(Rebirth '86: I Opened the Gates to a New World Through Gaming)
"Mr. Cole, let me introduce you to Mr. Takashi Takeuchi—one of our lead gameplay programmers."
The man who entered was short, wearing the same kind of white dress shirt as Mr. Nakamura, complete with a bow tie. His eyes narrowed as he gave Ethan a scrutinizing look.
"You're the one claiming to have made a true two-player co-op game? How exactly did you pull that off?" he asked bluntly, with no hint of politeness.
"That's classified," Ethan replied calmly. "I'm not obligated to explain the technical details."
Takeuchi frowned, clearly not pleased with Ethan's guarded tone. He looked ready to argue, but Nakamura cut in.
"All right, enough talking. Let's see the game."
"Fine," Takeuchi muttered, straightening up immediately.
Workplace hierarchy in Japan during the 1980s was rigid—he could disrespect Ethan all he wanted, but he wouldn't dare challenge someone of Nakamura's rank.
Nakamura handed over the Contra floppy disk, and Takeuchi accepted it with both hands. He loaded it into a bulky, exposed dev unit stationed at the center of the room.
The machine was a Frankenstein of wires and exposed circuits—an early prototype used for internal testing. Not designed for public eyes.
To Ethan, though, it just looked like a relic—bloated, slow, and woefully outdated.
Takeuchi, hoping to impress or perhaps intimidate Ethan, glanced over, expecting a reaction. This was cutting-edge stuff for Japanese developers at the time—very few outsiders had ever seen hardware like this.
But Ethan remained unimpressed.
Cute, he thought. Looks like something you'd find at a tech museum in 2040.
Takeuchi was convinced Ethan was bluffing. Japan had one of the most advanced electronics industries in the world, and he doubted a foreigner—especially one from a place with no known development scene—had ever touched this kind of tech.
But then the machine whirred to life.
The screen lit up.Contra's title flashed.8-bit synth music kicked in with a rising scale, ending in a simulated explosion.
Takeuchi blinked.
That's... actually not bad.
It wasn't easy to get harmonics like that out of an 8-bit sound chip. His skepticism wavered for just a moment.
Ethan said nothing, simply picked up the controller and hit start. He selected the two-player mode, then handed a second controller to Takeuchi.
"Care to join me?"
Takeuchi hesitated. Ethan looked like he was barely in his twenties—how much development experience could he really have?
Sure, he'd brought a working prototype. But was it legit? Could it really be true two-player?
Most so-called "co-op" games back then just let players take turns, like in Super Mario Bros. They weren't really simultaneous. Takeuchi fully expected this one to be the same—cheap tricks, smoke and mirrors.
And besides, this guy was a nobody.
Who even makes a good game alone? Game design is a collaborative art—it takes teams of specialists. Programmers, artists, composers, testers. Not some arrogant amateur in a hoodie.
Takeuchi was mentally preparing to expose Ethan as a fraud.
But then the game started.
No cutscenes. No drawn-out intros. Just two soldiers dropping straight into a jungle warzone on the left side of the screen.
"Here we go," Ethan said. "WASD-style controls—Up, Down, Left, Right. 'A' to shoot, 'B' to jump."
Takeuchi moved his character. It responded instantly.
Ethan's soldier moved ahead, firing on incoming enemies. "Watch out for the bullets—one hit, and you're dead."
Takeuchi was hit. "You've got three lives," Ethan said helpfully. "Don't worry, you'll respawn."
Takeuchi was hit again. Then again. In under three minutes, he had lost all his lives.
That was fast.
But gameplay mechanics were no longer on his mind.
Standing nearby, Nakamura couldn't take his eyes off the screen. His focus was absolute. All of his earlier doubts had melted away.
The co-op mode worked. Seamlessly.
And it was smooth—shockingly smooth.
This was more than a game. This was a feature. A breakthrough.
Other developers had flirted with two-player designs, but not like this. Not side-scrolling, platforming, real-time co-op. This was an industry first.
The marketing potential alone was huge.
"Our console—home of the first true side-scrolling two-player adventure."
It practically wrote itself.
While Nakamura was imagining ad slogans and sales charts, Takeuchi was staring at the screen in a quiet crisis of faith.
This is… finished.
He was supposed to expose this guy as a joke. Instead, he was watching a masterclass in pacing, gameplay feedback, and level design.
The whole thing felt right. Tight controls. Punchy sound. Attention to detail everywhere.
He looked at Ethan again with new eyes.
"Mr. Cole," Takeuchi said, voice now calm and respectful, "how many people worked on this project with you? How long did it take?"
Ethan scratched his head, pretending to think. "Hmm... just me. Took about three or four months."
In truth? He'd built the entire game in less than ten days.
Level design? One day. Core programming? Hours. The rest was polishing—artwork, effects, audio tuning. If he'd had even one partner to offload assets to, he could've wrapped it in half the time.
But no one here needed to know that.
For this era, even four months sounded impossible.
Takeuchi stared in disbelief.
Alone? In that time?
He knew teams of a dozen people who would struggle to make a prototype half this polished in three times the duration.
For the first time that day, he stopped judging—and started admiring.