CROSS×BEATS

» see game.capcom.com/crossbeats as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Capcom put CROSS×BEATS on the Japanese App Store on 2 December 2013, free, with items to buy inside it. It stayed an iPhone and iPad game for its entire life. No Android build was ever made, which for a Japanese phone game of that period is unusual, and it meant the thing had exactly one door.

The producer was Naoki Maeda, who had spent years at Konami as the sound producer on Dance Dance Revolution before moving over. What he built at Capcom was a rhythm game with a geometry problem in the middle of it. Capcom's own pre-launch copy described the whole design in one line: touch the screen at the moment the arrows of light cross. Two guide lines spanned the screen at right angles, arrows travelled inward along each, and the note was the point where a pair of them intersected.

That point moved. In the lane games everybody else was shipping, the place you touch was fixed, a notch at the bottom of a track that never shifted for the whole song. Here the target was worked out geometrically for every single note and could land anywhere in two dimensions, so reading the chart meant predicting an intersection rather than watching a line arrive.

Music was the rest of the pitch, and none of it could ever have travelled. Capcom licensed GLAY's "DIAMOND SKIN" as the launch tie-up and let you play it against the music video running behind the chart. A Warner label event the following spring brought in tracks by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and RIP SLYME. Song rights are signed territory by territory, and these were Japanese.

~ the dossier ~

~ where the arrows met ~

Four note types sat on that moving target. Two were ordinary enough: a tap, and a hold you pressed and kept pressed, with no judgement at the far end, so a finger left down past the endpoint cost you nothing. A round marker drawn on two notes meant they had to be struck at the same instant.

The flick notes are the ones worth keeping. You flicked in an indicated direction, your finger did not have to start on the note, and adjacent flicks could be dragged through in one unbroken motion. Chart designers worked that out and used it, writing sequences whose only purpose was to make your finger trace letters and shapes across the glass while the song played.

~ photograph your own name ~

The shutdown notice was posted on 16 April 2018, and it carried an instruction nobody expects to read. Claiming anything back required your player name, your eight-digit user ID and a transfer password of four to eight digits, and all three of those strings lived inside the app and would stop being displayed once the service stopped. So Capcom told players, in numbered steps, how to reach their own profile screen and take a screenshot of it before the deadline.

It is a company asking its customers to photograph their identity through the glass before the glass goes dark. The same notice confirmed what would not be surviving: save data would be lost, and the tickets and skins people had bought or earned would cease to exist at the moment of closure. Capcom gave one reason for any of it, and the reason was that changes in the external environment had made it difficult to keep providing the same service. That phrase, 外部環境の変化, is the standard Japanese corporate formula for declining to give a reason.

~ the same hour twice ~

The schedule ran on a single clock. At 14:00 on 16 April the in-game currency stopped being sold, in the same hour the notice appeared. At 14:00 on 25 June the game itself stopped, with the notice's own question-and-answer section putting the last playable minute at 13:59. Seventy days apart, to the same minute of the same hour.

There was an arcade version too, crossbeats REV. SUNRISE, running in Japanese game centers since April 2016, and its web portal for player data was switched off at exactly 14:00 on 25 June as well. The phone game and the arcade game's data portal therefore went down together. The App Store listing came down at some point afterwards that nobody wrote down, and Apple's catalog returns nothing at all for the app's ID today.

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