Gaming Game

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Gaming Game is an American multinational video game company headquartered in, ,. Gaming Game develops and publishes games, alongside manufacturing game consoles, though they publish games on third-party consoles and even rivals.

The company was known for creating several game franchises, such as Stickventures and Dagon. Gaming Game Japan was also known for developing the first third-party Famicom title Arcade Collection, released shortly after the system's launch in Japan, as well as developing Super Neko-chan Paradise, released by C.O.V.I.D. for the Super Famicom in 1994.

Its international branches include Gaming Game Europe, headquartered in Yorkshire, UK, Gaming Game Australia, located in Canberra, Gaming Game International, having headquarters in El Kadsre and Eruowood, and the now-rebranded Gaming Game Japan, founded in Tokyo. Gaming Game also had subsidiaries, such as Microsoft Game Studios New York (formerly Nestar) and Fujiotto (a joint venture between Gaming Game Japan and Fujiko Pro).

On September 1, 2001, Gaming Game Japan was bought by Japanese imageboard site Futaba Channel for 1 million yen. The buyout was also pitched to Gaming Game's international headquarters, but was rejected due to the obscurity of Futaba Channel overseas. As a result, Gaming Game became remembered by many Japanese gamers after the buyout, with some even considering the pre-2001 company as "the Gēgē era" (ゲーゲー時代, Gēgē jidai) and the post-2001 company as "the 2chan era" (時代, Tsūchan jidai).

History
In 1977, Atari had just released its VCS game system. John King saw the news about the new console and wanted to found a game company. King was looking for some names for his company, before settling on Gaming Game, as he thought it sounded "too interesting for a game company". The company was founded on September 7 and the first game developed by them was Looney Tunes, released under license from Warner Bros. and originally published by Atari themselves, before Gaming Game decided to publish later copies of the game. John King tried to push the Atari VCS to its limits by using sprites with more than a single color per line. He was satisfied with how the game turned out, with some Atari employees even calling them "an Atari game wizard". It also helped sell the Atari VCS at the time, with the game selling millions of units.

In 1981, Gaming Game USA started a campaign to find someone in the UK with a unique name. The person who won was Alex Colour, and on October 9, founded the European division in Yorkshire, whose region name was the origin of Colour's favorite dog breed, the Yorkshire Terrier.

On July 15, 1983, the Famicom launched in Japan, which gave attention to programmer Yoshitake Yumezumi, who loved programming on his computers. Back then, Yumezumi was only 23 years old, and since the Family BASIC didn't release until 1984, he had to manually look for addresses based on its functions, until Nintendo provided them the addresses and its functions on a piece of paper, and gave them the ability to publish its own games, which led to the creation of the first third-party publisher in Nintendo history, Gaming Game Japan, founded on November 1. Its first game is Arcade Collection, which was later released outside of Japan as Classic Games shortly after the launch of the NES overseas. Following this, the Gaming Game brand became popular worldwide.

In 1990, Gaming Game Europe ran a campaign for an Australian division, again looking for people with unique names. The winner is Flavour Favourite, who founded the division on August 1, publishing games themselves, rather than being published by other companies, such as Mattel.

On August 30, 2001, the Futaba Channel website launched, and two days later, bought Gaming Game Japan in order to announce new games through the image board, as well as publishing games based on 2chan's popular memes. The company also stripped out every reference to Gaming Game. The buyout was initially planned for the company's international divisions as well, but were rejected by Gaming Game staff due to 2chan being an obscure imageboard outside of Japan at the time.

On August 6, 2003, the first image of ME-tan was posted onto 2chan. The original creator of the image later went to Futaba Games's headquarters to implement her onto the company's games, all of which are originally cancelled. Yumezumi was also interested in giving ME-tan the first-person pronoun "mī" (ミー), referencing Windows Me. On August 12, 2003, ME-tan no Bōken was released for the Super Famicom, making it the first OS-tan video game to be ever released, as a way to rival games made for the then-dominating Game Boy Advance. On August 30, a GBA port was made, which was eventually localized as ME-tan's World. Unusually, this game was instead published by Microsoft New York (a Gaming Game subsidiary) outside of Japan, due to the Windows operating system being trademarked by Microsoft's original offices in Redmond, Washington. Their last Super Famicom game, Futaba Racers, was released on both the GBA and Super Famicom on September 2, 2003, making it the last official Super Famicom game to be released, before that system got discontinued on September 25, alongside the original Famicom. On June 15, 2022, Gaming Game announced that their logo would be changed. One new employee stated "the logo looked like a fetus would draw on a piece of paper. It kinda sucks how this logo was kept in". Unlike most logo changes, this one received positive reviews, mainly due to a lack of simplification, as well as the original logo being criticized by fans.

Consoles
Gaming Game was also known for making game consoles. According to a Gaming Game employee, the names were generic because "they ran out of ideas". That said, Gaming Game still makes games for third-party consoles, and their consoles aren't meant to be rivals, having unique games, though some of them are ported onto other systems.

Games
One important part of Gaming Game are its games. These games were mostly critical acclaims, due to them looking "impressive" at the time of their release.

Game series
Gaming Game is known for their game series, spanning sequels and spin-offs. Gaming Game and its subsidiaries also owns some game series from third-parties in order to localize them.

Trivia

 * Most of their games in Japan had been imported into Hong Kong, though with no changes, being manufactured by Mani (formerly known as Simon and Toys).
 * Some of their classic games stopped having GG Flashback versions due to the license being expired. For example, Looney Tunes 's last GG Flashback version was on the SNES, before Sunsoft picked up the license.
 * This is one of the third-party companies to use the black box design in some of their NES games.
 * Some of their Super Famicom games in the 2000s contain strong anti-piracy measures made not only to combat bootleg cartridge production, but also to avoid emulation. For example, ME-tan no Minigame-shū checks for the ROM size, SRAM size, region, cartridge type, checksum, and some bits most emulators at the time wouldn't set. If the check is successful, the game will boot up, but if the check fails, the game hangs for a second until an error appears, stating that is a serious crime to copy video game according to copyright law. This effect couldn't be done on modern emulators without hacking, but appears on bootleg cartridges (e.g. a reproduction cartridge), as well as faulty emulators and bad ROM dumps.
 * In November 2020, source codes of their titles are leaked and made available through sites such as 4chan and The Pirate Bay. It was also made available on GitHub, but was quickly taken down due to a DMCA. The source codes also contain prototypes and tech demos, and all of them are available from every division of the company (including its international counterparts). Gaming Game is an example of a company still keeping their old source codes (likely for making revisions of games), with another example being Nintendo, who also had their source codes leaked.
 * Starting with Stickventures, Gaming Game offered phone numbers for game tips. In 2000, these phone numbers were discontinued and in 2010, they were reassigned to a sex hotline (as it was the case with Who Framed Roger Rabbit). In 2017, to celebrate the company's 40th anniversary, they did not only release New Stickventures, but also recovered those phone numbers, alongside a new one for that game. They kept assigning new phone numbers ever since.
 * Their last Greek-language game was Pocket Stickventures 2. After that, Gaming Game refused to localize future games into the Greek language due to fears of a ban of electronic games in Greece that would have took effect in 2002. Despite the ban not taking effect, Gaming Game still refused so.
 * The Microsoft that published Futaba's OS-Tan games wasn't actually the real Microsoft, but rather a subsidiary of Gaming Game that had been bought by Microsoft (more specifically, Nestar), using their logo, despite being a different company from the other Microsoft. This subsidiary is commonly referred to as Microsoft New York. It was later renamed to Microsoft Studios in order to avoid confusion, before becoming a division of Microsoft Game Studios.
 * In Japan, the company's name is contacted in three ways, with the pre-2001 company being abbreviated as "Gēgē" (ゲーゲー), whereas the post-2001 company is abbreviated as either "Futagē" (ふたゲー) or just "Futaba" (ふたば).