Japanese Digital Games in Czech Media Discourse

Japanese console games have been enjoying success on foreign markets since the 1980s, and much has been written about their reception in the United States.The process of the reception of Japanese games is much less evident in the case of Europe, which is much more fragmented and next to impossible to describe precisely in a single study.In this paper, we decided to start the research at a local level and describe the process of the reception of Japanese games in the Czech Republic.Examining texts from the three most influential Czech game magazines of the 1990s, we reconstruct the image of Japan, Japanese games, and developers in the discourse of specialized game press.In our paper, we first describe the conditions that influenced the entrance of Japanese games to the Czech market, and subsequently, we trace shifts in their perception throughout the 1990s.In the early 1990s, we discovered that Japanese games were rarely recognized as such and trace some trends of a gradual shift from othering Japanese games as weird towards accepting their differences while marking essential milestones in their reception.