Staring Down the Brown Tube

The lights in Hey are famously blue. First foot off the IN escalator is *that* row of a dozen or so Egrets on either side. They actually have a Kodak PhotoPoint(TM) standee there now, the yellow greyed by the blue light, with a cutout for where experts say to point your camera. That’s actually true!

Or might as well be.

But if you can bare to have holstered that snapper just two more moments, you will discover that the lights are different on different parts of the floor. Different again on the floor above. But they’re all coloured, all strips, and all dim.

A Taito PR person told me, on an official photo shoot at Hey – not when I took this; this is from the hip: pretend to count ¥100s as you finger the shutter – she told me that the lights are all designed to optimise the legibility and beauty of the CRTs.

Actually, she said the beauty of the Brown Kans. And I learnt the Japanese for CRT.

These days, if it doesn’t have a memorable day out associated with it then new Japanese vocabulary probably won’t stick.

Games pictured here aren’t CRT, but the funky lighting continues, and shines now from the cabinets themselves – especially the green Border Breaks with the cross robots supervising to ensure proper facial greenliness.

Tekken 7 is happy to go with the room’s pink.