Phil Arrington had a dream on the cargo bed of his 2002 Ford Ranger pickup. It was a stupid dream, but it did not deserve to die on a dolly.
Arrington was holding a gold chain over a gray shirt. The video game arcade machine was between his arms, and its title could be seen over his shoulder. The machine had traveled from an arcade in Tokyo to an anonymous warehouse in Osaka and finally to a warehouse in San Pedro after a long wait on a container ship outside Long Beach, California. The cabinet was wheeled toward the pickup's hatch. A thin blue blanket lay on the concrete. A phone was recording.
Arrington pushed the machine's weight by centimeters second after second. The dolly's wheels slid off the edge. The arcade cabinet fell to the ground after his body spilled forward. Under the video Arrington uploaded, people expressed their alarm. One person said that this is the scariest thing they have seen on the internet. Another person said, "I don't think my asshole has ever been harder."
I screamed as I watched the video from across the country. It was my machine.
Enlarge by Phil Arrington.
Arrington chose his moment to explain himself, and it was a couple of days later, live on twitch, squatting in a red bucket, fishing out the remnants from a half-empty bag of Flamin' Hot Doritos. His tone was not contrite. He said that he cut the video at its most dramatic moment. The machine was intact. Arrington stood up, showed off his athletic shorts, and then made his way to the Museca cabinet.
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Museca was a beacon. A neon red coil shot up through its base like a spine, supporting a console of five pastel-lit buttons, each the size of an adult hand. If the game worked, a player would press and spin the buttons at the right time to amass points. The cabinet had opened the menu screen. You have to take care of it when you get something like this. This isn't like a car from the 60s or 70s, where people are making parts for it. He pressed the start button. The display was blank. He said, oh shit. Baby-voice pop music was playing from the speakers. It was called "Nevermind."
Museca is an extraordinary find. It is sold and played at arcades in Japan. The game was discontinued a few years ago. The machines were recalled and their parts were used to make a new game called Bishi Bashi. The Museca cabinets were a particular prize for fans of Japan's storied arcade scene.
Millions of native and foreign otaku have been attracted to the country's self-sizzling pleasure palaces for decades, with the promise of competition and escape for the price of just one 100yen coin. The arcade scene in Japan blossomed after Taito Corporation's Space Invaders in 1978 and included classics like Donkey Kong and Street Fighter II. Tens of thousands of arcades sprang up, packed with crane games filled with wide-eyed Pokemon plushies, greasy racing sims, shimmering fantasy role-playing or strategy games, and of course, the full-body high of rhythm games like Konami's Dance.
DDR got licensed or released overseas, where it became a cultural icon. The arcade game makers designed their best stuff exclusively for Japan, and the hardware they used was meant to stay there. The CEO of a Japanese consulting company says that they don't want the machines to be sold outside of Japan. Museca is one of the machines that states on their title screens that they are only meant to be played in Japan. In recent years, publishers like Konami have enforced this by making sure their arcade games only function when connected to their proprietary server.
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Music, distribution, and payment are all related to the price of licensing. It is also a commercial calculation. The arcade machines have to be connected to a server, which makes maintaining them, controlling them, and operating them more complex. They don't want the hassle of providing that knowledge to companies outside of Japan. The Japanese arcade chain Round1 has installed locations across the US, but the average American doesn't have access to the thousands of authentic arcade machines that brought glory to Japan as the holy land of gaming.
Japan's arcades are in crisis. Due to competition from home consoles and a tax hike, game centers are closing quickly. Between 2006 and 2016 the number of arcades decreased. The arcades of regulars and tourists were emptied by Covid. There were 20 arcades that closed in Japan.
Video games face three fates when arcades close, two of which are approved by a Japanese trade association. The first is in a landfill. The second is junked in a landfill after being gutted and sold. This is called the mafia treatment. A Japanese distributor buys up all of the dying arcade machines. Some are sent to smaller arcades. Arrington is a self-proclaimed "muscle guy" for the gray-market entrepreneurs who import thousands of cabinets from Japan every year.
Western demand for Japanese machines has exploded over the last five years as Japanese machines have become more available. To support that demand, an underground network of players has risen to the challenge of moving the cabinets from Japan, and hacking their code so fans like me can finally play.
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