Initial D Perfect Shift ONLINE

» see initiald-perfectshift.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sega opened Initial D Perfect Shift ONLINE at 11:00 on 2 April 2014, on the Nintendo 3DS, and it cost nothing to download. That last part was the point of the exercise. Sega's own site claimed it as the first free-to-play, item-billing title on the 3DS, with a dated footnote stapled to the claim in case anyone wanted to argue: as of 15 January 2014. The handheld was three years old by then and Nintendo's storefront was still built around games you paid for once.

What arrived inside that wrapper was a racing game in which you never touched the steering. The only input was the gearbox, up and down, and everything else came out of the car's numbers and the character cards you set before the race began. Producer Yojiro Ogawa explained the design to Famitsu four months before launch: an ordinary driving game would only reach people who already played Initial D Arcade Stage, so this one specialized in shifting and left the actual driving out of the player's hands.

Around the shifting sat the part that paid for it. Cards came out of premium races and lived in a card box, gaining levels as you used them, while the cars took aero parts and stickers. Teams upgraded their own facilities with items called spanners, and the paid currency was the D Coin. The courses were mountain passes lifted from the manga, Akina and Akagi among them, and the roster opened with more than forty cars.

Initial D itself crossed borders without much help. The manga started in 1995 and the anime followed it. The Eurobeat playing under the downhill runs became one of those things the internet carried everywhere by itself. This game crossed nothing. It lived inside the Japanese Nintendo eShop and wanted a Nintendo Network ID registered in Japan.

~ the record ~

~ a hundred thousand at a time ~

Sega announced the download count in public every time it crossed another hundred thousand, as a dated news item on the game's own site. The first came on 16 April 2014, two weeks after launch. Then 200,000 on 21 May, 300,000 on 25 June, 400,000 at 15:30 on 17 September, 500,000 on 15 October and 600,000 at 16:30 on 12 November.

Six hundred thousand is where the announcements stop. The game ran another seven and a half months and no further figure was ever posted. The marketing line it had launched under promised that a million street racers were waiting up on the pass, and the counter Sega had been keeping in public got sixty percent of the way to that number before it went quiet.

~ the schedule they published ~

The end was announced on 25 March 2015 at 20:25, in a notice that appeared the moment that day's maintenance finished. Sega gave a reason, which most of these notices decline to do. It had worked on events and on improving the system since service began, and it had still not reached a point where customers would be satisfied, so taking the future into account it had decided to close.

Printed underneath was the whole calendar, fourteen weeks ahead of the end. Ranking totals would stop on 22 April. D Coin sales would end after maintenance on 13 May and distribution from the Nintendo eShop would stop on 27 May. From 27 June the operators would send out thank-you cards four days running, and the service itself would go at 20:00 on 30 June. Money already spent on D Coins would not be returned, and the notice said so in one flat sentence.

One thing carried on past the end, which the same notice mentioned almost in passing: the game remained playable in offline mode. What replaced the site on 30 June was a tombstone signed by the operating team, written in the past tense, thanking everyone for their custom since 11:00 on 2 April 2014.

~ sixteen months to a parking page ~

That tombstone stood for about two months. By 2 September 2015 that page was gone and the address only redirected, which it kept doing for a year. By 6 November 2016 initiald-perfectshift.jp belonged to somebody else and was serving a page that offered the domain for sale. The squatter's page outlasted Sega's by a wide margin, sitting there until it started throwing errors in October 2019 and finally went to a 404 in June 2021.

The arcade line this thing was built to advertise is in better shape. Initial D THE ARCADE opened in Japanese game centers on 25 February 2021 under Sega Fave, and its official site was still posting news the week this was written. The free handheld version lasted fourteen months and twenty-eight days; the cabinets it was pointing people toward have been running for over twenty years.

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