📢 Kinokuniya Los Angeles is returning to Little Tokyo 📢
Following the temporary closure of our LA store in July 2025, we’re excited to announce that the store will officially reopen in June 2026. The new location will be twice the size of our previous store, making it the second largest Kinokuniya store in the U.S.
We look forward to continuing to share Japanese culture through stationery, gifts, exclusive books, and so much more! Stay tuned for the opening date!
I think it was around the third or fourth year after the show that used to be called CES became known as E3.
Back then, someone from the event staff asked me something like, “Some American celebrities are here ! do you want to meet them?” But I was just a hardcore game developer and self-built PC nerd who had absolutely no understanding of the value of meeting celebrities. So instead of paying attention to famous people visiting our booth, I only remember running straight to the Half-Life booth and the pre-release Baldur’s Gate booth.
(Actually… I still wonder what celebrities were even there.)
At that E3, NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT graphics card was an absolutely massive topic of discussion ..at least among people like me ,,and I remember standing there staring at the demo endlessly.
I think my body temperature was probably three degrees higher than normal at the time.
And younger people today may not know this, but back then there was a video card called the Voodoo2 that every PC gamer in the world knew about. I was completely obsessed with the idea of buying a second Voodoo2 card at a Fry’s Electronics store in the US.
I needed that second card. The meaning was a bit different from what people today think of as SLI, though.
but at the time almost every PC gamer belonged to the “Church of Voodoo.”
Eventually I converted to NVIDIA later on, though.
Honestly, my head was so full of “I need to get to Fry’s” that I barely even remember the reaction to our own game titles. In those days, unlike now, our schedules weren’t packed from morning to night with interviews.
Every year back then, I’d run around to other companies’ booths, play demos, stare closely at the technology, and then head to Fry’s the next day. I remember once going there to buy a Santa Cruz sound card, and seeing an employee casually put what appeared to be a returned product right back onto the shelf. I was genuinely shocked by how different that was from Japanese retail culture.
Also, in the 1990s, arcades still barely survived in the United States, and there was still a real arcade versus culture there, so I used to go watch it. This was something I did from the very beginning. What always surprised me was that, unlike Japan, players in American arcades often played sitting directly side-by-side on linked cabinets. I would always think, “These guys are sitting this close to each other… how are they not constantly getting into fights?”
In Japan, the players usually sit facing each other with two arcade cabinets physically separating them, so if someone gets angry, the most they can really do is throw an ashtray or kick the cabinet to indirectly express their frustration.
I also used to visit stores and tournament organizers who were running major events, bringing posters, small printed character CG posters, and Japanese prize goods, telling them, “Please use these as tournament prizes.” It was a very grassroots kind of support activity.
And speaking of memories from those days …I remember seeing Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco and the company president at the time, bringing Japanese instant udon with him on business trips to Los Angeles. After seeing that, I started copying him and did the same thing for years.
I guess those are the kinds of memories I have from that era.
AH!! I just realized something ….apparently even at this age, I’m still the same hopeless game nerd at heart.
The moment someone asks me even a small question, I immediately start rambling on forever about tiny details nobody even asked for.