08 The Ten Yen Arcade

The Perfect Show is back with a new look and a new episode! 

Scot dives into the video game world and puts a magnifying glass on a special spot from his time in Japan, the Ten Yen Arcade. Explore the world of bits and bytes with him in this episode all about arcades and playing games

 

Special thanks to: 

Drew, Lee, and Shane, my video game playing friends.

 

Music from this episode by:

Cloud Cuddles - https://www.fiverr.com/cloudcuddles (who did the amazing chiptune cover of Otsuka Ai’s ‘Amaenbo’ at the end of the episode.)

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

Bastreon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Igthun - https://www.fiverr.com/lgthun

Ismael Eldesouky - https://www.fiverr.com/ismaileldesouky

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

Songs: School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/school

Mall - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328

A Calm Moment to Remember Before Taking the Dangerous Road - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Helice_Awesome_Dance_Adventure_/a-calm-moment-to-remember-before-taking-the-dangerous-road

Beach - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/plage

Creo - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo

Song: Memory - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo/Dimension/Memory_1520

Rolemusic - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic

Song: Alamak - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/Pop_Singles_Compilation_2014/alamakmp3

 

AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Speaker 1: 0:26

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Tell me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection. I was never a really big video game guy, but there was a point in my life, when I was living in Japan, where video games were the core of a perfect experience for me. When I say I wasn't a big video game guy, I mean specifically the mainstream video game path that everyone my age seemed to have. I never had any of the Nintendo consoles, nes, super Nintendo and 64 Gamecube Wii none of those. I did have an old working Atari from a cousin's garage sale with a ton of games and Sega Genesis, but with only three games ever. I've had a PlayStation once I think it was a PlayStation 1 and an early Xbox, but I didn't own either one for longer than a couple weeks. Those are separate stories. So If I was going to go about playing a game now, I'd probably rather play a board game with people in person. If I'm going to play a game on my phone, it's probably an app version of a board game like Risk or Majon. I'm pretty basic. Now I do have a computer that I will download and play games on, along with all the other computer duties that I have it do, but that's a relatively recent, only since the start of COVID thing. So, yeah, I'm maybe not the typical video game guy. In fact, when I'm playing games now online and get frustrated, you can frequently hear me saying stuff like I hate video games and making plans to cut them out of my life. Basically, my ability to handle all the well just the normal stuff about video games is on the level of a 10 year old or younger, because I never really got used to dealing with it as a kid. I mean, that's my theory. Maybe I'm just a big baby man when it comes to video games, but hopefully the first thing Alright geography time. After college I moved to Japan, to Kita Kyushu, a city of about 1 million people in Fukuoka Prefecture on the island of Kyushu. So Kyushu is the southernmost of the four main islands in Japan. Hokkaido is the northernmost island. Below it is Honshu, the biggest and most central island of Japan. That's where Tokyo, osaka and Kyoto all are. Now Honshu is kind of an elongated island. It stretches pretty far north and south, but off its southeast side is the island of Shikoku and down south of Honshu is Kyushu. Kita Kyushu, the city I first lived in, is on the northern end of Kyushu. The Kita in Kita Kyushu is north or north Kyushu, so it's just on the other side of the water from the southernmost tip of the main island, honshu. In fact, and I know this from personal experience, if you are going home on the train late at night and fall asleep, you just might wind up missing your stop, going under the water between the islands and being awakened by a nice Japanese train conductor at Shimono Seki station on Honshu, then needing to make your way back down to Kyushu. The winter and spring were very mild in Kyushu, but in the summer the weather got hot. I was working in the public schools, and in Japanese public school there is a summer break, but it's not as long as the traditional break for US schools. It happens later in the summer and it's treated more like a mid-year break, how we do winter break, because the Japanese school year starts in April and ends in March. Once it really heated up, I was often in sweltering, unericonditioned classrooms during the hottest hours of the afternoon I call the classrooms sweltering. Like any of the other rooms were any different? They weren't. The heat was pervasive. I was really sweating those first few weeks. I remember being puzzled why no one else looked like they were having a hard time. And then, a few weeks or so into being in that heat all day, every day, my body sort of adjusted. I stopped sweating everywhere all the time and was pretty much normal like everyone else. Kita Kyushu is also where I learned about the fifth season of the year. Like I said, kyushu is down south in Japan and much farther south than anywhere I had grown up or lived in to that point. Latitude wise, it's about on the same level as LA, but it's an island environment. So that means, as the locals would explain to me, that there were five seasons there, not four. Fall goes into winter, which goes next into spring and then summer. That's all the same, but between summer and fall in Kyushu anyway, that's when it was to you the rainy season. It stayed as hot as summer, but added a heaping helping of humidity for good measure, setting the stage perfectly for the occasional typhoon that would come through. I never had school off for a snow day in Kyushu, but we had multiple days off for typhoons. What was new to me was how the weather didn't really change the heat. Where I grew up in Kansas it would get oppressively humid, but then after it rained, the air would clear out and feel lighter for a bit. In Kyushu, during the rainy season it would be at maximum humidity, downpour rain for like an hour and still be exactly as humid afterward, and it would usually rain downpours like that a few times a day every day. Stepping from air conditioning outside during Tsu-yu felt like hitting a wall. The difference was that noticeable. My first rainy season in Kyushu I was living in an apartment with a roommate and the place was fine, but we didn't have air conditioning. I was alternating weeks teaching at two different public schools and neither one of them had air conditioning either. I rode to work and then back home on my basic mama-charity Japanese bicycle again no air conditioning, and this was pretty much my regular weekday pattern. In the evening it wasn't so bad, but during the heat of the day it got to be 40-45 degrees Celsius, which is 104-113 degrees Fahrenheit, and practically everywhere you went was sweltering. My brain started making a mental map of the places along my roots, where you could get free AC, even just for a quick walkthrough, much like the mental map I made back when I first arrived to the places in the city where you could find a western toilet if you needed one, as opposed to the traditional Japanese toilet. Basically, information that could come in very handy for either myself or someone else in their time of need. In fact, the main places where we did get access to free air conditioning were retail establishments Some restaurants, big department stores, smaller ones were hit or miss, but it would mainly be places where you had to pay to be there in some form or another. Kokura Eki, the train station closest to where I lived, had a shopping center with a number of nice stores in AC, but they were pretty well tended by clerks who for some reason seemed to be more interested in helping you shop than just giving you space to cool off and avoid melting completely. Convenient stores were often well air conditioned, but you couldn't stay in one of those for too long without attracting even more attention than I already did as a non-Japanese person. I did try. I got pretty good at the whole pick the thing up and turn it around and be like oh, what's this item. Let me examine it very slowly. Ingredients, you say, Let me see what those are. Oh, a magazine rack? Better make sure I look through every option on there. Yeah, sometimes when you're hot, you got to do what you got to do. Near the station, though, just across a huge pedestrian plaza, was a mall called IME. Like the contraction, for I am IME, that's the name of the mall. That's Japan for you. But it was a really nice spot for shopping and eating that had recently been built, and there was a beautiful courtyard with an open central area inside of the building where you could even look down over all the floors. So this would have been a great spot to hang out and soak up some artificially cooled air, except for one small thing. The rumor I heard was that it was built on the site of an old Shinto burial ground and that the mall was cursed because of that. Now, I do not believe in curses, but if enough of your Japanese and non-Japanese friends decide that they do, you end up having to look for a different spot anyway. So the train station was out, the cursed mall was out, and this led to my friends and I exploring a bit. And on the other side of the pedestrian plaza, we found a towering building that was a little run-down but filled to the brim with different small shops and random businesses crammed into every level, accessible through one tiny elevator and presumably a set of stairs that I never saw. The stores and the levels had no real rhyme or reason, just businesses that could survive and attract clients to a beat-up building next to several fancier and more modern ones A small bookstore, a little cafe, a collectible store. But there, on one of the levels, sat the place that would become our air conditioning lifeline, our go-to cool-off and wind-down spot, the Ten Yen Arcade. Japan has tons of arcades. Like, imagine a place with a lot of arcades. Now, double that or maybe triple it, but yeah, a lot. Here's where my lack of familiarity with video games kicks into high gear. So please forgive any terminology blunders I make here, but a big arcade in Japan would have tons of cabinet games with regular joysticks, dozens of different games where instead of joysticks you use a guitar or a dance pad or a drum set, or a sushi table with a giant plastic cleaver yeah, that is one I saw once. Also, it would have tons of UFO catcher games, which is the Japanese name for the claw machines where you position your grabber claw and try to drop it down and grab a prize with it. Because there are so many arcades, there are homes for tons of video game franchises and several generations of the really popular games. Games numbered one higher than the last one, with a sign on them hyping what's new in this version, and it seemed like there were new ones of those replacing old ones nearly every time I turned around. What this also creates is a whole ecosystem of places where the games go after they're no longer the latest and greatest version of the block, like a plinko ball falling down and bouncing on pegs. A game machine in Japan will hit several levels before it gets all the way to the bottom. They may move around their original arcade a bit, from being in front and center at first to maybe back in a corner later, but whether they're updated with a newer version of themselves or something shiny or takes their place, eventually they leave the top shelf arcade. Mid-level arcades will snap up most of these, and then some might go to the entryways of Daiei grocery stores or the parking lot of a Don Quixote variety store. Like I said, there are lots of places for a video game machine in Japan to land on its way down to the bottom. One of the last stops they hit before they are shipped out of the country is the Ten Yen Arcade, and this is exactly the place I found in that stack of random shops, complete with its own big, beautiful, steadily chugging air conditioner. It's called the Ten Yen Arcade for the obvious reason that games inside all cost ten yen to play. So right now the exchange rate is 115 yen to the US dollar, so ten yen would be roughly 9 cents. In a new arcade the games would cost more like 100 to 200 yen per play. So ten yen to me felt like nothing If you haven't handled yen before. There are different denominations of bills, but the smallest bill is the thousand-yen note. So about the ten dollar bill? Everything under that is handled only in coins which come in one, five, ten, fifty, one hundred and five hundred yen varieties. The Juandama, or Ten Yen Coin, is the second largest coin after the five hundred and the only one with its unique bronze color. They had changed machines at the arcade that spit out Ten Yen coins, but Japan is also a way more cash-based society than the US and without a 25 yen coin in the currency mix, I actually wound up getting Ten Yen coins as change a lot, so after that first time I usually just saved up my change and brought the Ten Yen coins with me to the arcade. Maybe this is a good place to jump out and say as I've been working on the next chunk of episodes, I'm refining the theme of this show and instead of just telling stories about these perfect things or experiences, I'm going to see if there's a way to recreate them, either for myself, like in the Tiny Tense episode, or for others, like in the Perfect Road episode. And then also, after I run out of my experiences to share, I want to see how it goes replicating other people's nuggets of perfection too. As I was looking for ways to recreate this perfect experience, I ran across a 5-cent arcade named the oh Wow Nickel arcade in Fresno, california and I was going to be in Fresno, actually so I stopped in for a visit when I was down that way a few months back.

Speaker 3: 14:31

I'm going to clip my microphone on here. I'm wearing a mask, though, so it's a little weird. Alright, let's do this. Get 100 nickels. There they come.

Speaker 2: 14:47

Oh, that.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Games for only a nickel 5 cents. I mean by those numbers. I may have even found a place that was twice as perfect as a 10-yen arcade in Japan.

Speaker 2: 15:00

Oh, my God.

Speaker 3: 15:01

Oh, it's dropping Nickels, nickels. Alright, seems to be done. Now Pick up the ones that I dropped. Hand sanitizer here there.

Speaker 1: 15:21

Okay, sure, some games cost two or three nickels, but I wouldn't really know what was up unless I checked this place out.

Speaker 3: 15:27

Here's a punching thing. It takes three nickels. Okay, let's do it. Yeah, let's try the first one. Here we go Two, all right, three, sorry, wow. Oh, 898's the high I got 522. I'm pretty weak. All right, let's see what else we can do. All right. Old school games, fighting games.

Speaker 2: 16:17

That's what.

Speaker 3: 16:18

I'm looking for All right. Marvel vs Capcom takes two nickels, 10 cents, perfect. Let's try the right side. Maybe there we go. Let's see how this goes.

Speaker 2: 16:41

First off what.

Speaker 1: 16:45

I wandered around with my Styrofoam cup of nickels checking out all the games, playing anything that looked fun or interesting, but, being by myself, met no one to talk to, so oh, no, oh no. I wound up with long stretches like this one of me just playing a game.

Speaker 3: 17:09

All right, there it goes.

Speaker 1: 17:13

And also much shorter stretches like this one.

Speaker 3: 17:17

Galaga is fun. One nickel, I don't really play Galaga much, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, I'm bad and I'm dead, all right. Well, I'm not good at Galaga.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I cut it way down for the show, but I was there for about an hour on that $5 and played a lot of games.

Speaker 3: 17:43

This backman solid Donkey Kong there there. Oh, hungry, hungry, Hippos, dance, dance Revolution. Oh, no, not that, just a similar Interesting Daytona USA. Daytona USA, cruisin' World. Yeah, I'll play that for two nickels, absolutely All right. Sitting in the seat. One One, there it is All right. Oh, that's cruise Japan, right, we gotta go to Japan.

Speaker 1: 18:29

All right, man. Most of the games were old, not all were good, few didn't even work. But this is a place that is trying to blow you away with quantity, not quality. There you go.

Speaker 3: 18:39

This is a little hound game, man Ready set go and enough.

Speaker 1: 18:45

We're up and running to keep me playing and entertained for an hour you can do it.

Speaker 3: 18:52

I can second All right, done, done with that, what else is?

Speaker 2: 19:03

there.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Alien game, ski ball machine Shooting, basketball game. That's out of order. Little kid stuff. Well, that's it, let's go All right. Well, that's, oh wow, actually better than I thought it was going to be. You know, that's fine, it's not. It's not really what I was not really what I was looking for. But then again I didn't really think it was going to be, and, yeah, not bad.

Speaker 1: 19:49

I went during a cooler part of the year so I wasn't really testing any air conditioning component of this experience. The games were older, how you'd expect a lot of classic arcade games and others that seemed like leftovers that ended up there somehow. But it was nice and I had a good time. I wouldn't, however, call it perfect. Even though it was super cheap video gaming, it lacked some major pieces of that 10 year and arcade experience in Kyushu like being there by myself, and I thought there must be better ideas for recreating that experience than this. But back to the 10 year arcade the space was cramped but there were no clerks caring whether you were actively playing or not, only open doors and, amazingly, artificially chilled air. It was just the place I had been searching to hide, and when the days got their hottest, I put out the word to my roommate and two of our other friends and we decided to meet up there on a future afternoon after teaching. Meanwhile I soaked up all the cool air I could while I perused the games that they had. I figured we'd mainly be playing fighting games like Street Fighter, because that was practically the only thing I had experience with, and playing them the same way I did back home too, which meant mostly button mashing and crossing your fingers. But when we actually got together and started hitting up the machines, two games far and away outpaced all the others in terms of getting the majority of both our time and our dimes Our Juendamas and our Tamas. Nope, this is where I learned about Mobile Suit Gundam or Kiro-Senshi Gundam, which is part of the people in giant robots fighting other people in giant robots. Genre Gundam was everywhere in Japan on the toy shells and the magazine racks, tv movies and, apparently, in video games. Off to one side in the Tenian Arcade, over in a little cove behind the base deray of air conditioners, were eight machines connected to each other with built-in stools to sit on. It was the Gundam Arcade game. It was amazing. You chose your Gundam robot, picked your special primary and backup weapons and then you were dropped into a 3D city environment and tasked with finding and blowing up the other team of Gundam robots. Since there were four people in our group, we could frequently play as a full squad that seems like such a weirdly intense term for friends playing a game, but whatever and then we'd often play against another squad of four, usually Japanese junior high or high school students in the after-school versions of their uniforms, which meant maybe a missing tie or rolled up sleeves, earrings or spiked hair that wouldn't have flown in the classroom. And they were also there in the afternoon doing exactly the same thing. We were avoiding the heat. The four of us in my group were myself, my roommate Trell from Atlanta, ken from Alaska and Cesar from Mexico City. We all worked for the same education company and we're all English teachers at junior, high and high schools in the city, so we got along with our opponents pretty naturally. We also got completely mollywopped by them at first, but at only 10-year-old in a play, and since we could be posted up there for hours at a time, we slowly got better at the game, as well as getting better at friendly and not so friendly trash talk in Japanese. Now let me break away from the 10-year-old arcade again for a moment and tell you that there were lots of other arcades I would go to with my friends. Like I said, there were many levels of arcade in the Japanese arcade ecosystem to accommodate each phase of the game's life. Another level of arcade well, arcade, and then some, was JJ Club. Jj Club was a place where you got a wristband, going in and got it scanned on the way out, and then you paid for all the time that you were inside. I think it was 100 yen per 15 minutes. But then everything inside, all the games and activities, were free. The inside of JJ Club, which was a franchise that had a ton of locations across Japan. The inside of each one was slightly different. I don't remember JJ Clubs for the video games so much. I mean they had the usual assortment and a couple of odd ones sometimes. Okay, I do remember playing a skiing game where you race the person next to you down a virtual mountain but you're standing on these moving platforms that look kind of like chopped off skis. But I think of JJ Club more for the other activities inside, like pool tables, an indoor volleyball court, some small basketball courts, a rock climbing wall at one, and then there was an entire floor of books to read, ping-pong tables and a soda fountain slash slushy machine. When I moved up to Hokkaido later on, there were still JJ Clubs that I went to, but I also started seeing a place called Round 1 popping up in those same cities and they were usually in larger spaces like, I think, often closed down shopping centers. Round 1 had pretty much everything I described about JJ Club, along with roller skating, fishing where you could catch actual fish. Theoretically I never did that one because I couldn't imagine what I would do carrying a fish in a bag or whatever for the rest of my time. But you could do it. You could also do curling ride, a mechanical bull batting cages. There was a mini golf course, mini motorcycles that you would ride around the roller skating rink. When they shut it down specifically for the mini motorcycles every few hours, it was unbelievable. I mean, obviously, having someone else there to play with you is huge to the experience. I never went to a JJ Club or Round 1 alone. There were always other people with me. Same with the Tenian Arcade. That was one thing I didn't get at the Nickel Arcade in Fresno, so I called up my friend Drew.

Speaker 3: 25:56

Hey Scott, hey Drew.

Speaker 1: 25:58

There's an arcade called High Scores in Alameda, california, and you pay to get in and then stay for however much time you bought, and inside all the arcade games are free, like how JJ Club in Japan was. This place was only arcade games, but that's perfect, because that's all I was really looking for.

Speaker 3: 26:17

Thanks for doing this with me. I was figuring we'd just go in and play some video games old school style and just have a good time. That's really it.

Speaker 2: 26:26

It's going to be easy.

Speaker 3: 26:27

I haven't been to an arcade in years. This is really nice for me, man.

Speaker 4: 26:31

How you doing today Good.

Speaker 3: 26:33

I wanted to get two one hour tickets to the arcade?

Speaker 4: 26:37

Sure thing. So, guys, most of the machines here are going to start up automatically if you just hit the one or two player start button. Okay, you see a yellow button down on the point door. You just want to press that first added credit and then you can hit the start button. We've got several machines like Furgood Time over here, zalada. There's a couple other ones in there that are multi-caged, so they play a whole bunch of games on them, not just arcade games. We've got console NES, super NES, sega Genesis. So if you're looking for a game in particular, just let me know, okay, thanks, thanks yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:08

This is actually my first time meeting Drew in person. I was a little nervous. We had connected early on during the pandemic and a text thread with a mutual friend and had played computer games together online, but this was our first time seeing each other in real life.

Speaker 3: 27:23

You want to just take a look around? Yeah, oh shoot, I didn't know there was a Super.

Speaker 2: 27:28

Smash Brothers arcade Whoa Okay.

Speaker 3: 27:30

I'll play that a bunch, yeah yeah. What is this Pac-Man Battle Royale? Alright, you a Pac-Man man, I am.

Speaker 1: 27:44

Just like at the Nickel Arcade, we bounced around and hit up any game that caught our attention.

Speaker 3: 27:49

Well, we can alternate pick and stuff if you want to, if you see stuff you want to go for.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Whatever?

Speaker 3: 27:55

Let's try a game you want to try. Alright, the straight up old Donkey Kong. I've never played this. Old Donkey Kong. Let's play it. Is it two player? Yeah, okay, you know I switch in and out. There's only one button jump. You just have to avoid. Really so Donkey Kong's rude. He takes our girlfriend up to the top of this thing and then he throws barrels at us and we have to jump over them. There's a place to get a hammer if you get up high enough, but I usually die.

Speaker 2: 28:26

So Donkey.

Speaker 3: 28:27

Kong's a bad guy. Donkey Kong's a total bad guy, absolutely Wow, I'm going to go up here. Oh, oh, I need to get this hammer.

Speaker 1: 28:40

We played a ton of games. Both of us got to introduce the other two some games and we had a great time. It was way more fun playing games with Drew than it was going solo. Before I edited out a lot of the audio that was just us playing games, but we stayed there a while.

Speaker 3: 28:54

Alright, I don't know how much time we got. You want to try any stuff in here? Let's go in here. You want to try the?

Speaker 2: 29:11

shooting one, let's do it.

Speaker 3: 29:13

Alright, let's do it. We're shooting aliens, or?

Speaker 2: 29:16

wait, are we doing maximum force or area 51?

Speaker 3: 29:20

I don't have any Either way. Maybe area 51. We got to kill those aliens. Beginning yeah.

Speaker 4: 29:39

Oh, my gosh dude, I have played this game.

Speaker 3: 29:42

I have played this game, dude. I have not seen this in more than a decade.

Speaker 1: 29:48

It turns out that, even though I am not good at video games, I am also not good at being conversational and present while I am video gaming either, so I would probably be a terrible Twitch streamer.

Speaker 3: 30:01

What about the helicopter? Oh wow, this one has like a bunch. What's this one? It's like I think this is the emulator he was talking about where it has a bunch of things. Does it have my favorite? No way, wait a minute. How do I? It's alphabetized right.

Speaker 2: 30:29

D, f, D B. No okay, Ultimately.

Speaker 3: 30:34

I was looking for Bomberman. If I could find it on this, that would be like my Holy Grail. Yeah, no, okay, cool.

Speaker 1: 30:45

So remember how I said, there were two games that we really got into at the Tenian Arcade? Well, one was Gundam, but the other one was just a single unassuming cabinet directly diagonal to the wall of air conditioning, holding a simple four-player game called Bomberman. I guess Bomberman is a Nintendo staple, but back to me not being a video game kid, this was my introduction to the game. If you're not familiar with it either, bomberman is a game where players start off in different corners of a square map and there are blocks separating them from each other. When the timer starts, you run around and drop bombs near the blocks to blow them up, collect any power-ups inside and make your way toward the middle of the map and the other players. Using power-ups over the course of the round, each player can get more bombs, make their bombs affect a larger area when they explode, get the ability to move faster all sorts of fun things. The rules are simple, though. If you get hit by a bomb blast even your own you're out and you play until there's only one player remaining. The end of the round becomes a fast-paced, chaotic frenzy of trapping each other and escaping giant bomb blasts. Bomberman might be the most fun I've had playing a video game in my life. If Gundam was where we went to trash talk with Japanese players, then Bomberman was where we went to trash talk with each other. The rounds were only two minutes, but to win the match you had to get three victories. That meant if each of us put in 10 yen and we all got two wins apiece before someone got a third, we were playing nine games, so like about 20 minutes on that 10 yen and we were all getting better at roughly the same rate. So no one really dominated our match and an even spread of wins like that happened pretty frequently. 30 cents an hour for incredible fun and amazing air conditioning in the heart of Kokora that's a pretty unbeatable deal. A perfect place to hide from the heat.

Speaker 3: 32:38

Leo Geo Press it. Oh, this plays 100 plus games. Hold on Really, for 10 seconds to see the menu. Hey, I've played this game. Hold on a second, I get to see the menu. If I hold this, oh, there's like a menu and stuff.

Speaker 5: 32:57

I don't know that's what it says Okay On Leo Geo multi-video system, An SK.

Speaker 3: 33:02

That was like Bomberman. Are you kidding me? Let's do it Bomberman. Hold on a second I want to see what else is here. Dude, if Bomberman's on here, that's like the holy grail for me. Okay, Rubble Dude, that's crazy. I can't believe. I looked it up on an arcade place looking for Bomberman arcades and I couldn't find one. Okay, Bomberman number 10, that's it. Oh my gosh, it's probably old, old school Bomberman, but that's okay, it's a pretty old game dude. This looks old. It's going to be cool. Yeah, it is Well. The game, the core of Bomberman, is so simple. You're just dropping bombs and walking away from them. You know. That's all right. That's in Spanish, that's weird, oh it is in Spanish. Cuegos solo con su. So do you start? This is older than the version I played. Choose the place in which word you want to play. Are you in?

Speaker 2: 34:11

With who do you want to play?

Speaker 3: 34:14

Oh, you can move too. Okay, I'm going to try.

Speaker 2: 34:16

This is a regular Bomberman.

Speaker 3: 34:19

Who's this guy? All right, so I think the same thing goes, we go, we drop bombs.

Speaker 2: 34:25

Dude, look at me. I'm camouflaged the flames make you get longer the skates make you go faster.

Speaker 3: 34:34

This is actually. It's wild. What's with the arrows on?

Speaker 2: 34:40

there, yeah, it's really old school.

Speaker 3: 34:42

It's nice, oh flames.

Speaker 1: 34:50

Now, the version I found here was an older generation of Bomberman and entirely in Spanish. That was on an emulator with a ton of games that had been placed into a cabinet. But this Bomberman didn't really remind me of the one I played back in Japan. To be honest, it was a bit janky of a version to begin with and I'll admit, bomberman also lacks a bunch when there are only two players instead of four.

Speaker 3: 35:15

This game is great, man Dude, it's so fun.

Speaker 1: 35:17

I know, I know I was just crowing about having two players for these games, but like with a lot of games, board games and video games that, like changing the number of people playing can really change the dynamic of the game. Game developers try to compensate for this with computer players, but even the best AI player falls short compared to playing with real people.

Speaker 3: 35:42

I think maybe we should skedaddle. We should skedaddle. Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, you skated a little longer. That was fun, dude, it was man. I hit everything kind of long behind. I can't believe I found a Bomberman. That was ridiculous and I lost it over and over again. Thank you, thank you. Get some of that you too.

Speaker 2: 36:00

Thank you All right, all right.

Speaker 1: 36:08

High scores was really fun. I had a great time playing games with Drew, but at the same time, it was still missing some central aspect of that 10-yen arcade that I was trying to recreate A dynamic that's just not going to be the same with only one or even two players. I searched for both Gundam and Bomberman online. I found a version of what looks like it could be the Gundam game I played on Steam, but it's like $70 and I can't totally be sure if it's the right game. Also, gundam is my second choice. Anyway, my first choice was always going to be Bomberman, and I happened upon a version of that on Steam as well, called Super Bomberman R Online. It looked pretty much exactly how I remembered the version we used to play, so I downloaded it. It's a free game to play, but I shelled out $10 for the premium version so I could host a private game with people. And then I asked a group of online friends if we could play Bomberman one night. Oh, I found out. This game is also on the Nintendo Switch, so you can find it there if you have one of those.

Speaker 4: 37:09

I literally don't have any idea what's going on.

Speaker 1: 37:12

right now it's about to drop us down in separate spots on the map and you put a bomb down by hitting space and you run away from your bomb because it's going to blow up. And you do that over and over again to blow up the block and get power ups and then also to try and attack each other when we get through all the blocks that are between us. It'll take a little bit of getting used to, but once you get used to it it'll make a lot of sense.

Speaker 5: 37:43

And shortly try to blow up the other people, not yourself.

Speaker 1: 37:45

Two of these voices should be familiar Mine and Drew's from earlier in this episode.

Speaker 3: 37:51

Hey Scott, hey Drew.

Speaker 1: 37:53

The other two are Shane and Lee. Shane and Lee go way back and we all play video games together online from time to time.

Speaker 5: 38:02

Can I be green? Is anybody else green? It was all.

Speaker 2: 38:07

How do you change your color?

Speaker 3: 38:11

Oh, you can change the bomb skin. You can change that. Yeah, it's dope.

Speaker 5: 38:23

But I mean, yeah, the original was. I think it was an AES game.

Speaker 3: 38:28

Oh, look at that.

Speaker 5: 38:35

Oh, this is sick. And the second Bomberman that I know of, anyway, was Bomberman 64, and at the time it was an Nintendo exclusive. Well, maybe it had on like Gameware play.

Speaker 2: 38:50

Did you want that? No, I think you did.

Speaker 4: 38:54

So basically we're getting resources like in Fortnite.

Speaker 1: 38:56

Yeah, we're getting power-ups, we're getting better weapons, we're upgrading our bomb. Back once again to me not being a video game guy. I didn't start playing computer games online with friends until the pandemic started and everyone was stuck in their houses, but it's been one of the regular things during this. That has helped me keep it mostly together most of the time, or maybe somewhat together some of the time.

Speaker 2: 39:36

Whatever, oh no.

Speaker 1: 39:48

After a bit of getting oriented to the game, especially since the controls are so simple, it was really easy for us to have random conversations while we played, the kind of unplanned spitballing discussions that are nothing really but also are everything Shamed throughout. The hypothetical scenario where, if you get a room and then you could plunk down three arcade machines in it to own and play whatever, what are you picking? I mean, I mean like the extended machines, like arcade machines if I get three, this is definitely one I think I also might want a street fighter game yep, that's on there, yeah, yeah, the turtles, the turtles. I was gonna say either the turtle or I have another soft spot that might really be out there. Yeah, the four player x-men game where you could be colossus yes, yeah, and and and I like my car uh-huh

Speaker 2: 40:41

uh-huh I came we're feeling it.

Speaker 5: 40:44

We're on the same page here she's paining.

Speaker 4: 40:50

I know because we worked in an arcade circus.

Speaker 5: 40:53

You know the best how I ever had I if I could make a third of the money I do now to do that job, I would quit my job right now we should do it, shane, we should, we should go back and work I would so do it. That was the.

Speaker 3: 41:06

I'm so sad that it's not there oh, no, oh, this poison makes me really slow.

Speaker 5: 41:13

Come over here, drudin, now it's yours oh no friend that worked at chucky and he says he got kicked in the nuts. Oh, I got kicked in the nuts, man. Oh yeah, but it was still worth it. That was the best job ever only one problem, shane, you get kicked in the nuts no, that part, that part sucks, but you just had to guard them.

Speaker 3: 41:36

I work up man I think I killed the game.

Speaker 5: 41:38

I'm sorry that's okay, I started again all right, creating room.

Speaker 3: 41:42

All right, I think I'm gonna be pink this time I'm not holding.

Speaker 5: 41:46

I'm gonna stick with green.

Speaker 3: 41:47

I'm a green dude it's got good suggestion man this is a fun game.

Speaker 1: 41:52

I love this game. I mean, I just played it over and over again. The tenian arcades do still exist, tucked away in larger cities. Uh, I did a google search in japan just now and a few popped up here and there. I remember being in tokyo on a work trip and finding a tenian arcade in the basement of a skyscraper one night with a group of friends. But we had to look it up intentionally and search it out even then. So they are findable, just probably a bit off the beaten path all right.

Speaker 5: 42:21

So here's the here's a couple. If we're gonna expand on games in our personal arcades, I have a couple that I really want yeah I'm gonna go beyond the three limit here. I'm gonna say I have a whole room for all the consoles that I want, I want, I want asteroids, I want asteroids and I want and I want pacman, I want donkey kong jr. Not donkey kong, but donkey kong jr why jr? you know what it's because it was. There was a pizza joint next to the the house that my mother moved into and my parents got divorced. He lived there for like two and a half years and that pizza joint was like two doors down and I went there every day to buy a garlic bread pizza for four dollars and it was delicious and they had that game and I played it waiting for my garlic bread pizza, and so like there's, it's like some of my happiest memories of childhood and so wanted for that reason I want it. I remember waiting for my garlic bread pizza for four dollars and playing that game over and over, and I loved it.

Speaker 3: 43:31

It's great I want to change.

Speaker 1: 43:35

I want to change the three consoles I would have in my thing. You made me think go so I would keep bomber man, I would put in cruising, like one of the cruising usa or cruising world, whatever the oh my god, I have a story that, like the driving game, I'll put one of those in, oh my god. And then I would put in the taiko no tatsujin, the taiko game from japan, where you're playing the taiko drum oh, that's a good one.

Speaker 5: 44:04

That's a really good one. Oh, that's a hard one to be. You can't say no to that one, jen. Yeah so good it's satisfying to give that a good. Oh yeah, that's so good. That's such a great one. There's so much fun to be on for that one and that's one of those things we like that, like the in-house peripheral just doesn't make the grade. Like you got it. You got to get the thing in the arcade. Yeah, you got to get the big old thing.

Speaker 1: 44:26

Yeah, man, that's good stuff while researching for this episode, I came across an article on kotakucom that said that in one decade, from 2006 to 2016, 10 000 arcades closed down in japan, making the number go from 24 000 to 14 000. It also explained the domino effect of tax raises on the arcades. The owners collectively decided that they had to stick with the one coin model. For instance, they wouldn't consider going from a 100 yen, which is one coin, to 110 yen game, two coins. Or in the 10-yen arcades case, that would be going from a 10-yen game, which is one coin, two, and 11-yen game, two coins. The arcade owners in the video game industry opted just to absorb the tax and take slimmer margins over and over, and that's not even accounting for inflation, not to mention. It's a different landscape when everyone has access to a device with a constantly refreshing supply of new games in their house or even in their pocket, when you can connect to friends and strangers through hd video across the globe while you play, then how long can a house of aging cabinet screens and joysticks really last? A japan times article reported that the official number was only 4 2022 by 2019, and that number was pre-covid, which I can't imagine helped the arcade industry there. If things are this on the decline even in japan one of the last holdouts for the video game arcade they may be on their way to extinction for good, which would be a real shame. Of all the experiences I tried for this episode, playing games online comes the closest to taking me back to that time, back to playing games for ten yen a pop at that wonderfully chilly arcade in the height of the sweltering kyu-shu summer, making friends, having relaxed conversations and the occasional panic attack, laughing fit or both so. And with that, the ten yen arcade in japan becomes the next entry into the perfectorium, the index of perfect things. Don't forget. You can find a direct link to the perfectorium by going to perfect show dot site slash perfectorium. You can also find all the credits and links for the music in the show notes or on this episode's web page. I want to thank drew, shane and lee for letting me use the audio of us in this episode and also just for being fun guys to play games with. This episode was recorded in fresno, alameda and oakland, california, and mixed up marina studios in oakland. Subscribe if you'd like to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop. The perfect show, a perfect rating, a review? Please do. It's easiest way to support the show once again. The perfect show site is at perfectshowsite. That's s-i-t-e. Email any comments, music or other things to perfectshowshowcom. Connect on twitter, instagram and youtube to the name perfect show show. And remember if someday, decades from now, you find yourself looking at an exhibit in the smithsonian learning all about what arcade games were like before they went extinct, and they happen to have a playable version of that four-player x-men game and I happen to be there at the exact same time as you, I called, did some colossus. Anyway, until next time, I'm scott moppin, and thanks for listening to the perfect show.

Speaker 4: 50:12

I'm gonna eat 58.