Nintendo was founded just three years after the beginning of the Meiji era in 1889; 100 years later, the company dominated the global game market, having rescued the U.S. video game market in the wake of the 1983 crash. Considering Japanese cultural identity as isolated from a global context misunderstands a long history of active construction of that identity as global and globalizing. Yet, Video Game Studies has often come from a decidedly Euro-centric perspective that regularly frames Japan as an isolated monoculture rather than acknowledging the global existence of Japan and its cultural products.