KONAMI STATION

» see 573st.i-revo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Konami had a portal called i-revo, run for it by a company set up for the job, seventy percent Konami and thirty percent IIJ. In August 2008 that portal grew a radio station. The host was 573st.i-revo.jp, the 573 being the old Japanese number-pun on the company's own name, and the page announced itself with the word used for a broadcaster signing on for the first time.

What it broadcast was Konami talking about Konami. Every program on the slate was built around one of the company's game series and staffed with the voice actors who had played those parts, so the Suikoden show brought in the cast of the Suikoden games and the Tokimeki Memorial shows brought in theirs. Castlevania got one too. It was free to listen to, and the money came in sideways through radio CDs sold off the back of the shows.

This was a product for people who already knew the games in Japanese and wanted more of the actors' voices, which is a narrow door to walk through. It was out of reach for me in 2008 and would be out of reach today. The whole appeal depended on recognizing a voice from a game you had finished, and I had finished none of them.

~ the case file ~

~ nine shows and a filing cabinet ~

The station opened loudly and nearly all at once. Nine programs is the widest the slate ever got, and most of them arrived in the first weeks rather than being spaced out across the year.

The giveaway is the station's own archive page in its final capture. Five of the launch programs carry the label "August 2008 to November 2008", and exactly one carries "August 2008 to March 2009". Read those two lines together and the shape of the whole operation falls out: the station front-loaded its entire slate at opening, most of that slate had finished recording within three months, and the last stretch ran on whatever was left. By the time anyone decided to close it, the archive page had more on it than the schedule did.

~ the two dates ~

The tombstone went up on the station's front page some time between the end of February and the middle of March 2009, under the heading used for notices of a service ending. It gave two dates and kept them apart. Programs would stop being updated after the 31 March distribution, and the service itself would finish on 30 April. The closing line promises that the staff will go on working to enrich the program content, a peculiar sentence to set directly underneath an announcement that there will be no more programs.

A second notice on the portal's help pages, dated 27 April, repeated the end date for anyone who had missed it with three days to go. Neither document says why. The parent portal carried on without the station for another thirteen years, until Konami absorbed the company that ran it back into itself in October 2022.

~ the name that came back ~

There is a trap in the wreckage worth pointing at. The dead station's own page listed its short form as Konasute, and Konasute today is a perfectly healthy Konami product: a cloud service that streams the company's arcade games to home machines, run by a different Konami subsidiary and still going. It took that name in 2018, nine years after the station went off. Search the abbreviation and a 2009 corpse appears to have got up. It did not. Two separate products, sharing a contraction of the same company name.

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