# Talk:Radar Scope

"Appeal to Americans?" No one liked the game; it flopped in Japan too, but the American subsidiary ordered far too many arcade machines, causing the need to generate a new game to replace this one. Krupo 01:42, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
I heard that Donkey Kong was based on a semi-developed Popeye game rather than Radar Scope, but they lost the license so Nintendo turned it into Donkey Kong.

That was Super Mario Bros, not DK. In the future, please format the page correctly when starting a new discussion thread. I'll move it for you. 24.218.147.30 (talk) 01:18, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
Huh? No, it was in fact Donkey Kong that was originally going to be a Popeye game. If I recall, King Features didn't want to give the Popeye license to Nintendo back then because Nintendo was a small company. After Nintendo had success with Donkey Kong, they did in fact get the license to make a Popeye game. (The Radar Scope thing is an entirely different matter; that was just a question of the hardware the game was going to be developed with. The original Popeye game would probably have been based on Radar Scope hardware too.) - furrykef (Talk at me) 20:26, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Is it Radarscope or Radar Scope? The sources I used for Donkey Kong (arcade game) all use Radarscope. — Amcaja 16:26, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Look at the klov page for Radar Scope [1], as you can see the marquees and title screens for the game all utilize whitespace between the words. --Larsinio 16:49, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
I can see why there might be confusion (the cabinet art could be read either way), but I do believe the title screen settles things. Thanks. — Amcaja 03:38, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
Official artwork and documentation says Radar Scope, therefore, it is Radar Scope. 24.218.147.30 (talk) 01:19, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Radar Scope/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 16:55, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I'll Take this one. Indrian (talk) 16:55, 14 January 2020 (UTC)


### General Notes
Before getting involved into the nitty gritty of the article, there are a few things that need to be addressed factually:

Radar Scope was developed by R&D 2, not R&D 1.  Masayuki Uemura was in charge of development.
The programming and circuit design for Radar Scope was contracted out to Ikegami Tsushinki, as were most Nintendo arcade games of the period.
The game was unquestionably released in 1980.  Ads for the game do not begin showing up in Game Machine until November 1980 and it features in their coverage of the Japanese coin-op trade show that fall.  The sources that refer to a 1979 release date are demonstrably wrong and should therefore be removed.
Radar Scope was never a hit anywhere.  Uemura himself called it a failure in interviews, and Akagi, the leading Japanese coin-op historian, also indicates it was not a hit in his book.  I have no idea why certain American sources thought differently, but I don't think any of them really understood the Japanese market of that period.
Listing Miyamoto as a "designer" of the game in the infobox is not accurate.  Even if he did provide some sprite art, which is in dispute, that puts him in an artist role, not a designer role. In Japan, they call artists "designers" and designers "planners," which is different from the Western terminology.
Radar Scope was not released worldwide in December 1980 as stated in the infobox.  While it was introduced in Japan at about that time, it was not available in the United States until January 1981.  It was shown at the AMOA Show in November 1980, but was not in production yet.
This article should help fill in some of the above gaps and deal with some of the inaccuracies in other sources.  Once these issues have been addressed, I will continue the review by going over the prose and whatnot. Indrian (talk) 17:35, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

As much as I greatly appreciate you taking the time to look over this page, I am also just as much confused and rather concerned. Lots of the suggestions you brought up you say are from various interviews, or books, or whatnot, but you don't provide really anything to show where you found that information (and the article, while a great read and will add into the page for sure, doesn't have some of this stuff). Where did you find out it came out in January 1981 in America? The AMOA show? Miyamoto not being a designer on the project? Some sources or at least any kind of lead would be helpful, surely. Namcokid47 (Contribs) 17:45, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
In most of the above cases, I am not looking for you to add material, but rather correct the material already in the article to reflect the sourcing already present.  For instance, the 1981 release date in the US.  Replay Magazine called it a January 1981 release in its March 1981 directory issue, but don't worry about tracking all that down.  What I would like you to do is change the "WW" in the infobox to reflect that December 1980 was a Japanese release date only.  The Akagi book gives December 1980 for both Japan and the US, but I think there is enough confusion here that we should hedge are bets.  Replay might well be wrong, as release dates were not exactly a hard-and-fast thing in the early coin-op market, but then Akagi may be wrong for the exact same reason.  Florent Gorges further confuses the issue by calling it a November 1980 release in Japan in his History of Nintendo Volume 1.  November is when ads started appearing in Game Machine, but manufacturers sometimes advertise games in industry trades in advance of their release to solicit orders.  Game Machine issues from the period in question can be found here.
The Miyamoto thing in the infobox is likewise not about adding new sources, but about correcting the article to reflect what the current sources say.  He was an artist not a game designer.  If you look at the article that "game designer" links to in the infobox, it refers to "a person who designs gameplay, conceiving and designing the rules and structure of a game."  None of our sources say Miyamoto did that on this game.
The article I linked above should cover the stuff regarding Uemura, Ikegami Tsushinki, and the lack of success of the product.  Hope that helps. Indrian (talk) 19:16, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
Okay, thank you. I’ll see what I can do. When I finish this I will give you a ping. Namcokid47 (Contribs) 22:13, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
@Namcokid47:.  Any movement on this?  Looking around some more, I am not too concerned about the December 1980 release date, so it's really just changing things to eliminate the mistaken notion that the game was ever popular in Japan.  If I don't see movement in the next week or so I will need to fail, which would be a shame, as I think the article could be whipped into GA shape fairly easily.  If there is anything I can do to help, let me know. Indrian (talk) 22:27, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Sorry for the wait. For whatever reason this got lost in the amount of work I'm doing, so I ended up just forgetting about it entirely. I'll start working on it. Namcokid47 (Contribs) 22:30, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
No worries, I am not in a hurry as long as there are signs its still being worked on. Indrian (talk) 22:46, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Okay, I corrected the misinformation present in the page, and did some minor cleanup. Are there any other glaring errors with it? Namcokid47 (Contribs) 23:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
Great!  Now that the big issues have been tackled, I will do a full review before the end of the week. Indrian (talk) 03:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
Okay, formal review time.


### Lead
"but in a third-person perspective" - Space Invaders and Galaxian are also in a third-person perspective, which merely indicates that the viewer is experiencing events outside the point-of-view of any specific participant in the scene.  I know you are trying to convey the idea that the enemies appear to be farther away and change size as they approach the player. I think the game uses a combination of forced perspective and sprite scaling to achieve this effect.
"which in turn prompted Nintendo's business conversion from arcade to console development with the Nintendo Entertainment System." - This is overstating the Parish source, which states Donkey Kong was a help, but says nothing about prompting the change.  Nintendo had already been highly successful with dedicated consoles in the 1970s and LCD handhelds in the early 1980s.  The NES was a continuation of the company's objective of following trends in electronic gaming wherever they may lead.  This statement should really be tweaked.


### Gameplay
"Each stage sets 48 Gamma Raiders in a formation which swoops down toward the player." - The formation does not swoop towards the player, individual ships break formation to swoop at the player a la Galaxian.
This section needs to be expanded for accuracy.  There are two basic threats in the game, bigger attack ships that shoot at the player and smaller ships that ram the space station.  The player does not just lose a life if the energy meter of the space station goes to zero, which happens if enough of the smaller ships crash into it, but also loses a life if he is hit by the fire of or collides with the larger ships just as in a Space Invaders or Galaxian.  Two different mechanics deadly in their own way.


### Development and Release
"century-long history of producing toys and playing cards in Japan" - While the company had been producing cards for nearly 100 years by this point, it only got into toys in about 1965.
"Space Invaders and its derivatives had never reached critical mass in America anyway" - I don't think that's quite accurate or quite what the source is saying.  No, Invader-type games did not sell as many units in the United States as in Japan, which is what the source is saying, but Space Invaders set a post-Depression sales record for any type of coin-operated amusement of 60,000 units and Galaxian moved 45,000 units, both of which were huge figures for the U.S. market.  No single video game had even moved 20,000 cabinets before Space Invaders.  The US had a more mature and diverse video arcade game developer ecosystem than Japan at the time so a single game concept could not achieve the same level of dominance, but Invader games were still an unprecedented success in the country.


### Reception and Legacy
"Pac-Mania dominated the world, and a rigid missile base shooter felt hopelessly dated" - Yes the source says this, but its easily proven inaccurate.  Centipede, Phoenix, Gorf and Galaga were all massive hits in the United States in 1981.  Just to pick a random month of the year, in June 1981 the Replay Top 20 chart show Gorf as the fifth most popular game on the market, Phoenix at 8, Galaxian at 9, Astro Blaster at 15, Space Invaders still hanging on at 17, and slots 18-20 held by Astro Fighter, Stratovox, and Moon Cresta.  Every one of those games is a "rigid missile base shooter". Just because Radarscope itself was considered bland and uninteresting for whatever reason does not mean fixed shooter concepts were being ignored in 1981.
"and the company's eventual shift from arcades to home video game consoles" - As above, I think this overstates the source.  Parish said it gave them a "lever" to enter the console industry.  That is a weaker statement than saying Donkey Kong was the reason Nintendo could enter the console market.
And that's largely it.  I think the prose is a little dramatic in places, and I will probably make a few edits on my own to tone some of that down.  Once these items are taken care of, the article should be ready for promotion. Indrian (talk) 19:13, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

A lot of the stuff that you have brought up was not done by myself but by another editor during the copyediting phase, and while I appreciate their work I don't like how a lot of it is opinionated and feels overly-biased at times (the refs don't cover a lot of this either - very few sources mention Pac-Man, for instance, even though the article mentions it many times). I don't like a lot of it, and I agree that it needs to be removed or heavily trimmed/corrected as you said. I don't even think I noticed a lot of it until I started reading the page myself in detail, and from you bringing it up. Some parts don't even feel like a Wikipedia page, and are written in the style of something I'd see in a book or places like NintendoLife. I'll get to fixing these right away. Namcokid47 (Contribs) 19:22, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
@Indrian:: I think I've fixed everything you brought up in your review. Namcokid47 (Contribs) 16:15, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
I tweaked the language a little more and toned down a couple things you missed, and I am now ready to promote.  Thanks for sticking with this one! Indrian (talk) 22:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

We have multiple people on this talk page claiming that Radar Scope was also a failure in Japan. The article now outright states that this game was a failure with no qualifications. Unsurprisingly, the same people responsible for these edits are the same people pushing this idea here on the talk page. These edits and claims have never been questioned at any point.
No source is provided for the claim, of course. Instead, names are dropped claiming to say this or that and, I guess, expecting everyone else to hunt for the statements. Meanwhile, the idea that Radar Scope had some kind of success in Japan comes from Arakawa himself, where he claims that Radar Scope was almost as popular as Pac-Man in at least Tokyo, and this quote comes from the Power-Up book.
A link is provided, but it's a very strange link that raises too many questions. It's a fan-made translation, posted on a personal blog even, of an old Nikkei article. The translation mentions the "large number of unsold cabinets", but doesn't mention anything about the situation with Nintendo of America, which was supposed to be the entire reason Donkey Kong came to be. Either the article is mistranslated, the situation with Nintendo of America is being conflated, or there's something else at play that we need considerably more information about. Never mind that this statement, at face value, clearly conflicts with Arakawa's own statement. Game Machine provides sales data for arcade games in Japan, do we have any entries for Radar Scope?
Unless someone can find real proof that something is wrong, it's clear that an explicit quote from Arakawa in a printed source is worth a lot more than the unsourced hearsay of some random Wikipedia editors. There's too much bizarre historical revisionism going on these days. We need a real solution. 2603:6081:9540:5CE:49EA:49A4:1657:73D0 (talk) 12:04, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Wow, a lot of half truths, lies, and aspersions to unpack here. Now that does not mean you are entirely wrong, but the real answer here is that history is messy. Now first for the big lie: Power Up does not quote Arakawa on the success of Radarscope in Japan. That statement is just a claim by Kohler cited to Supercade, which also does not quote anybody. The only Arakawa quote here, which is pulled from Ultimate History of Video Games, is about Radarscope being more sophisticated than Galaxian.
Now, let’s move on to the quite authoritative Nikkei series in which the paper spoke to all the key players in the creation of the Family Computer. No idea why anyone would try to smear such a well-researched piece from a reliable source, so I can only assume you are doing so because it contradicts a narrative you want to push. Such a shame when facts get in the way of a good story. No, it is not mistranslated, but nice try. And the statement about it being a failure is backed up by an actual participant in the story, the game’s creator Masayuki Uemura, unlike your fabricated Arakawa quote. So yeah, the game’s creator considered it a failure.
But here is where the story actually gets interesting: it did score high for a couple of weeks in the Game Machine popularity charts. Now these are not sales charts as you once again misstated, but rather operators sharing what games were doing well in their locations. In 1980, Radarscope hit second once and third once in the Kyoto region. In contrast, the big game of the year, Pac Man, was 1st 24 times, 2nd 14 times, and 3rd 6 times in one region.
So where does that leave us? Well, clearly it was not a complete failure on location in Japan since it had a couple of weeks of high performance. However, it was also not a great hit. That year Pac Man, Galaxian, Crazy Climber, and Moon Cresta experienced sustained success in the charts and everything else turned over in the charts pretty quickly. Also, we have to remember that manufacturer success and operator success are two different things. Just using some invented numbers by way of example, if Nintendo sold 5,000 units that did fine on location but still had another 8,000 unsold units in a warehouse, that would be a failure for Nintendo, which makes its money on cabinet sales, not coin drop. So really, these conflicting claims may not even be in conflict at all.
So I hope that clarifies things a bit. Happy to continue the conversation further, but it would be helpful if you could stick to the facts going forward. Indrian (talk) 14:49, 21 March 2025 (UTC)