Gunslinger Stratos

~ the goodbye ~

Gunslinger Stratos arrived in Japanese arcades on 12 July 2012. Byking and Taito built it for Square Enix to publish, and it ran on Taito's Type X3 board using Silicon Studio's Orochi engine. It was a team shooter sold on its control scheme rather than on anything else.

The cabinet gave you two gun-shaped controllers, one for each hand, and the weapons you had access to depended on where those controllers were in relation to one another. Held apart they gave you one loadout, and clipped side by side they gave you another. Connecting the right gun to the left unlocked the heavy equipment. Nobody had to explain this to anyone twice.

It did well enough in Japan to justify a sequel in February 2014 and a third version in May 2016. An upgrade billed as Gunslinger Stratos Sigma followed in April 2017, and a television anime had already run in April 2015. None of it was released outside Japan, in arcades or anywhere else.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two guns, one cabinet ~

The two-controller idea is the reason this game cannot be preserved in any ordinary way. The hardware was the design. A light gun is simple enough to emulate, but a pair of them whose relative position changes your inventory is a physical object with a physical answer, and the answer lives inside a cabinet that was never sold to anyone's living room.

Arcade operators in Japan bought those cabinets on the understanding that Square Enix would keep the matchmaking servers up, because the game is built around playing other people. The hardware in the room was only ever half the product. The other half lived at an address that Square Enix controlled.

~ seven months on pc ~

There was one attempt to get out of the arcade. Gunslinger Stratos: Reloaded started official service on PC on 27 August 2015, free to play, with the twin-gun scheme flattened onto a mouse and keyboard. It was still Japan only.

On 9 February 2016 Square Enix announced it was ending the service, and published the schedule in the way Japanese operators always do. New account registration closed that same afternoon at three o'clock. Purchases of in-game points stopped at midday on 29 February. The service itself ended at 23:59 on 29 March 2016, seven months and two days after it opened. The reason given was a failure to build an operating and development structure that could keep the game at a standard players would be satisfied with.

Seven months is a short enough run that the game's existence never registered outside Japan. In Turkey the arcade as a room you went to had already been replaced by the internet cafe, and by 2012 most of those had closed as well. My own nearest equivalent to this kind of machine was a cafe PC with a shared keyboard and a copy of Counter-Strike, which is a different proposition from a cabinet built around what your two hands were doing with two separate guns.

~ when the cabinets went dark ~

Network services for the arcade game ended at 06:00 Japan time on 1 April 2021, eight years and almost nine months after the first cabinet was switched on. The machines are still out there and some of them still power up. What they cannot do is find anyone to play against.

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