Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

Takagism

Many years ago, I somehow found my way onto a website called Takagism. The name comes from the creator, a Japanese fellow by the name of Toshimitsu Takagi. I’ve always sophomorically pronounced the name “Taka-jizzum”, though there are reasons to believe this is the actual pronunciation. It’s difficult to say for sure.

I can’t remember exactly when or why I first visited the site, though I’m pretty sure it was around 2003/2004 and had to do with the Crimson Room. Takagi created the Crimson Room as his take on games like Droom, Mystery of Time And Space, which are apparently examples of type of game that Wikipedia feels deserves its own genre despite an incredibly small number of games that follow its formula.

The Crimson Room is a simple flash game; it’s all point and click, and relates to you with a few captions before you begin that you are waking up to find yourself in a room you’ve never seen before, and the door is locked. You’re trapped! Your job is to escape the room, and you do so by clicking around, finding various disparate items which are then used in odd ways to perform a series of actions which then lead to escaping the room. It actually is very odd – like, David Lynch odd – in its plot and style, but it is actually very fun and addicting.

After escaping the Crimson Room, you are free to leave your name to the wall of escapees, which was actually a pretty novel idea for a flash game at the time. Actually, pretty much everything about this game was novel for a flash game at the time. This wasn’t the sort of thing you saw at Newgrounds or eBaumsWorld (thank God) or Albinoblacksheep; it was too high-brow, too artistic, too intellectual. And I think it still stands as a shining example of the kind of unfulfilled potential of the Internet.

Upon beating the game I looked up more information and found Droom and MOTAS, which were both incredibly fun (especially Droom). I was amazed that such games were out there – games which operated in your browser and so required nothing extra to obtain, games which were absolutely free of cost, games which posed serious intellectual puzzles (Droom even has multiple endings). It changed my perception of the Internet from awesome time-killer to wonderful new horizon, single-handedly.

Takagi released a few sequels to the Crimson Room, including the Viridian Room, Blue Chamber, and White Chamber. My favorite is probably the Viridian Room (which is also probably the most difficult, be warned), though I think the Blue Chamber is cooler when you consider that it was originally meant to be a cell phone game. Naturally, I found my way onto the creator’s website – Takagism – which, as I think I mentioned, ended up becoming my favorite web site of all time.

Takagism is still the same page it was when I first visited it all those years ago, except for the ads that are placed on it now. A catchy, fun-spirited low-fi song loops in the background – the kind of guitar/sampling fusion you hear and instantly think “This guy is definitely Japanese.” The interface, shown below, gives you a fun little animation where you can choose the hair, eyebrows, glasses, and mustache on the man it shows. If you’re indecisive, you can always click the final button, which picks a random assortment for you. Most of the styles are either humorous or bizarre – a recurring theme in everything Takagi seems to touch.

A little bio on the right-hand size explains who he is. We find that Takagi is currently (as of 2009) 44 years old, and does work with multimedia on the Internet. It would appear that this site is basically a collection of multimedia experiments, almost all in Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash format. You are taken to different sub-sections of his site by clicking on the images in the left-hand side. At first glance, that may not sound that new or exciting, but go ahead – look further. You’ll see what I mean.

Probably the most apparent link takes you to the site where he houses the Crimson Room, its sequels and a fun mini-series of Flash Games called Smile Ninja Picomaru. The mini-series, it’s worth noting, acts almost like a television program, with each game being a progression of the “episode” before it. To play a game, you must have completed the “episodes” prior, and the games remember you by a cookie placed on your computer. High scores (of which I am still in the top ten ranking, though I was briefly in the number one spot as “Maldoror”) are recorded for those who set records in each game.

That site holds little of the charm that I feel permeates Takagi’s personal page. I’ll go through each of the subsections and give you the highlights below.

Shockwave Theater – This is where the bulk of the site exists. A fairly spooky little sound lip loops in the background as an old film projector’s light flutters in and out. Each of the icons represents a different game or animation, with a description explaining each game in Japanese above the fray. The titles are still in English, though, which gives you some clue as to what the game pertains to. The trio of “Runnin’ Nude”, “Flyin’ Nude”, and “Cyclin’ Nude” have a risque approach to the traditional flash game, while QP-Shot 1000 displays a fair amount of black humor. “Machine Gun Etiquette”, in which your job is to shoot a bunch of ant-like people escaping from a room in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen while handling the exaggerated kickback of a machine gun, ends when any of the entities scales the walls and makes it to a hidden exit at the top left-hand corner. “Nicholas on the Monocycle” takes the old Windows game Pipe Dream, makes it a bit more three-dimensional, and then replaces green slime with Santa Claus on a unicycle. The reasons are never explained.

Of course, there are simpler games, like “Portrait Zigsaw”, which is simply a Shockwave implementation of a jigsaw puzzle; “15 Blocks”, a classic numbered slider puzzle; and “Amo Jan”, which is a game of rock, paper, scissors with a girl who removes an article of clothing every time you win. Of course, once she’d in her underwear, she suddenly begins a streak of wins and draws that seem to keep you from going any further, though a list on the side seems to hint that its possible to get her nude. Is the game fixed, perhaps to make you self-conscious about the effort you seem to be exhibiting to see this cartoon character stripped bare?

And not everything is a game…at least, in the traditional fashion. “Snake Paint” has a series of snakes emerge from the left-hand side of your screen and then inch slowly toward stage right. While they move, clicking one of them changes the color of the snake to something else, apparently randomly chosen. Most other options on this screen are animations, some incredibly simple, some interactive. The interactive ones behave in simple, almost useless ways: “Hana-yoshi” plays a solemn plucked tune and allows you to open or close one of two doors leading to a bar. Nothing else. “My Life As An Insect” uses images of a man and makes him into a centipede that follows the cursor of your mouse.

The other animations seem to display certain recurring conceptual themes. For example, many have a penchant for recursion: “On The Northern Lake” simply loops a few images that start from a romantic scene with a girl on a boat with her lover on a lake in Japan, while “Metempsychosis” displays an infant vomiting another infant indefinitely, before reaching the end of the screen and then being swallowed back into the previous child. Transformations are also popular: “Man to Evil to Man” shows the transformation of a normal human head into a demonic one, complete with backwards-masked audio clip – remarkable when you consider it’s creation in 1994 – while the self-descriptive “An Apple Decays” also illustrates the novelty of the time for simple animations.

Some animations are just random and unlike any others. “ZZZ…I Want to a Sleep” acts as a short film depicting the conflict between a young man and his insatiable girlfriend, complete with a twist ending that would probably be offensive to some. My favorite is perhaps “The First Lover”, a simple endless loop of a young man gleefully pedaling his bike on a path, with mountains slowly passing by in the background. It makes you feel as though a certain artistic sentiment was being attempted…

Flash Theater – this appears to be more modern than the Shockwave Theater. Most of the options here are mere looped animations, some of them short, while other last about a minute. “A Running Girl”, “Flying Baby”, and “The Explanation of Socrates” stand out as highlights of this section, along with the interactive “Body Control”, which allows you to manipulate portions of a displayed body by enabling or disabling the appropriate sections of a brain. Much less interactive on the whole than the Shockwave Theater, the Flash Theater still adds more to the atmosphere of the site, mixing aural and visual content into a pleasant, if absurd, experience.

Takagism For Inpaku – This part of the site makes more sense when you find out that Inpaku was an “Internet Fair” in Japan around the turn of the century where they got a bunch of people together to demonstrate the capability and promise of the Internet. I like the vague and open-ended idea behind this, and I’m guessing Takagi did as well, since he provided this particular subsection of the site as one of the demonstrations for the event.

The opening page, a looped sketch of a guy removing his shirt to some upbeat surf-like tune, captures the spirit of the whole site in a way. It’s fun, it’s artistic, and for the time, it was very high-tech. The left-hand side has five links, each of which take you to a flash-based animation or game, much like what Takagi holds inside the Flash and Shockwave Theaters. These animations were done specifically for Inpaku, and aren’t seen elsewhere on the site; it includes a page containing a face manipulator like what is seen on the home page, only this time with six people to work on. It also includes an arcade-style flash game where you play a floating wine bottle that fires its cork at angry heads which will cause you to burst if they touch you. A couple token animations with a story in Japanese that I can’t read round out the site.

All in all, it’s a very small site, but I find it worthwhile to visit at least once or twice, if just for the opening animation. It’s also a keen reminder of a time when people were still rather open-minded about the Internet; what it was, and what it could be. I praise Takagi for envisioning an Internet more concerned with fun and free expression than simple social networks or corporate web sites.

Takagism Remote – I still haven’t figured out why this site is separated from the rest, but I’m sure there is a good reason for it. I mostly never visited this part of the site, given that it only has some photographs, a couple of the usual odd animations, and then a game called “Botanical Room” that took me forever to figure out. Once I figured it out, I became addicted, and again found one of Takagi’s finest works.

You start off as a nude man standing on a ledge which is, at a closer glance, a nude woman. You use a boomerang to strike weird insects which float in circular patterns; your goal is to get them to fall on certain outlined parts of the body below. Certain insects leave behind certain items when they fall in certain spots, which can then be fused to grow very odd plants. Your goal is to get all 15 plants, at which point nothing special happens at all, in line with Takagi’s style. This game alone earns Takagism Remote its rent on the site; I spent hours on it the first time around – watching the animation for the plants that grow is as mesmerizing as it is visually stunning.

(The Rest) – Since I’m not fluent in Japanese, the Takagism blog has been mostly useless to me, though there are usually some interesting photographs mixed in. The Thumbsync Demo appears to be precisely what it sounds like; a demo for how to use thumbsync on cell phones or other mobile products. This is a strictly commercial exercise, and lacks the enchanting quirkiness of the rest of the site. That’s all I can really say about the these two.

I think the reason I love this site so much is that it embodies everything I love about the Internet. It’s got no purpose except to show off some interesting things, some of which are fun, others of which are unusual, and all of which are mentally stimulating. It displays a flagrant lack of decency or censorship at times, yet still evokes feelings of fun and excitement. I have yet to see another web site that comes close to achieving the level of expression and immersion of atmosphere that Takagism does.

I don’t know what Takagi is doing these days, but I wish he’d return to developing his site and keep working his worldview into ours.