Leftover arcades wasting away at the Nara Dreamland

Newsfeed 1115 via and GameSetWatch

When an amusement park or other large FEC goes out of business,they often leave some stuff behind. Perhaps there wasn’t enough interest from buyers at the time or the people in charge of selling off old items just didn’t care to deal with the hassle. I’ve come across a few places like that, not too far from where I live is a site of a place that used to be called the 49th Street Galleria (which was the first arcade I ever visited as a kid in the late 80s and where I came across a Discs of Tron) and was later turned into the Utah Fun Dome. After they closed down they left quite a few arcade items laying around, including a couple of Sega R360 machines. But they were left outside and were in terrible condition. I’m not sure if the guy who got a hold of them years later managed to do anything with them or not.

Anyways, over in Japan there is a site of an amusement park that closed down in 2006 called the Nara Dreamland. Apparently they originally copied Disneyland as closely as possible (not unlike what’s going on in some Chinese parks today), understandably peeving off Disney. It originally opened in 1961 and managed to stay open for a few decades but eventually disinterest and a sagging Japanese economy caught up with them. A Russian blog by Ralph Mirebs has a bunch of recent photos of the park and it’s current state which included an arcade with a number of abandoned machines. Those include: Daytona USA 2, Victory Lap, Final Furlong, Jurassic Park, DDR 3rd Mix, Top Skater, Airline Pilots and Golgo 13 Part 3. How much longer they will remain depends upon the future of the land where the park is, I imagine that one day they’ll tear the place down to make room for something else. Hopefully the arcades are salvaged in the process, it wouldn’t be surprising if a few of them still worked.