But With Model Horses

In 2018, with the usual absence of interest in the spacebar, Konami released GI-WorldClassic – “The start of a new history of horse racing medal games”.

This is real gambling with pretend money that costs real money.

“Don’t I stand to win anything?”

“Look: in the long run, we all know where this is going. Would it be too much trouble to optimise the flow of cash into my pocket by letting the finer details play out with worthless tokens?”

“Of course not, Mr/Ms Konami. It’s the least I can do since you’re going to the trouble of robbing me blind.”

“Robbing you?! Would you like to go home to your family instead?”

“I’m sorry, I spoke out of turn.”

I wrote about Sigma Derby, the quaint tin-toy flutter from 1985. This is its legacy: a 20-station behemoth with ashtrays, touchscreens and nested menus all the way down. (Top-end “GD” on the WorldClassic website.)

For fuck-you irony, it swamps the medal floor in Adores – Sigma’s arcade-chain descendant where it used to throw boom cash in show-off at glamorous floozies.

Konami put out a similar thing in Vegas called Fortune Cup. Of course, the horses have to be covered by bulletproof glass because it’s in America, but otherwise it’s the same.

It was a direct play to erase from history Sigma’s beloved mechanical derby track of yesteryear.

Flop.

Look stupid, Konami. Turns out punters weren’t so desperate to bet on mechanical horses that they just made do with ancient tech. They liked the rattling old shitty horses and 25¢ plays. They liked the outdated economics where the money was sucked out of them surely but slowly.

Sigma Derby died when the Las Vegas D decommissioned the final table in 2018. No floozies now; just drab dinosaurs saying “floozy”.

There’s no gap in the market for rose-tinted, golden-era horse betting: GI-WorldClassic is just another high-square-footage engine to turn lethargy into profit.

But with model horses.