Your glasses spike the screenlight at your face like a kid burning ants. HUD branded on your cheekbones.
Shibuya Sega: a down-and-out dive for the can’t-grow-ups.
Looks like the modern Space Harrier. Fit for an old-school one-coin-stand. But the JP arcades don’t go for that these days.
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.
Fate: Grand Order – who *isn’t* playing it?
Compared to home, Tokyo gets dark early and stays warm late. So night is a playground.
Gundam Extreme Vs. absolutely does not give a shit about the modern world. Let’s go back: before Japan’s superfuture tech got caught pants-down by the smartphone era.
Bubble Bobble became an icon. Cutie dragons burping poppers at trippy edible baddies.
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.
Yeah, I wear moccasins and a check shirt. Glasses. A look that says don’t bother looking. Spend life head-down, blanking some black hole on my heels.
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.
Tokyo Game Show convention floor: crowd noise and the smell of recleaned carpet tiles.
Arcade hardware is an aid to escapism. Just travelling to the arcade makes a ceremony of leaving your life behind – better than just tuning out your bedsit scraps and empties. Climb into a cabinet, climb into a game.
One square of commercial algae and fungus, just creeping over the concrete landscape.
Check out this monstrous dong of a joystick on Starwing Paradox. Rippling with nooks and nobbles for your fingers and thumbs.
In a world where a single mobile game can impoverish the masses by a billion dollars annually, surely the sit-down points in Sega playrooms are small potatoes?
