Answer×Answer

» see anan.sega.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A quiz game is the least exportable thing an arcade can hold. The questions are in one language, drawn from one country's television and school curriculum, and the whole pleasure of the cabinet is being faster than the stranger three machines down who grew up on the same material. Answer×Answer was Sega's version of that: a networked quiz cabinet, nationwide, where you sat at a touch panel and raced other people through the same questions in real time. It went into Japanese arcades on 5 July 2007, after a location test in twenty-five Sega stores that April.

It then did what successful arcade hardware does, which is turn into a series. A sequel arrived in December 2008 and a revision the following May. The line that lasted was Live!, from July 2010, and its final form, Answer×Answer Live! Double Answer, went out in August 2011 and was still the version running when everything stopped.

Around the cabinet Sega built the usual apparatus of a networked arcade game in that era. A dedicated IC card held your record. Alongside it ran a paid companion service called Answer×Answer.NET, reachable from a phone or a PC, where you dressed up the look of your answer podium and checked where you stood against everyone else. Shops could run their own tournaments off the same standings, with physical titles awarded to winners who applied before the deadline.

Sega posted the closing notice on 7 October 2014 and amended it a month later with the dates for the companion service. The network itself ended at 4am on Friday 30 January 2015.

~ the case file ~

~ the number sega published ~

The notice that sits on the site today gives one figure and no explanation. It says the series started on 5 July 2007 and that all network services ended at 4:00am on 30 January 2015, and then it says: 2,767 days. That is the operator counting its own run, inclusive of both ends, and putting the total in the obituary instead of a cause. The rest of the text thanks the players and the shops that ran the machines, and then it stops.

No business reason was ever printed. Nothing about declining takings, nothing about a successor product waiting in the wings. A company that is willing to count to 2,767 in public is clearly not embarrassed about the game's life, which makes the silence about its death read as policy rather than shame.

~ the parts that died first ~

The companion service went before the cabinets, and it went carrier by carrier, which is a very 2014 way to die. SoftBank users lost it at 4pm on 17 December. Everyone else, meaning the two other carriers plus the PC version, lost it at 4pm on 26 December, and the notice warned that the link to the arcade would be cut by 7am the next morning depending on how your last session had ended. Then, nine days before the finish, the servers fell over on their own: 21 January, from 7am until 12:35, no networked play.

Afterwards the machines were not removed all at once. The notice says plainly that stores could keep them installed if they wanted to, and that two people in the same shop could still play each other. Guest play went on working too. Your IC card kept counting down whatever credits were on it and then became a piece of plastic, and anything the server held about you was simply unreachable. One thing outlived all of it: the Answer×Answer Live! attraction inside Tokyo Joypolis in Odaiba, which had no network and no cards, ran on for another 143 days and closed on 22 June 2015.

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