BERLIN -- When Hiroshi Masuyama hosted friends from Zurich in Tokyo last year, they didn't ask to see a tea garden or an ancient Shinto shrine. Instead, they wanted to visit Sega's headquarters.
That's when Masuyama, a widely published writer, media theorist, professor, and producer of games for the Nintendo 64, had seed idea for Japan's TV-Game Museum.
"Tourists travel to Germany to see where all those famous wines come from," he says. "More and more, I see people coming to Japan to see where their videogames come from."
Masuyama's brainstorm was to create a virtual tour of Tokyo using the medium that made the city famous. The result is Tokyo Techno Tourism, an exhibit that opened Friday in Berlin and runs through 27 December.
"It was when I considered that we have commenced living in a fictive media space at the same time as we live in the physical city space that I realized that videogames were an extremely effective textbook for viewing cities," he said.
Exhibit visitors are jolted from freezing temperatures and the monolithic 19th century Prussian architecture of Berlin's Museum Island when they enter the subterranean rooms of the exhibition. The ambient sounds of Tokyo -- chatter on the street, random phone calls, and, of course, the persistent bleeping of electronic gadgets -- create an abrupt cultural and climactic shift.
The first stop is a game called Scramble Formation, a startlingly realistic rendition of the Space Invaders principle. The player controls a red biplane that cruises over the Diet building, high-rise hotels, the stadium where Tokyo hosted the 1964 Olympics, and other landmarks. Blasting away at tanks and jets, the perceptive player gets a feel for the layout of the city below.
Eight city districts are represented by either a game or video footage shot by Masuyama. Visitors can view otaku -- or die-hard gamers -- pounding the machines in Akihabara, one of the world's largest shopping districts for electronic goods. Roppongi, known for its night life, is represented by Bust-a-move, a 1997 game in which players make their avatars dance for points.
In a tiny side room, two Tokyo Techno Kids come courtesy of the FuriFuri Company. Life-sized pillows with the images of the fictitious brother and sister oversee a vast array of hi-tech playthings. Large Day-Glo pillows describe how the objects -- like the foot-long electronic baseball bat that yells, "Home run!" when it's swung -- gained popularity among Japanese children.
Co-organized by the TV-Game Museum and Berlin's Computer Game Museum, the exhibit will feature a panel discussion of Japanese videogame culture, lectures on Japogames and Japanimation and architecture in Japanese film. Oh, and two evenings of Japanese noodle-soup dinners.
