i-revo Game

» see game.i-revo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Konami opened a portal called i-revo on 14 March 2006, run by a company built for the purpose: Internet Revolution Inc., incorporated six weeks earlier, seventy percent Konami and thirty percent IIJ. The portal did several things badly remembered now, an ISP among them, but the games corner was live on the opening day with more than a hundred titles already on the shelf. You downloaded a client with an emulator inside it, and that emulator ran Famicom, Super Famicom, PC Engine and MSX software on a Windows PC.

Nothing fixes the service in its moment like the launch pricing. A day with a game cost 210 yen and a week cost 525, and if you wanted to keep one it ran between 1,050 and 1,785 yen depending on the title. GAME Watch noted at the time that running rental and outright sale on the same storefront was unusual, which it was. By the end the rental half had been reshaped into monthly tiers, starting at 315 yen for three titles and running up to 1,050 yen for the whole catalog.

Outside Japan in 2006 nobody paid anything for a Famicom game. You found an emulator and a ROM file, and the whole transaction took four minutes and cost nothing, which is how the rest of the world met these games and how it meets them today. What Konami was selling was the only version of that experience with the rights holders standing behind it, and a rights-cleared market in twenty-year-old software can only open where the rights themselves are sitting. In 2006 they were sitting in Tokyo. That goes a long way toward explaining why this storefront had no foreign equivalent worth the name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the key you had to give back ~

The thing ran on keys. Each title you took out came with one, and the closing notice is blunt about what that meant for the ending: after 31 March, returning a key and re-downloading a game both became impossible. A borrowed object with a slot it had to go back into is why the monthly tiers could be sold as "three titles" rather than as a flat library, and it puts the whole arrangement closer to a video rental counter than to anything a storefront does now.

Konami also commissioned a manual nobody else would have thought of. Mitsuru Sugaya drew a brand new Game Center Arashi comic to explain the service, eight pages an installment, six installments between March and August 2006. Arashi was the hero of a CoroCoro arcade manga that ran from 1978 to 1983, which means Konami hired a character from the arcade boom to walk 2006 customers through an emulator storefront selling the games that boom produced.

~ who still owned the old games ~

Twelve suppliers appear on the final roster, not the eleven usually quoted, and several of them are not the companies that made the games. G-mode stood in for Data East. Netfarm Communications carried the dB-SOFT catalog. D4 Enterprise brought Compile's work along with PC Engine and several other platforms. Alongside those sat Atlus, Kogado Studio, Taito, Nihon Telenet, Hudson, Bothtec, Micro Cabin and Workjam, plus Konami itself for its own back catalog. Part of that shelf was being let out by the keepers of other companies' catalogs rather than by anyone who had made the games.

One of those relationships outlived everything around it. D4 Enterprise came to Konami wanting to put MSX titles on its own Project EGG service, found that Konami was already planning to distribute its library on i-revo, and ended up supplying several platforms to the store instead. Japanese Wikipedia credits that work with leading D4E into Virtual Console, which would make this dead 2006 rental counter an ancestor of the Wii's store and of the EGG Console releases still shipping on Switch today. The causal link there is Wikipedia's claim rather than a first-party one, and it is worth holding loosely.

~ thirty four days, then noon ~

The notice went up on 25 February 2011 under a headline marked 重要, important, and set the end for noon on Thursday 31 March. There was one carve-out: i-revo Retro Game, the version playable in net cafes, was explicitly excluded and kept going. Flat-rate plans already sold were allowed to run themselves out, so the notice could state the real last day in the plainest possible terms, that at the longest you would be unable to play by 29 April.

People who had bought games rather than rented them got the worst instruction in the document. Re-downloading stopped on the 31st, so they were told to download anything they ever intended to play onto whichever PC they planned to use, and afterwards they could play offline on that machine and nowhere else. A purchase that had been sold as permanent turned out to be scoped to one hard drive.

No reason was printed. The whole of the explanatory passage is thanks to the users and the suppliers, followed by a request for understanding, with nothing underneath it. No compensation notice ever followed either: the next several items on that notice board are maintenance windows for the billing system. i-revo Game died by itself, in the middle of its portal's life, and the portal went on without it for eleven more years before Konami folded the company back into itself on 1 October 2022.

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