Auto Modellista

» see capcom.co.jp/automodellista as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It did not look like a racing game. Capcom rendered Auto Modellista in heavy cel shading, flat-colored and ink-edged, so the cars read as panels out of a comic rather than photographs of metal, and the frame rate was tuned until the whole thing behaved like animation. The technique had its own house name, Artistoon, and Capcom led the marketing with it in a year when the rest of the genre was selling photographic realism.

Underneath, it was a serious car game. More than sixty real tuning houses were licensed into a deep catalog of Japanese road cars. You built your own machine by setting it up rather than by buying it, because the game had no money in it at all. Garage Life was the career mode. There was a replay editor called vj&theater, with music supplied through a deal with avex.

The PlayStation 2 version reached Japanese shops on 22 August 2002, with a bundle beside it called the Auto Modellista Modem Pack that put a modem in the box and unlocked a hidden car from the start. A revised edition, U.S.-tuned, followed over the next eighteen months across three consoles, adding American marques and a pair of oval courses.

The network mode is the part that died, and it died twice, because the two editions were plugged into two different services. The original was a dial-up product on a matching network reached over the telephone. U.S.-tuned on PlayStation 2 was a broadband product on Capcom's own service, Multi-Matching BB, which opened on 11 September 2003, the same day the Japanese disc shipped.

Both services were Japanese and metered in yen by the minute, sitting behind an accessory sold in Japanese shops, so the online half of this game stayed inside one country no matter which disc you owned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ thirteen yen a minute ~

GAME Watch sat in on a press session three weeks before launch and wrote the pricing down. Thirteen yen a minute while you were in a race and ten yen per three minutes while you were in the lobby, flat across the country. Registration was simple enough: fill in a form to get an ID, then pick a handle and a team name before connecting from the main menu.

Then the reporter noticed the problem and put it in the article. A race would not start until the lobby filled to its cap of six or eight, and the meter was running the whole time you sat there. His advice to readers was to keep leaving rooms and re-entering until they found a fuller one, which amounts to a published strategy for avoiding your own waiting room. The waiting room charged ten yen for every three minutes you spent in it not racing.

~ two clearouts, seven years apart ~

On 24 June 2004 Capcom announced it was clearing out the dial-up services behind most of its older online titles, and the original Auto Modellista lost its network on 2 August along with Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The official sites went down with them, rankings included. U.S.-tuned was explicitly spared, because it sat on the broadband service instead. Seven years later, on 16 February 2011, Capcom announced that Multi-Matching BB itself was finished, and on 30 June at 23:59 it took down the last six titles still running on it. Auto Modellista was first on that list and Monster Hunter was fourth, with both Resident Evil Outbreak games between them. Offline play was untouched on all six, so a disc from 2003 still boots today while the thing it was sold to let you do does not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »