Double, double, tile and trouble.
Mahjong represents a few notable firsts on SG-1000. As a launch title, this holds the distinction of being the first proper video game adaptation of the mahjong tabletop game ever released for a home system. Nintendo would follow with their own take on the pastime a couple of months later, but Sega got there first. Although that may not strike Western game enthusiasts as being worthy of celebration, it actually mattered quite a bit in SG-1000’s home territory.
Mahjong adaptations clutter the library of every Japanese console ever created for a reason: It’s a deeply entrenched pastime throughout most East Asian cultures, and that includes Japan. As the first platform to play host to a proper (albeit limited) interpretation of mahjong, the SG-1000 had instant appeal to casual shoppers by offering an analog to a familiar real-world game.
As use cases for new tech go, you could do worse than a capable interpretation of a wildly popular traditional game. This adaptation of the popular tile-matching game is almost completely identical to the best-selling Mah-Jong that Nintendo released a short time later.
But then, mahjong doesn’t leave a lot of room open for interpretation. It works the way it works; in this case, both Sega and Nintendo elected to design digital renditions of the Japanese riichi variant of the game. Players attempt to create a collection of tile matches according to a very specific set of rules, and both the Sega and Nintendo games offer only a fraction of the full tabletop experience. Traditional mahjong pits four players against one another, but this cartridge only contains a single-player competition against a single computer-powered opponent rather than offering multiplayer support or a proper four-position face-off.
The methods by which players produce matches are fairly analogous to making poker sets: Matching identical face values, building consecutive runs within the same suit of tiles; that sort of thing. However, mahjong also requires players to declare the kind of match they have completed; simply making a match does not equal instant victory. Given the formality of the game Mahjong adapts into software and the limitations of what could be accomplished within the SG-1000’s limited memory space and resolution, it doesn’t leave much room for discussion. It plays really about the only way it can.
Its visuals look somewhat more primitive than Famicom Mah-Jong, and its interface feels slightly more awkward; but these come down to hair-splitting. It’s digital mahjong, it contains all the rules for a two-on-two competition, and it saves players the trouble of needing to set up and clean up tiles. In hindsight, you could take this for a perfunctory bid to appeal to older consumers (who, of course, were the ones spending money on game consoles in 1983). In the context of its era, however, you have to assume this looked pretty exciting on store kiosks, even if it’s only half a proper mahjong experience. It’s a quick and easy way to play digital mahjong on a non-dedicated device that cost far less than home computers of the era. It’s aged horribly, but then again this wasn’t exactly created as a bid for posterity.
MAHJONG, EXPLAINED
Growing up in the days before the internet (and before American popular culture made much effort to properly engage with the world outside the U.S. and Britain), I had a wildly skewed notion of what mahjong was. As a regular comics page reader (even the boring serial strips) from an early age, the strip Steve Roper and Mike Nomad introduced me to the name in the form of Nomad’s landlady, a small, stout Chinese lady named “Ma Jong.” Around the same time, my father brought home a Coleco Telstar console: A Pong clone featuring four variants that included jai alai. My tiny, still-learning-to-read brain conflated these two foreign-sounding words that included the letter J, leading me to grow up under the mistaken impression that mahjong was some sort of handball sport.
More than a decade later, I discovered the world of freeware Shanghai clones on my college’s Macintosh lab, most notably The Simpsons Gunshy. A Singaporean friend mentioned in passing that Shanghai used mahjong tiles—never mind the fact that the version I played simply featured pics of Bart and Homer Simpson—and invited me to watch her aunties play mahjong in the backroom of a restaurant she frequented. Reader, I do not exaggerate when I say that this spectacle blew my mind, forcefully rewiring mis-learned information I had carried since first grade.
4 Nin Mahjong for Famicom
No, about all that mahjong has in common with racquetball is a blinding sense of speed and ferocious competition. Traditionally, four players sit at cardinal compass points around a table and draw 13 tiles apiece from a pool of 12 dozen. Some vague similarities to poker and other Western card games come into effect here, as each player hides their tiles from their competitors while attempting to create sets of related tiles, called melds. A basic winning hand consists of four melds of three related tiles plus a pair, but the rules allow for some degree of variation.
Players create melds by linking together different aspects of the tiles in different ways. Most tiles belong to one of three numbered suits—bamboo segments, dots, and numeric characters written in Chinese brushwork—allowing you to create sets of a single number or runs of sequential numbers. Special rules apply to the unnumbered Honor suits, giving you greater flexibility in how you create your melds. Players take turns playing tiles, drawing a new piece for each one played. It’s a noisy game between the rapid clacking of tiles and frequent interjections; after all, it’s not simply enough to create winning hands. Players also need to call their key plays. Otherwise, as in Uno, they miss the shot.
Yakuman for Game Boy