Thursday, October 27, 2022

updates

exploring the arcade in 愛欲の罠 / Aiyoku no wana aka Trapped in Lust (1973): identified the missing pinball machine!!  (search for "Update 2022-10-27" in the post)  Also previously add Sun Trial!

bagatelle notes: Trou Madam, Mississippi, Pigeon Hole - significant update as I declare Trou Madam to be the true spiritual birthplace of pinball.

Japanese Rolling Ball: 2 photos added to the very bottom, from Salons Vénitiens.  Plus a new postcard added to 1908.

Niche Mechanisms 004: rotation - added Xenon, Automatic Obstacle Race, Steer Crazy II

Niche Mechanisms 001: the drop shelf - added Funky Circus, Dream Rail, Dream Rail Lovely, はっぴーぴえろ Dream Rail 2

Niche Mechanisms 002: catchers - added ダイナマイトキーパー, 電動ホーマー (Electric homer), Catch The Ball

Sunday, October 23, 2022

exploring the arcade in 女獣 / Mejû / Woman Beast (1960)

Like the previous posts, I found this movie through a tweet by TOO_yoshikawa.  I have also included this in my "exploring pachinko in Japanese cinema..." post, but since this has smartball in it, I wanted to post it separately as well.  I'm going to include a few extra photos in this post.


The movie starts with a great pan of a bustling downtown streetscape, and then we pan down to a pachinko parlor exterior shot.


"Shinjuku Tokyo"







exploring the arcade in 本日休診 / Honjitsu kyûshin / Doctor's Day Off (1952)

Another movie I discovered via a tweet by TOO_yoshikawa, this movie shows us a handful of older pachinko machines.  The famous "masamura gauge" came out in 1951, but these machines are older.

本日休診 (1952)

I am adding to my "exploring pachinko in Japanese cinema..." post as well, but I also wanted to share as a standalone post to highlight a few extra scenes.



exploring the arcade in this 1955 Japanese video on candy...

 This video is assumed to be from 1955:


I found it via this tweet from TOO_yoshikawa.  It is a great little video, but there are some pachinko-related rarities to be found.

First we see kids at this pachinko machine.  We can't tell much from the glimpse, but the coin slot at the right means it's a medal pachinko machine  Most machines with the slot there would pay out coins for a win.  But this isn't a video about pachinko, this is a video about CANDY, so I imagine this is a pachinko machine that dispenses sweets on a win.




The camera then cuts to a different machine, giving us wonderful footage of the machine in action!

a win causes a candy to dispense here


If this looks familiar, its because we've seen this machine before, in the Birth of Pachinko Museum by Kazuo Sugiyama:
~1940 子供パチンコ 自動菓子販賣機 (Children's pachinko confectionery vending machine) by セイコー社 (Seiko)

These machines are not gambling or tests of skill.  They are a novelty for the kids to play with.  The ball will fall out the bottom and back to the shooter lane, allowing someone to keep shooting until they hit a winning pocket and receive their confection.


exploring the arcade in ハイティーンやくざ / Hai tiin yakuza / Teenage Yakuza (1962)

via this tweet by TOO_yoshikawa I learned of the movie ハイティーンやくざ which has 2 scenes at a smart ball parlor in it.


ハイティーンやくざ (1962)



The tables being played:

1950s Lucky Ball - ラッキーボール by YMラッキー株式会社 (YM Lucky Co., Ltd.)

I hope I can find more information on the YM company.  Their tables seem quite prolific from the 50s and 60s.

Lucky Ball has come to denote the 4x4 grid configuration we see above, where you can win by completing a row, column, or one of the 2 diagonals.

Here is a better shot of what I think is the same model:



There are a few variations in this style of smart ball.  This one, as in the movie, there is no opening to the front players' trough.  The attendant uses a scoop to serve the balls to players:

Thursday, October 6, 2022

new project: a foreigners' guide to eremeka arcades - 外国人のためのエレメカアーケードゲームガイド

I'm sure you all read about it already over on nazox2016's blog, so it's probably a good time to announce it here as well.  

All throughout 2022 I have been working to build a list of all of the Japanese eremeka games.  What started with an obsession for electromechanical oddities and candystore skill games has spiraled out of control to document a good chunk of Japanese arcade history.

The history of videogames is meticulously documented by an overwhelming army of historians, but I was unable to find a list online of Japanese electromechanical arcade games, let alone a pictures of most of them.  I wanted a list that showed...

  • a game's name (English and Japanese)
  • the year it appeared
  • who made it
  • a decent photo
That's it.  So here it is:

a foreigners' guide to eremeka arcades - 外国人のためのエレメカアーケードゲームガイド


The bulk of information I used came from Onitama, kt2, nazox2016, and the good people of Gaming Alexandria.  There is a much longer list of sources on the page itself.

This is a work in progress and there is still so much to do, but I decided that once I hit 2000 machines documented I would do a "soft launch".  Scroll down to the heading Current Machine List and you will find a text-only version of every machine documented.  This is very useful for just hitting CTRL+F on to find something.  The photo pages are (currently) split into 6 8 different sections: 

  1. machines before 1970   //   1970年以前の機械
  2. machines from 1970-1974  //  1970〜1974年の機械
  3. machines from 1975-1979  //  1975〜1979年の機械
  4. machines from 1980-1989  //  1980〜1989年の機械
  5. machines from 1990-1999  //  1990〜1989年の機械
  6. machines from 2000 and after  //  2000年以降の機械
  7. machines without any year (please help us find any year references!)  //  年のないマシン(年の参照を見つけるのを手伝ってください!) 
  8. machines with no picture  //  写真のないマシン



I still have a lot of material to sift through.  It is an arduous process and I don't want to disclose just how many hours I've poured into this already, but trust me: it's a lot.  When I finish processing the bulk of the materials remaining, I will probably begin tagging all of the machines so that I can generate pages of specific styles of game.

I hope one day someone from Japan decides to make a site like IPDB.org or similar, but for the Japanese games.  I would be able to offer them my data and research for integration.   Until then, this project is the current best hope for documenting these kinds of machines.

There are currently over 2200 machines listed (2023-05-02 update: almost 3500 machines!).  My passion is for the 1970s and earlier, but the materials for machines before 1974 can be extremely sparse and difficult to come across.  Most of the work going forward will be for machines from the 1980s onward, as that is the bulk of the remaining research materials.


On a project like this I have had to set myself some limits, or else I would end up documenting every single Japanese arcade machines ever made.  Maybe someone else will do that, but the thrust of this project is to document all of the machines that I have some interest in, based on flexible criteria that I apply unevenly.

I am including all of the electromechanical medal games, but not all of the modern medal games.  Why?  Most modern medal games are a video slot machine.  I only care about games that have a physical component, and I don't want to consider "dispensing medals" as a physical component here.  There are many large games like horse racing simulators that I am not including, but I am including some modern horse race games that actually have physical horses moving around the track, even though the action itself is all electronically controlled.

I am not including carnival games where you pick up balls and throw them in buckets or baskets.  These came out of the redemption arcades of the 80s and don't interest me.  But I have included some air hockey tables, as they appeared in the electromechanical arcades of the early 70s.

I am not including horoscope and modern novelty machines like photo gimmicks, but I am including old electromechanical ones.  I'm not including most novelty prize games, like string cutters and UFO catchers, but I am including crane games from the 60s and 70s, and their evolutions into the modern age.  I am also including crane games that have novel physical adaptations that interest me, but that's mostly arbitrary.  Rotary merchandisers go back to the 1920s, and more modern versions certainly have a place on my list.  What I'm saying is: it's not a perfect system, but if I can't defend the inclusion or exclusion of something specific, just assume it's because I was exhausted.  :)

One way to think about it: once we hit the IC age (Integrated circuits) my interest diminishes.  If something is from before 1974? My interest piques.

What are you still doing reading this?  Go look at some cool eremeka machines instead.