After 56 years, SEGA Officially Sells Off All Its Arcades

There may still be cabinets in rows with flashing lights and electronic sounds — but Polygon reports a historic change in the world of videogame arcades: Even though arcades all over the world have been in a steady decline over the past 20 years, owing to the ubiquity of console and PC gaming, they've kept a fairly major place in Japan's gaming culture. However, in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, even Japan's arcades started to falter. In late 2020 Sega sold 85% of its shares in the company's arcades, which are run by the Sega Entertainment division, to Genda. Now, as new variants of COVID-19 crop up and the arcade business continues to struggle, Sega has sold the remaining shares to Genda as well, according to Eurogamer and Tojodojo.

Sega's arcades will be renamed GiGO throughout Japan, according to a tweet from Genda chief executive Takashi Kataoka.
"It's worth noting that although Sega's Entertainment business ran its arcade locations, the company manufactured and sold arcade machines themselves separately and will likely continue to do so," reports Video Games Chronicle.

And "While it is sad to see an era of Sega's history come to an end, this doesn't mean Sega will stop making actual arcade games," notes the Metro, which points out that Sega "has continued to supply arcades with new games right up to the present day."

But Syfy Wire notes the news comes "after a remarkable 56 years maintaining a coin-operated gaming presence from its native Japan." In memory Eurogamer shared it editor-in-chief's posts about visiting Tokyo's iconic arcade and anime district Akihabara.

At Arcades, you could get to know new friends

[ffkom]

... and I mean actual, human friends, which you could share many more interests with than just video games.
Not that ephemeral crowd of online trolls, cheaters and irrelevant acquaintances that will you will never meet again after the next "game over" - or after the "online gaming service" has been switched off.

Re: At Arcades, you could get to know new friends

[NagrothAgain]

I never really saw arcades as a place to make friends. Maybe for a few socially stunted people. But for most of us, if you actually "met" someone at the arcade it was because you were smoking cigarettes or weed with them behind the arcade. I've been told that during the era where an arcade was primarily pinball and pool tables it was more of a "social club" environment.

Re:

[ffkom]

I was never into smoking, but in my youth there were usually more people around the machines than could be playing at any one time, and thus many would just spectate those currently playing, and naturally that was leading to the spectators talking with each other, and not only on the topic of the ongoing game.

Later on, when I was an adult, I liked playing Billiard a lot, we usually went to a public place where they had tables, and it was not uncommon to just play against others you met there if you could n

Re:

[Aighearach]

I practically grew up in the arcade, and it was never a place to make friends. It was a place to compete against whoever that guy with the funny initials is. And if you met, you just played the game, you didn't talk. If you talked to somebody it was because you knew them from somewhere else.

Re:

[irreverant]

... and I mean actual, human friends, which you could share many more interests with than just video games. Not that ephemeral crowd of online trolls, cheaters and irrelevant acquaintances that will you will never meet again after the next "game over" - or after the "online gaming service" has been switched off.

Agreed. It was were we had Mortal Kombat & Capcom vs. Marvel tournaments. It feels like forever.

Too bad

[phantomfive]

Arcades in Japan are a lot of fun.

Re:

[phantomfive]

I think you under-estimate how inclusive Japanese society is.

Re:

[OngelooflijkHaribo]

What makes them more fun than elsewhere?

Do they have male waiters in maid uniforms who roleplay as your younger female siblings who act like they had you, but quite transparently are actually fun of you? — That seems fun to me.

Re:

[phantomfive]

What makes them more fun than elsewhere?

A) They exist
B) They have a good variety of fun games (unlike the quarter gobblers that fill the few remaining arcades in the US)
C) There are enough people to feel camaraderie, but not so many that you can't get the game you want.

So many quarters

[quonset]

How many of us wonder how much money we poured into arcade games over the years? How much paper route/grocery store money did we schlep to the mall or bowling alley to get in an hour or so of pure bliss entertainment?

Quarter after quarter shoved into a slot while we stood at a cabinet shooting down wave after wave of invading armadas or blasting hordes of enemy tanks or onrushing creatures.

Today's kids will never know the agony of hoping your favorite game wasn't being occupied by someone else or worse, having to stand by as patiently as possible while they screwed up screens you could easily get through, only to see them put in another quarter when they died or time ran out.

Today's kids will never know.

Re:So many smashed nickels

[echo123]

When I was a kid, right when arcades became a thing, the local mall's arcade machines worked solely off tokens. Maybe you got 5 for a dollar or something like that, I can't remember.

It didn't take a 14-ish year old genius to figure out that smashing a nickel with a hammer made it the perfect width and diameter of an arcade token. That worked really well for a while. :)

Which no doubt led to my subsequent criminal activity of forging local pizza coupons using photographic typesetting machines once I

Arcades were a good thing, and I miss them

[realmolo]

I can't deny the appeal of playing games at home, and playing online. But arcades were just...great.

Young gamers that don't live in Japan have never got to experience the full "arcade culture", and that's too bad. You made friends, you had fun, and you "got good".

The "got good" part is something I really miss about arcades, honestly. Not having a game at home, and having to spend money on it, and having limited lives, adds a LOT to most games. You were motivated to get your money's worth, every time you played.

I have fond memories of "beating" arcade games at my neighborhood convenience store. All of the kids my age played the games, and we'd play them constantly until all of us could beat them, and then they'd replace them. It was good times.

I remember all of us playing "Vs. Super Mario Bros." before the NES was available in the US. We all could beat it without dying, and without warping. Eventually we started going for max points, which meant killing as many enemies and destroying as many bricks as possible, and ALSO meant landing on the "hammer" at the end of each World (after defeating Bowser) with exactly "000" seconds left. Do that, and the timer resets to "999", and you get all those points for "time remaining".

We did that with all the games they had. Hell we did that with *Gauntlet*, which took forever and cost a collective fortune. But it was great.

/ when the NES came out, we were all excited to play Super Mario Bros. at *home* for *free*. But it wasn't the "Vs." version, and it was *pathetically* easy compared to the "Vs." version. I remember how pissed off we all were about that.

Re:

[freeze128]

Another benefit of real arcades is that you would sometimes get promotional items for beating a game. I have a button for being one of the first at our arcade to complete Space Ace on the hardest difficulty, a couple of T-shirts (Gauntlet II, Toobin), etc. I beat Road Blasters which offers a t-shirt, but it was just past the cut-off date.

Also, the arcade itself offered free items on its anniversary. I have a couple of marbles with the arcade logo on it (maybe to promote pinball, or marble madness), and als

Do your bucket list items

[weeboo0104]

When my family went to Thailand in 2018, my wife and I had agreed that visiting Japan was one of our bucket list items. I'm happy to say that we turned our layover in Tokyo into a 3 day stay and saw a few things there. One of those things we took our daughter to was the Sega Arcade in Shinjuku, the Pokemon Center, and Inokashira park. You just never know how long places and people are going to be around.

That's a real shame...

[SvnLyrBrto]

The continuing survival and popularity of arcades was a really fun and cool part of visiting not just Japan, but a number of other countries in Asia, pre-COVID. And it's more than a little bit depressing just how it's been allowed to destroy so many of our social and fun-time activities, with no equivalent replacements. Glad I got to see at least some of it before life was reduced to this dour dreariness.

SEGA Officially Seals Off All Its Arcades

[Ronin441]

At first glance I read the headline as "SEGA Officially Seals Off All Its Arcades".
And I wanna see that story. In 3033 AD, retrocomputing archaeologists open up the sealed arcades, blow the dust off, replace all the electrolytic capacitors...

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[glendanoble]

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