For more than three decades, Japan has been a leader - the leader, in a lot of respects - in the global video game industry. Names like Nintendo, Sony, and Sega were the only names in video games for years, and even since Microsoft joined, Japanese companies still dominate the market. But of course these companies didn’t just emerge out of nothing, and Matt Alt’s book Pure Invention is a history of how Japanese pop culture exports shaped our culture, too.