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, yellow greyed by the blue light, with a cutout for where experts say to point your camera. That’s actually true!
That Sega logo does well standing out in this Higashi Shinjuku square. The brand is so clear it’s like this here is the label on the insideout city of Tokyo.
Game Spot 21 is a real-deal arcade. Finger-crossing that it comes back post-Covid – and dirtier than ever.
Easter eggshaped image from the loserdrop stairwell that squeezes you between the prize machines and a Chinese into a Fight Club-style fighting-game fight club.
The guy running P&P lives fussy, at his desk with his daily paper, ice tea just so. Everything’s covered in handwritten instructions: the Label Crazy Blast City I’ve posted before, the tiny washiki toilet with its triangular basin/cistern, and this old Astro, who’s been told what to do its whole life.
In Akihabara, the arcades don’t have to be polite. On the contrary, it would be the zakkaya or Ginza stationer who would have to apologise to passersby.
Compared to home, Tokyo gets dark early and stays warm late. So night is a playground.
How to be sure you’re in Tokyo
Oh, c'mon! They're practically jumping into the claw!
Tokyo fix-all multipurpose commercial realty. Quietly stylish. Slick enough to skirt vogue for a decade; unobtrusive enough to get old and hide.
Have a good time!! Welcome to a special place ★ We wait for you challenge !!
They missed this rooftop scrap of the Art Deco Club Sega brand when they mauled/modernised the signage of Sega Jiyugaoka.
90s gamers know the magic. Quartercentury later and the blueandwhite trigger word still plays that voice. MKUltra shit. By now, you’re hearing Green Hill Zone, as we all will in the pre-death seconds.
Style never goes out of fashion. Lack of style never comes into fashion, so likewise can never go out, I suppose.
Get in the bustle. Tokyo street.
It tells you something about the purpose of Japanese arcades when you see multiple cabs on Tetris: you don’t always come here for the games.
MM Land has this kind of peripheral vision tester game where you whack light-up buttons on a board right in your face.
Like something from Raymond Chandler, with that Deco font, or a cruise liner where puff-sleeved women skywrite with ivory cigarette holders as long as their silk gloves.
While retro arcade gaming is a niche interest in the West, it’s hard for it to establish a comeback when only nerds will seek it out.
