The underground network that brings arcades from Japan to the United States

Last October, Phil Arrington precariously balanced a dream on the cargo bed of his 2002 Ford Ranger pickup. It was a silly dream, but he didn’t deserve to die on a cart behind a beige warehouse.

Arrington was bent over the cart, the gold chain dangling from a tight gray t-shirt. Between his arms, leaning at a 45-degree angle, was a video game arcade cabinet; his title, MUSECA, could be seen over his shoulder. The machine had come a long way – from an arcade in Tokyo to an unnamed warehouse in Osaka and then, after a long wait on a container ship outside Long Beach, California, to the warehouse of Arrington to San Pedro. Arrington effortlessly rolled the 6-foot-tall cabinet toward the pickup truck hatch. On the concrete 3 feet below, lay a thin blue blanket. Nearby, a telephone was recording.

Scuttling, repositioning, crouching, growling, Arrington pushed the weight of the machine inch by inch, second by second. Suddenly, the cart wheels slipped off the edge. His whole body lurched forward, and the arcade cabinet plummeted to the floor with a choppy crash. Underneath the video Arrington uploaded to Twitter, players expressed concern. “This is the scariest thing I’ve seen on the internet,” said one. Another said, sharply, “I don’t think my asshole has ever puckered harder.”

Watching the video from across the country in Brooklyn, I screamed. It was my machine.

Arrington picked his moment to explain himself, and it was days later, live on Twitch, crouched in a red bucket, searching for the dusty remains of a half-empty bag of Flamin’ Hot Doritos. His tone was not contrite. He intentionally cut the video at its most dramatic moment, he said. The machine was, in fact, intact. Arrington stood up, revealing athletic shorts and, tossing the bag of Hot Doritos aside, walked over to the mueca firm.

mueca was a glowing anime tag. A neon red spool springs from its base like a spine, supporting a console of five pastel-lit knobs, each the size of an adult hand. At an energetic pace, a player would press and spin these buttons at the right time to accumulate points, that is, if the game was working. The cabinet, fortunately, had started in a menu screen. “When you get something like this, you have to take care of it. It’s not like a Cadillac from the 60s or 70s, where people make parts for it,” Arrington said. He pressed Start. The display has gone blank. “Oh shit,” he said. But then, baby-voiced pop music blares from the speakers. “It does not matter.”

These days, mueca is an extraordinary find, Arrington said. Like the other machines Arrington helps import, it is primarily sold and played in arcades in Japan. In addition to that, Museca’s publisher Konami discontinued the game a few years ago. The machines were recalled from all over Japan and their parts were reused in a brand new game called Bishi Bashi. Not a lot mueca the cabinets have survived, making it a special prize for dedicated fans of Japan’s legendary arcade scene.

The country’s self-sizzling pleasure palaces have attracted millions of natives and foreigners otaku for decades, luring them with the promise of competition and escape for the price of a single 100 yen coin. Taito Corporation space invaders marked the launch of the industry in 1978, and in the following years the Japanese arcade scene flourished, spawning classics like donkey kong, Vs, and Street Fighter II. Tens of thousands of arcades sprung up, filled with crane games filled with googly-eyed Pokemon fluff; greasy racing sims; fantastic and shimmering role-playing or strategy games; scrape fighting games; and of course, the physical high of rhythm games like those from Konami dance dance revolution Where mueca.

Some titles, like DDR, have obtained an official license or have been released abroad, where they have become cultural references. But Konami, Taito, and other arcade game makers designed their best stuff exclusively for Japan, on idiosyncratic arcade hardware that was meant to stay there. “They don’t want these machines sold outside of Japan,” says Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese consulting firm Kantan Games. Lots of machines including mueca, state on their title screens that they are only intended to be played in Japan. In recent years, publishers like Konami have enforced this by ensuring that their arcade games only work when connected to their proprietary server with a proprietary protocol.

One of the main reasons for this is the logistics and the price of the licenses: the music, the distribution and the payment. It’s also a business calculation, adds Toto. “Arcade machines are no longer autonomous, they must be connected to a server, which makes their maintenance, control and operation more complex. They don’t want to have to provide this knowledge and maintenance services to companies outside of Japan. Lately, Japanese arcade chain Round1 has set up locations across the United States; but other than that, the typical American has almost no access to the thousands of authentic arcade machines that have made Japan famous as the holy land of gaming.

Today, however, Japanese arcades are in crisis. Game centers are closing with heartbreaking speed, in part due to competition from home game consoles and a tax hike that drove up the price of a single game. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of archway deflated from 24,000 to 14,000. The Covid has accelerated this trend, emptying the arcades of regulars and tourists alike. Between October 1 and November 24, 2021, 20 arcades closed in Japan.

When arcades close, their video games face one of three fates, only two of which are sanctioned by a Japanese trade association of game makers. The first is to throw yourself in a landfill. The second is to be gutted and sold in pieces, then dumped in a landfill. (Arrington calls it “the mafia treatment.”) Finally, the third: a Japanese distributor comes in and buys all the machines in a dying arcade. Some are sent across Japan in smaller arcades. Others, downstairs, come from enterprising Westerners like Arrington, a self-proclaimed “muscle guy” for gray market entrepreneurs who import thousands of cabinets from Japan every year.

Over the past five years, as Japanese arcade machines have become more available than ever, Western demand for Japanese machines has skyrocketed. To meet this demand, an underground network of gamers took on the challenge of evacuating these cabinets from Japan, transporting them around the world and hacking their code so that fans like me could finally, after all these years, play .