Masako Wakamiya: the retiree who made a game after 80

Who is Masako Wakamiya?

Masako Wakamiya worked at a bank in Japan from the time she finished high school until she retired, in the 1990s¹³. She began her career doing sums on an abacus, the wooden bead calculator¹.

After retiring, she became her elderly mother's full-time caregiver and felt isolated at home³. That was when, at around 60, she bought her first computer². She didn't know how to use it: it took her three months just to get online³.

Once she did, she joined a social website for older people, Mellow Club, and became known in Japan for making drawings inside Excel, the spreadsheet program³. According to her, the internet gave her wings³. Programming still wasn't in her plans.

How did she learn to code after 80?

She learned the basics from online tutorials and books, and had a teacher who guided her remotely²⁶. The teacher was Katsushiro Koizumi, president of Tesseract, a Japanese company that, by 2019, was already offering programming courses for older people. Since the two lived in different cities, the lessons were over Skype, the video calling program⁵.

The language she studied was Swift, the one Apple created for making iPhone apps³. She didn't hide how hard it was: she told AFP that writing the lines of code is difficult, and that she wanted to understand the basics of programming better¹.

That's why the phrase "taught herself" needs an adjustment. She did study on her own, but she had someone to ask when she got stuck. That isn't a minor detail: people starting from zero almost always need someone like that (our reading).

How do you play Hinadan?

Hinadan is a game about putting dolls in the right place, from memory. It is based on Hinamatsuri, the Japanese doll festival, which takes place in March and celebrates girls' health². For the festival, families set up a tiered altar covered in red and arrange the dolls in a traditional order: the emperor and empress at the top, the ladies of the court and the musicians on the steps below⁴.

In the game, you put each doll on the right step. To get it right, you have to have memorized the arrangement¹. In Japanese, hinadan is the name of that tiered altar⁴.

The game came out for the iPhone on February 24, 2017, for free⁴². The art was made by a friend of hers, in Word, the word processing program, and the narration was recorded by a professional voice actor⁴.

Why did she make a game for people over 60?

Because she couldn't find one. Masako complained that app makers weren't interested in games for older people¹. At Apple's conference, she summed it up for Fortune magazine: since she didn't see apps for seniors, she decided to make her own².

The idea she brought to her teacher was a game in which older people could beat younger ones⁴⁵. In a memory game about a traditional festival, people who have known the festival for decades have the edge.

Every choice in the game follows that idea:

• A slow pace, with a narrator who speaks slowly².
• Designed for people with weaker eyesight and less steady fingers³.
• Only taps on the screen, no dragging, and large text⁶.

None of this is hard code. These are decisions made by someone who knows the player, and the person who knew the player was her (our reading).

What happened at Apple's conference?

In June 2017, Apple invited Masako Wakamiya to WWDC, the annual conference where the company brings together people who make apps for its devices¹. Her ticket was paid for by a scholarship from Apple itself².

She was 82 and the oldest developer at the event¹. Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, introduced her that way and talked with her; he asked what she had done to make the app easy for older people to use¹³. The youngest attendee was a 10-year-old Australian boy³.

By August 2017, Hinadan had about 42,000 downloads, according to AFP¹. In May 2018, the Japanese site Gigazine reported more than 50,000, with versions in English and Chinese⁶.

By the numbers

What does her story show, and what doesn't it show?

It shows that age doesn't stop anyone from making a game, and that a small game, designed for an audience nobody was serving, reached tens of thousands of people. It also shows that the idea came from someone who knew the player.

The other side

Masako's story doesn't prove that it's quick or easy. About 20 years passed between her first computer and her first game (our math, based on her ages), and she had a teacher to help her code. The game is simple, it was made without AI, and the reports talk about downloads, not money. It is also a story that made the news precisely because it is rare.

And what has changed since then?

This part isn't about her game, which was made without AI. It's about the work.

The part she herself called hard, writing the lines of code, is the part AI does today: you describe in plain English what you want, and it writes the commands. People who don't code can talk to AI the way Masako talked to her teacher, which came to be called vibe coding. That doesn't make the work easy: testing, fixing and deciding are still up to you.

What AI doesn't bring is what Masako had plenty of: knowing who the game was for and what that person was missing (our reading). If you have an idea like that, see what AI does and what stays with you and how long the first game takes. And for a case made with AI, read the story of Curve Clash, a Norwegian accountant's game.