Original Content

Imports were a solid third of the contents of the game room. Plenty of video games, frequently ones based on anime properties, and sometimes just things too obscure for their publishers to waste money on localizing them, were stuck on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, officially at least. If someone was inclined to try and import a game from Japan, braving the gulf of translation and multiple layers of import and export paperwork, and dealing with the cost of shipping, they'd run up against another barrier: 2008 was still a time ruled by a policy known as “region-locking”. Games published in one region of the globe would not function on consoles from another region. In some cases, this was a practical matter: Europe, much of Africa and South America, the Middle East, most of Asia (barring the former Soviet Union), and Australia used the PAL broadcast data format for displaying images on televisions, and had their AC electricity cycle at 50hz, while North, Central, and a bit of South America, along with Japan, used the NTSC format, cycling their electricity at 60hz. Due to fundamental differences, the gaming machines from PAL and NTSC regions were incompatible.

But this didn't necessarily have to be important: Games were just data, after all – what was preventing that data from being played on a different-region machine? The answer, of course, is protectionist economics. Sometimes chips were added to consoles that would detect “unauthorized” games and cause them to crash, sometimes physical lockouts were added – Nintendo, famously, used completely different cartridge formats for America and Japan. The reasoning behind this was, among other things, that due to the unique economic circumstances of each region, different price ranges were viable for consumers and merchants in each region, and letting regions cross-trade would disrupt this.

So, how do we circumvent this? Well, either through extensive modification of consoles, with a soldering iron and replacement chips, or through importing Japanese consoles and using a voltage converter. Both of these were cost and skill-prohibitive, and so, running into a dozen or more of these coveted machines running, say, the Sailor Moon side-scrolling beat-em-up, was a major draw to anime nerds who'd otherwise never have the opportunity to play these games.

The second pillar was competitive gaming: Its uniqueness was due to, at its basest level, a lack of population density. It was difficult to find enough people who played, for example, Super Smash Brothers at a high level of play in your own town to hold a tournament. Even for say, Dance Dance Revolution, a world-conquering game at its peak that was mainly played in arcades, a natural social gathering point, the local competition was nothing compared to what you'd find at an anime convention. After all, people were traveling from all over the country to get to these conventions, and sometimes from outside it – and the people who were coming there were statistically more likely to be badass gamer lads. As such, you'd get the toughest tournaments you were likely to ever see at these conventions, and you'd even get to hold tournaments for games small-time enough that you were unlikely to ever meet someone else who'd even heard of them outside of a convention hall. Alan had thought himself to be quite the talented Smash Brothers player, with skills bordering on precognition with Captain Falcon, but he'd been divested of those notions at his first AniMass. He still signed up frequently, just for kicks, but he'd only won anything at a small convention in upstate New York – a gift certificate to Ruby Tuesday's. He'd even thrown his hat in the ring on some obscure games – Jeff had trained him on Arm Joe, a fighting game based on, of all things, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo – and got his ass thoroughly handed to him by an Elfen Lied cosplayer – it felt like she had exactly as many invisible arms as her character.

The third, “arcade esoterica”, was what usually drew Alan's interest. He'd had enough experience with emulation and piracy to reliably get his hands on illegal copies of most Japanese games he cared about, and while he liked competitive gaming, to a degree, he hated losing, but “arcade esoterica”… Well, by 2008, most arcades around the United States were dying. Machines had stopped being updated and repaired, and when they broke, they were sold off, with only a blank space representing where they once were. However, the arcade industry had produced some absolutely bonkers games, many of which were nearly impossible to experience on a home console. The Fist of the North Star boxing game, for example, had eight pads, four on each side of the machine, that would swing out for you to punch, and the game would measure the force with which you punched them. It was a hell of a workout, and Alan loved it, despite having noodly arms. Some rhythm games, like Pop'n Music, demanded controllers three feet long with a dozen large buttons, and others had a set of man-sized drums. Alan's favorite, perhaps, was a game where you flipped a table attached to the arcade cabinet, and the game would send a virtual table careening through various environments. He was pretty sure he decapitated a swan once in that one.

This physical space and its importance, unfortunately, wasn't going to live much longer. As emulation and personal computer gaming flourished, region locks stopped mattering. As online gaming grew more popular and the internet as a whole lowered its latency, physical proximity stopped being core to competitive gaming. As arcades died, the desire to play physically unique arcade cabinets died too – not because the games grew boring, but because people stopped imagining them – and further still, there was the looming threat of Virtual Reality gaming, which would redefine how physical interaction fit into gaming.

Change, as always, was coming.