Shibuya Sega: a down-and-out dive for the can’t-grow-ups.
Funabori is home to this perfect embodiment of the Sega World concept, flawlessly preserved from the 90s.
If you say the machines don’t need to be cleaned on the parts people don’t touch then that’s your thing, I guess. If you think it’s OK to laminate a “Watch it! Bagsnatchers!” Sign over the urinal instead of creating an establishment where it doesn’t happen, your call.
But…
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.
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.
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.
In the 1970s there were 10 of these buildings in a row. In an earthquake in which no one was harmed or inconvenienced, they all began to collapse in unison, at a steady tempo, by one storey at a time.
Compared to home, Tokyo gets dark early and stays warm late. So night is a playground.
How to be sure you’re in Tokyo
Tokyo fix-all multipurpose commercial realty. Quietly stylish. Slick enough to skirt vogue for a decade; unobtrusive enough to get old and hide.
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.
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.
Did the suffering artist who drew the space invaders have in mind some slithering, slavering tentacled monster?
Roads brushed to a shine and longstanding arcades showing only the necessary degradation.
Easy to think that this space invader is just a generic symbol of an arcade, but of course Space Invaders is Taito's game, released in 1978.
Tokyo is never not busy, but sometimes it lulls. Like an ocean when the waves aren’t crashing but the bottomless power of the gloom is about to find another swell.
Tateishi Segafront’s a weird design mashup: 1930s Art Deco cinema entrance, 1940s militaristic stars and 1950s sailorboy babystripe, silver starshooting hopes of the spaceage 60s, bubblebumped 1970s lavalamp blobs, and Sega’s 80s iconography superimposed off-centre.
Milling about mainstrip Ikebukuro. A monumental Sega in the kind of playground district that gets remade in computer games. Level designers, empowered to build anything at all for free, see no reason to change it.
