those licenses and the people working on those systems are often constrained to the same games that get re-released constantly. Though sometimes someone pulls off a surprise like the Capcom all in one joystick unit that had Aliens vs. Predator on it. I love it when people can give us a good mix of beloved system defining classics and the deep cuts that fans of the system are looking for.
I have a bit of a mantra: there’s no wrong way to enjoy retrogames. Right now there’s so many options if you want to play an old game and as long as you’re having fun, whatever method you’re using is good. I like collecting the original games and playing on original hardware, that works for me. But if you just pick up a mini system that shows up on a store shelf near you, that’s a good way to play, too. So are using flash carts and ODEs. So is emulating. And getting retro collections for modern systems. And FPGA hardware. As long as you’re playing and having fun, then how you’re playing doesn’t matter.
Q8: Speaking of reading Japanese, one aspect of your videos I enjoy is that a lot of em contain a discussion on how Japan typically reacted to the games in the moment or looking back. How do you manage to do this, and any particularly interesting stories you remember? A game that’s beloved here JP folk hate, a game people liked later via remakes, etc?
A8: I go hunting for comments on message boards, below videos, on social media, anywhere and try to build a general picture of what the response was. If I find dozens of comments that say, “Ooooh, that game was too hard!” then I’ve got a pretty good idea of what people thought.
I recall finding lots of stories about people leaving their games on overnight to try to finish something and their parents turning the game off. I guess it’s a universal experience.
The thing that consistently surprised me was how tolerant Japanese fans were of bad licensed games. Just having the familiar thing on screen was often enough for them to call a game a classic no matter how badly it played. You can see this with the Shonen Jump Famicom Mini which is a collection of games that will make you miserable, but a lot of Japanese players go, “Oh, that was my favorite when I was a kid!”
Q8B: So wait, even games like Kamen Rider Club and M.U.S.C.L.E aren’t that hated over there? Are there any licensed games that do draw the level of hatred like several Western NES games did? I feel like something such as Kamen Rider Shadow Moon is pretty much impossible to defend…
A8B: It’s only the worst of the worst that really seem to get a hostile response, so that includes Kamen Rider Club. Things like the Hokuto no Ken games, or Fist of the North Star, on the other hand have plenty of people talking about how much they love them. The Doraemon games that are nearly unplayable are beloved classics for having all of the characters people know. Saint Seiya features a battle system that doesn’t work, character creation that can make the game nearly unwinnable depending on your birthday, and the action is some of the stiffest out there, but it has the story they already knew so players loved it. The focus really seems to be on how the characters are represented and it comes across for most Japanese players that if the game has the things they’re familiar with from the show, then it’s all good.
The ire really gets reserved for when there’s a big deviation. Touch, for example, which is a dramatic show about a love triangle between two brothers who also compete in sports was turned into a bizarre game where you wander a vast city fighting an army of living toys by throwing baseballs at them and buying up hardware from shops to open new paths. And some games are so bad they become indefensible like S.W.A.T., though it might have helped that S.W.A.T. wasn’t a popular property to begin with.
Q9: One of your biggest videos is a non famidaily project covering Idea Factory’s first RPG, and it’s one I shared in local Mystery Dungeon communities. What inspires you to do these off videos? Any ideas for future ones you want to share? I definitely enjoy how you focus on the obscure with that
A9: For Spectral Tower, it was actually a case where it was one of the games I considered making a video about before I did Famidaily. It’s weird, obscure, and distinctive, everything in my wheelhouse and I loved inflicting it on people.
If I do a one-off, it’s because I found something that I thought was interesting and I wanted to share. Like a Japanese book about supposedly difficult games, for example. It’s a window into another world.
Naturally I have lots of concepts percolating, though for the moment I’m mainly working to be far enough ahead with my current Famicom Disk System project that I can take a two week vacation next month. I’ve recorded a lot of footage for a video on playing Daggerfall with no patches installed. The original Daggerfall release was buggy to the point of being nearly unplayable and I want to see if I can beat it without any of the many fixes and crutches that were added later. While recording a video I came across a reference to another game being the worst reviewed game in Famitsu history and I was dying of curiosity on what that was like to play, so that video will definitely be coming on April 26. There’s a very strange Dragon Quest spin-off that I’ve been trying to repair and play and if I can get that working then there will be a video just on that. On the other hand, I just threw away a video on Bikkuri Mouse because I couldn’t find enough interesting things to say about it; that would have been slotted in right after the video on Otocky.
Q10: Lastly (not counting up followup questions), any advice for readers who want to get into famicom collecting, or doing their own docu/chron series?
A10: For collecting, get what you enjoy. That’s always the most important piece of advice for collecting: don’t do it for value or clout or any other reason other than you enjoy it.
Famicom collecting is a great entry point to collecting Japanese video games since it is so foundational and there are mountains of Famicom cartridges out there. You can get a very nice Famicom collection containing a lot of popular games for under $50 and I know this because I’ve done it a few times for people. Explore the games, find things, have fun.
As for a documentation series, first you should make a plan. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to right, but it will help you know if it’s reasonable. You’re going to have to explore and talk about a lot of things that are left in history’s bargain bin; the Famicom had fifty baseball games on it and almost all of them played the same, but I still had to make a video on each of them trying to find what made individual games stand out. If you’re going for a whole system’s library instead of just playing your favorites, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with things like that. And you need to give those games a fair shake, you can’t just go, “Here’s a mahjong game, same as the last mahjong game,” because you’re going to miss something that way. Maybe that’s what your experience will come down to with a game, but you have to at least try to find something in it.
It’s a long, tough road to document the library for a major game system. It’s also a rewarding experience when you find the cool things that are overlooked and forgotten.
Q10B: Yeah, I can vouch for that. I hate to say it but due to your show I have collected 50 Famicom games and 60 SFC games, for better or worse. It’s honestly surprising how fun collecting is, even if the US side of things has a big surge in pricing. Do you think the US retro collecting scene will die down to be like Japan? Or do you think that’s only with Atari/pre NES systems from here on out.
A10B: I sold comics in the early 90s, so I’ve seen collector mania and bubbles happen right before my eyes. I know it can all come crashing down faster than anyone realizes. Nothing is forever when it comes to collectables, and mass market durable goods produced in the thousands, sometimes millions, can’t sustain high prices.
That said, I’d never try to predict when it would happen or what the price of anything after it’s done will be. You can’t outguess irrationalism and some things will never be cheap. Maybe in ten years time the kids who grew up on the 16-bit systems will try to cash out their collections, or maybe next week so many people get priced out of the retrogame market and leave to seek other ways to play, that things just stop selling.
The important thing if you’re a collector is doing it because you enjoy it. If you’re buying things because they’ll increase in value or specifically because they’re “collectable” then you could find yourself holding a bag down the line. Fortunately, when it comes to a game in your collection, there’s always something you can do with it: play it.
And that about covers it! Hopefully that gives you a fun taste into why the Famidaily project has been a favorite of mine to watch over the past year or so, and why I felt the need to ask some questions and have a fun conversation. Lots of fun tidbits about obscure games here, and if you crave more than the select highlighted video embeds I threw in the article, there’s a big huge playlist right here to start with.
While I do tend to interview game devs a lot and have been branching out into reaching JP devs directly as a result of my goal to have my interview initiative focus on the obscure devs and giving them a voice, I do find other causes that highlight obscurities to be very enjoyable, which is why David’s content clicked with me, and why I wanted to interview him as part of this little side project I do between queue reviews.
Seriously, if any Famicom game came your way and you had no idea what the heck it was (especially if it was a Switch Online drop like Daiva), Famidaily is the best way to get info on it, and I hope he continues to do great work with his Year of FDS series and other bonus videos. Thanks again to David for answering the questions!