Buy An Old Building In Japan, Gain 2 Floors Of Arcade Games

Sometimes news has a weird way of getting to me – I checked the Arcade Otaku forums this afternoon and caught an interesting post from May 20th about an AO member whose girlfriend’s Grandma bought an old building in Japan where it turned out that the first two floors were loaded with 90s arcade games. Then as I do some checking, where some other forums have the news and then I get an email showing Gizmodo (thanks Phil for that one) has the story as it spreads like wildfire across the net. Either way, Arcade Otaku is the original source of the story if you are curious to know more (or if you are looking to purchase some of the items).

The poster goes by the handle Keisuke999 and he describes it thus:

Hello All, I was directed here.

My GF’s grandma just recently bought an old building here in Japan.

The first 2 floors were an old game center dating back to the mid 80s.

Full lot of pics added to the album.

Pics of machines and no boards are ones we couldn’t open

Pics are here:

http://imgur.com/a/yqxip

There are enough cabinets there to start off your own arcade center and then some, which includes “Aero City: 42 Astro City: 7 Namco: 6 Jaleco: 1 Neogeo: 1“, the games include: “Street Fighter 2 Dash, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Zero 2), Street Fighter EX 2, Super Puzzle Fighters 2 X, Metal Slug X, Donkey Kong, Junior King (Donkey Kong Jr. Clone), Space Pilot, Pengo, Scandal Man (Pac-man clone), Namco Classics Collection Vol. 1, Sega Tetris, Disney Tetris (Magical Tetris Challenge), Ace Driver: Victory Lap, Galaxian, Raiden 2, Columns, Comotion (old 4-player Snake clone by Gremlin), & Champion Baseball”. There are others but I think those are the ones they have confirmed as working to export out to the US and other places. There are quite a few adult-oriented games in the collection as you can see in the photos (games like Gals Panic). There are also a lot of game PCBs packaged up there, while I can’t tell what all of them are by appearance alone, I noticed one happened to be Dottori Kun (image below), which the the product of a weird law that didn’t allow Japanese game cabinets to ship without a game so Sega made these small cheap boards to put into some of their candy cabs with the intention of it being replaced with something people would want to play. Not worth much as a game, just as a historical footnote. Some other easily identifiable Sega boards include System 16 and ST-V PCBs. It is quite the collection, preserved in an unplanned time capsule kind of way. 

As always, finds like this make you wonder how many machines are out there collecting dust in an old building or warehouse, just waiting for the right person to come along to move them back into the hands of operators or collectors.