Re-release this: Door Door

The game that launched a company that made a bunch of other games that North Americans have actually played before.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Before there was Chunsoft, there was a programming competition. Enix had existed in another, completely unrelated to video games form before their 1982 transition to becoming a games publisher. In order to announce their entry into this field — and to find game developers who were worth investing in — Enix founder Yasuhiro Fukushima organized the “Enix Game Hobby Program Contest,” with a million-yen prize for the winners, i.e., those who made a game that Enix would want to publish. As Chris Kohler wrote in Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave The World an Extra Life, this was a common tactic for manga publishers to find new storytellers and stories, now adapted for the growing video game industry.

It’s tough to argue with the results. Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, got his start in the industry here with a winning personal computer game called Love Match Tennis. Kazuro Morita finished in first in the contest with Moritan no Battle Field, a turn-based war simulation game — he’d go on to work on quite a few Samurai Shodown titles, while designing the 1992 Famicom tactical RPG Just Breed, which was also published by Enix. And then there’s Koichi Nakamura, the founder of Chunsoft who remains its chairman to this day. His winning game was called Door Door, and starred a little round dude wearing a hat, named Chun. That’s right: the name of the studio that Nakamura would soon found was a nod to his start in the industry.

The name Chun itself was actually a nickname of Nakamura’s, owing to his love for mahjong — one of the three dragon tiles in that game is chun, and so, a friend started calling Nakamura that. He programmed Door Door for this tournament, and named the protagonist after himself, sort of, and then founded a company that would work closely with Enix for years using that same nickname as inspiration. It’s probably a good thing that Nakamura didn’t try to make a mahjong game for easy money, like so many other developers of that decade, and just rolled with that little reference to his love for the tile game.

Image credit: MobyGames

Door Door was a significant release in Japan, but it’s never been released internationally, not as part of any of Nintendo’s Virtual Console services, nor on Nintendo Switch Online. It’s not a game D4’s Project EGG has rights to, so you can’t expect its PC-88 version to appear as an EGG Console release, either, and it was never an arcade game, so, forget about Arcade Archives, too. The closest thing we’ve got is a modified mini version of the game with a different protagonist stuffed inside of Chunsoft’s 428: Shibuya Scramble, which received an international Windows release in 2018 a decade after it initially came out for the Wii in Japan. It’s a shame, too, because Door Door is that perfect kind of classic video game, in that it has a very simple premise, very few possible actions, but exceptional level design that forces you to sit and think on what it is you need to do.

It’s odd that it never left Japan on its own, too, because the game itself lacks Japanese text to read, and the premise, again, is simple, easily understood just by playing the introductory level 0 that shows you what you have to do in each stage. Was localizing the manual to explain the four enemy types and your goal going to be that much of a slog? To be fair, Enix didn’t end up publishing anything internationally until Dragon Quest II, when they weren’t just some up-and-coming Japanese publisher any longer, but still. It’s a bit surprising no one else wanted to tackle it before then in a licensing deal, or pop it onto Virtual Console untranslated. Nowadays, maybe Square Enix still retains the rights to the game for home release, not Spike Chunsoft — Chunsoft did publish the mobile phone release in Japan in 2004 — and that’s a company that’s not exactly the greatest about keeping their older titles available if they aren’t role-playing games. And even then there are some real gaps in the library.

Regardless of why Door Door hasn’t yet received an international release is a bit beside the point, however. It should get one. Nakamura’s idea was to build off of the kind of gameplay found in Namco’s Dig Dug, but in an original way rather than to simply replicate that. Nakamura originally wanted to make a Dig Dug-style title for the Enix competition, but, “the idea of just creating an imitation started to bug me, and people around me told me that if I was going to submit something to Enix, I might as well aim for an original game… So I started to think about how I could translate the appeal of Dig Dug into a different form, and Door Door was the result.”

That appeal was in the need to herd enemies around a maze. Dig Dug itself was taking some of the appeal of Pac-Man, but its big (and enormously satisfying) change to the formula was to make the player the one in charge of creating the maze in which they were chased, due to their ability to dig through the dirt, building paths in which enemies could be led to their demise. Nakamura developed that premise further, removing digging from the equation and adding, as you can probably surmise on your own, doors.

In Door Door, Chun can only take a single hit before he dies. He can’t fall off a ledge at any height without also dying. You move on platforms, some of which let you loop around from one side of the screen to the other, and you climb or descend via ladders and wall pegs — that’s it. Enemies will chase you around the playing area in four predetermined patterns, one for each enemy type. Namegon, the orange alien, takes the most direct path to Chun, going straight for him. Invekun is a purple jellyfish-looking alien who will ascend or descend every climbable surface it sees. Amechan is a smiling blue slime creature who also gravitates towards every climbable surface it sees, unless Chun happens to be on the other side of said surface, in which case it’ll continue on to Chun. And then there’s the real troublemaker of the foursome, Otapyon, a green alien who will jump every time that you do. Which means this is the one enemy you can’t jump over, or else you’ll just collide in midair and die.

You need to get these four enemies, who appear in different configurations in every one of the game’s 50 stages, with one to six enemies per stage, all trapped behind doors. Some doors can be opened from both sides simply by walking by them, some can only be opened from the left or the right, which you’ll know by seeing which side the knob is on. Enemies can only enter a fully opened door from the side opposite the hinges, meaning, if you open a door while walking to the left, enemies entering the door must be walking to the left, as well, or else they’ll just walk right past it.

From the S1 release of Door Door. Image credit: MobyGames

Once you shut a door with an alien trapped behind it, that door is out of play. It can’t be opened again! Which means you need to ensure that you’re not accidentally using doors too quickly, and are using the doors that make the most sense for certain types of enemies and their movements, rather than making the herding of these foes more difficult later on after you’ve sealed a specific door shut. You get more points for trapping additional aliens in the same door at the same time, which is dangerous to attempt — if the second (or third, or whichever) alien is coming through the door a little late, one of the earlier aliens might already be exiting and coming for you once more, or you might accidentally make contact with them while attempting to shut the door — but absolutely worth the risk. You need those points, as they’re not just for show: they’re the only way to earn more lives, and you’re going to need them.

A single enemy trapped behind a door is worth 100 points. Two enemies is 500 points. Three is 1,000. Four, 3,000, and five is 5,000. Get all six enemies behind a single door, and that’s 10,000 points. You get your first extra life at 10,000 points, and additional ones thereafter require 20,000: you aren’t going to get there at all at 100 points per alien. There are other ways to score points, too, as there are six different items to pick up in the game, all with point totals that match those of the aliens being trapped. Candy is 100 points, popsicles are 500, lollipops 1,000, ice cream 3,000, cake is 5,000, and the non-edible mahjong tile is 10,000 points. Nakamura really does love mahjong.

From the PC-6001 release of Door Door. Colors and resolution differed from version to version: notice the grey alien, who is green in the Famicom version. Image credit: MobyGames

Picking up items is fraught with danger, as well: they appear in a designated place in each stage, so once you know where the item is going to appear in a given level, you can plan for that a bit. But what’s unclear is which item will be there, and if it’ll be worth the detour and/or the aliens chasing you down to where you’re going. That’s because the item locations are set, but the items themselves are random: you might put in a whole lot of effort just to pick up a candy, is the thing. Or, even worse, a bomb could appear there, too. Bombs aren’t worth points. They explode when you touch them, and then you die. You probably shouldn’t touch the bombs.

As stated, the four enemy types all have their own subtle behaviors to account for, and part of the challenge is when two enemies are coming at you from different directions, forcing you to think fast about how to survive and trap them, or which one you need to prioritize, or if it’s even possible to trap either of them at that moment. Levels with a single door force you to think and react in strategic ways, and fast, as does being left with a single door after using the others. It’s worth noting, too, that Chun doesn’t move very fast, and is impossibly slow at climbing ladders and such, but the upside of that is you have a lot of time to think about what you’re going to do in the first fraction of a second in which you’ve finished climbing. Sometimes, enemies are going to be so close behind you that if you don’t make that move at the literal first opportunity to do so, you’ll be caught and die.

Levels designed around the specific abilities of the aliens are really fun. They’re sometimes pretty tough, but the joy of figuring out your approach and then executing it stands out more. In the first stage where it’s clear this is what’s going on, you have to make Otapyon mimic your jumps in order to make it platform its way to the exit against its will. Or in stage 10, where you must make a pair of Namegon end up close together and facing the same direction on a looping platform, so that they exit the stage’s lone door simultaneously. You’re not going to be able to accidentally solve these ones, or really any of the stages after a certain point, as there is action, sure, but Door Door is very much a maze puzzler.

As noted before, it’s surprising that Door Door never left Japan. In 2006, Famitsu’s editors made a list of the greatest Famicom games released in each year of the console’s history. Door Door, ported to the Famicom in 1985, was right there alongside some excellent arcade conversions like Dig Dug, The Tower of Druaga, and Galaga, Enix’s foundational adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and a little title called Super Mario Bros. It was ported to pretty much every platform in existence between 1983 and 1985, with Enix releasing it on the FM-7, three versions of Sharp’s MZ series of personal computers, NEC’s PC-8000, PC-6001, PC-88, and PC-98, the MSX, the Hitachi S1, three more Sharp MZ computers two years after the first batch, and then finally the Famicom.

If you’re the kind of person who still enjoys firing up maze games like this from the early-to-mid 80s, then Door Door is going to work for you. It’s a shame that it hasn’t somehow, at least, made its way to Nintendo Switch Online’s NES channel, given that it has untranslated Famicom games and curios released almost exclusively for it at this point. Maybe Chunsoft will do something with Door Door in 2025 for the 40th anniversary of its Famicom release, at least. Or you’ll just have to find another way to play it to see the game that launched Chunsoft and the career of its founder.

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