Dragon Reversi

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

~ the goodbye ~

A mobile carrier publishing its own video games is a thing that only quite makes sense inside Japan, where the carriers spent two decades owning the whole stack from the handset to the store to the billing. On 10 November 2014, NTT DOCOMO announced it was going into native smartphone games directly, and named its first two. One was a flick-input puzzle game built with Edia. The other was Dragon Reversi, built with iNiS, and the credit printed beneath it named DOCOMO before it named the studio.

iNiS was not a nobody. It is the Tokyo studio behind Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and its English-language cousin Elite Beat Agents, two of the strangest and best-liked rhythm games Nintendo ever put its name near. DOCOMO hired that studio and had it build an othello game with dragons in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

The board was six by six. You held a hand of five pieces and placed them, and flipping an opponent's pieces was how you dealt damage, so the oldest capture mechanic in board games became an attack button. Around that sat everything a 2014 Japanese phone game was required to have: a gacha, a party of nine units pulled from a roster of over five hundred, a story mode, and a Coliseum where you played other people live. The art was comic rather than serious, big-eyed and round, and the official site filed the whole thing under puzzle and RPG at the same time, as if unsure which shelf it belonged on.

Pre-registration opened at eleven in the morning on 7 November 2014 and paid out ten gacha tickets. iOS followed on 4 December and Android on 22 December. DOCOMO made a point of saying the game would run on other carriers' phones too, which was the whole argument for doing it: not a perk for subscribers, but a business the carrier wanted to be in.

~ the refund window ~

It lasted one year and thirteen days. The servers stopped at eleven in the morning on Thursday 17 December 2015.

The document that matters is not the shutdown announcement. It is the page DOCOMO put up next, headed with a refund notice and citing Article 20, Paragraph 1 of the Payment Services Act, the Japanese law that requires an issuer of prepaid instruments to return unused balances when it stops honoring them. The notice names the issuer in full: NTT DOCOMO, INC. Not the studio, not a publishing label. The carrier itself was legally the party that had sold you the Crystals, and the carrier had to give them back.

The procedure is the part I keep rereading. To claim, you opened the dead app. The refund page displayed inside it, and once you had read the terms there was a button at the bottom that took you to a form asking for your bank details, so the money could be wired to you in cash. A game that had stopped working had to go on working well enough to process its own estate. The window ran from eleven on 18 December 2015 to three in the afternoon on 17 March 2016, and anyone who missed it was excluded by name in the notice.

~ what got buried with it ~

DOCOMO did not become a games publisher. iNiS does not exist under that name any more either; the people and the address carried on through a couple of renamings and are making small things in Meguro today. What is left of Dragon Reversi is an archived homepage from March 2016 that is not a homepage at all, just the instructions for getting your money back, captured not quite two weeks before the deadline it was counting down to: three in the afternoon, 17 March 2016.

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