You Need a PC for PC Games: Sunsoft’s Shanghai

There’s a problem with my current series on mahjong games– when I say “mahjong”, people in my home country of the United States of America probably don’t think of the 2-4 player competitive game. They think of the single-player tile-matching game, Mahjong Solitaire, also known as Shanghai, beloved of office-workers and casual gamers everywhere. And that’s popular in Japan too; popular enough to get arcade releases. How did Sunsoft bring Shanghai to arcades? Why is that even a question worth asking? Born on the PC The exact origins of the tile-matching game using mahjong tiles are unclear, but making it a video game is usually attributed to Brodie Lockard, who discovered the tile-matching game as he dealt with recovery from an injury that had left him paralyzed, porting it to the PLATO system. But it was the Activision-published 1986 release across computers that really made it a mainstream hit. Shanghai presents you with an arrangement of mahjong tiles arranged in a multi-level…