Nfs Underground Arcade

[Trinidad Baltzell]

Iam a big fan of arcade games. They remind me of being a kid, digging for quarters in the couc,h and going to the mall. If you want a dose of nostalgia you need to check out Pinball Jones in Old Town Square in Fort Collins.

underground space, with a bunch of games. Many of them were the old 'penny-arcade' type boardwalk amusements, and they also a had a few very early b/w only arcade games, like red baron. It was either late 70s or early 80s, I can't remember precisely. I'd love to see some old pictures from this place.... or if anyone remembers what it was called....

I don't think it was the bar code, unless that goes underground and has old electromechanical penny-arcades in it. Did penn station have any of the things I mentioned? I remember it being not part of an actual working train station...

Barcode (when it was open) has you walk into a street level entrance, but everything was in the basement of the place. You had to go down a couple flights of stairs. It did not look too much like a train or subway statino though.

Formerly called Flipperspiel Wunderland, the Flipperspiel Underground Arcade Club is a social club that focuses on retro video gaming and pinball machines. Located in world famous Las Vegas, Nevada we hope to provide a classic arcade experience with a focus on tournament and competitive play.

We respect your privacy and promise not to sell your information...unless we were offered a lot of money. I mean everyone has their price right? Just sayin'. Seriously though, it would have to be like a million dollars or something so you're probably good ;-)

So 15 years ago, what happened was Americans would get together over IRCs and forums and coordinate what were called group buys. They would order like 40 cabinets off of a Japanese distributor, just somehow bring it over in a container over a ship that costs like $3,000, and then it would all go to some guy's house in New Jersey. They would just rent a U-Haul and bring the machines back to their house and then try and desperately find someone online who could hack into those machines.

Over the last five to seven years, as demand for these machines has increased, a semi-professional industry has formed around bringing these machines over from Japan. People who have stable distributor connections, people who understand the shipping industry a little bit better. And as you said, there's one person on the East Coast, one person on the West. It's pretty small, but they're bringing over like over a million dollars of cabinets a year.

That's incredible. It's incredibly grassroots, it seems. You were mentioning, it's just a bunch of people pooling for a shipping container.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, one big part of this is that arcades in Japan are closing at a rapid-fire rate. And that was a trend that preceded COVID, but has really been exacerbated by COVID. Ten thousand arcades closed over 2006 to 2016 in Japan, and over the last couple of years there has been news story after news story of these famous Japanese arcades just shuttering because people don't want to go to them and get COVID. When those arcades shutter, the machines, they go to a landfill maybe. A lot of the time they just kind of get junked or junked and sold for parts. A lot of the distributors who talk to me really view themselves as saving these games.

I mean, I don't know. I can't come out there and recommend that people go and find the Japanese arcade machine of their dreams and bring it to their Brooklyn apartment and fill their space with that. Because it, frankly, there is no justification. It was lockdown-induced mania. But I have to say, it's the coolest thing I own. And it makes me so happy every day I see it.

And then it showed up at this warehouse in California and the guy who had it, Phil Arrington, who is just the most fun dude, who helps distribute these Japanese machines, posted a video of himself wheeling it off his Ford pickup truck and it almost fell. And that was the first thing that could have gone wrong! Twenty other things could have gone wrong between then and it coming to my house. And thankfully, after a couple replaced fuses it works.

It's a great story. I couldn't stop reading it. It reads like a heist at times. It was just like, my God, I can't believe we pulled it off. But yeah, no, it's just such a wonderful read. I'm so happy that you were able to write it and that you finally caught the white whale.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. I was kind of shocked that other people shared my enthusiasm for this and that it was so well received by the community and people who were not part of it as well. So honestly, I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to have written it.

Yeah. It's great. You are departing Wired. You've been in the game for a while, you've been at Kotaku, you've spent a great deal of time at Wired that produced some really fascinating stuff, and now your next steps are at Bloomberg. What kind of stories are you kind of most excited to cover moving forward?

Oh, thank you for asking that. I do identify as an investigative journalist, so I'm really excited to be exploring issues around labor and gender in the world of video games and particularly at video game publishers.

If you're someone who has a story you want to tell me, please reach out. I'd love to hear it.

Yeah. It's been a very interesting time for stories of that nature.

Yeah, absolutely. I just have so much gratitude for the people who work at these game companies who are willing to take a stand and who are willing to share their experiences with journalists like us. So much is happening right now and it's just all inspiring to see.

That's exciting. Well, again, really looking forward to what you come up with next. This story's been fascinating. I guess, where can folks find you? Where can folks find your work?

You can find me at Bloomberg starting on January 24th, 2022. My Twitter is @cecianasta.

When a Japanese arcade closes, one of three things happen: their video games are sent to a landfill, they\u2019re gutted and sold for parts and then sent to a landfill, or a distributor will buy up all of an arcade\u2019s machines. From there, they\u2019ll either sell them to smaller arcades around Japan, or they\u2019ll discreetly load up a shipping container and send them to the U.S., where an avid collector base is ravenous for off-the-books arcade cabinets, even if the manufacturers hate it. It\u2019s a brisk business thanks to home gaming consoles and a tax that raised the cost of playing arcade games: from 2006 to 2016, the number of arcades declined from 24,000 to 14,000. With a connection to the right grey-market distributor, a cabinet can be had for $1,000 to $6,000.

I was somewhat obsessed with this story; it\u2019s an incredible exploration of globalization, of cultural shifts in Japan, about underground digital networks, of fandom, it\u2019s just got everything. I was so excited to talk to Cecilia about her quest to get MUSECA, an arcade game, into her home.

You wrote a fascinating story that seemed like it had been years in the making. Do you want to tell me a little bit about how you got into Japanese arcade games and kind of where this story began to bloom?

Yeah, of course. This has been kind of a white whale for me; several years ago I met a friend who had a Street Fighter cabinet in his apartment in Brooklyn. And I was like, \\\"Man, that is so cool. How did you get that?\\\" And he was like, \\\"Look, I can tell you a little bit about it, but I can't tell you the whole story.\\\" Which for a journalist it's like, oh man, what is that story? I thought about doing this story for a lot of years, but what really actually triggered it was my own journey, getting my own arcade cabinet.

Essentially I went to this arcade on Long Island called Round1. It's a Japanese arcade, and in that arcade, I fell in love with this game called MUSECA. It's a rhythm game. It's like DDR [Dance Dance Revolution] except you play it with your hands. It's playing Japanese pop music and trance, and it's got all of these anime characters' art. It's just an exquisite game. It's so fun. I just \u2014 maybe in lockdown-induced mania \u2014 I just had to find one. And that's the framing for this story.

You reveal something so cool about how this market works. Because you go into in the piece that this was not the original plan for these video games, many of them are actually explicitly designed to not function outside of Japan, but nevertheless, there's a group of fans, and a West Coast concern and an East Coast concern. I just kind of love to hear about how these actually get stateside.

A little history, so years ago, about a decade to 15 years ago, Americans still wanted to bring over Japanese arcade games because they're really awesome, and they're only in Japan and they only exist on this really idiosyncratic clunky hardware. Think bringing over a whole DDR machine \u2014 DDR is actually a bad example because there was an American DDR machine release \u2014 but the situation is that a lot of Japanese publishers didn't want the games to leave Japan. There are a variety of reasons for that. Licensing is one, also they want to make sure that the games can be adequately maintained, sources told me. But lately, they have this proprietary authentication software; they have to connect to a server run by the game publisher in order for them to even boot.

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