Mirai Dagakki FutureTomTom

~ the eulogy ~

In 2013 Konami bolted a Kinect to the top of an arcade cabinet and aimed it at a drum game. ミライダガッキ, rendered FutureTomTom in English, opened in Japanese arcades on 20 June. You struck four illuminated pads with sticks on cords, and when a pose marker came down the lane you stopped drumming and held the shape for the camera. While you did that, the machine was putting a cartoon mask over your face on screen.

It was aimed squarely at people who found music games hostile, the same audience Konami had chased years earlier with Toy'sMarch. You could rank B or worse and the cabinet would not throw you out, because two songs were guaranteed no matter how badly the first one went.

Ver.2 arrived on 18 December 2013 with new note types and a score display that went from five digits to seven.

Arcade hardware is the part of Japanese gaming that travels worst. This one needed a Japanese arcade with an e-AMUSEMENT line running into it, and an operator willing to buy a machine built for people who did not already play music games.

~ the dossier ~

~ sticks and a kinect ~

The masks were not decoration. Konami original songs carried masks tied to whichever machine the song had debuted on, so a beatmania IIDX track put Tran on player one while a pop'n music track put Nyami there instead. Playing FutureTomTom meant wearing the rest of the BEMANI catalog on your face, one song at a time.

Enough players asked to turn it off that Ver.2 added the choice, and from December 2013 you decided whether the mask went on before the credit started.

~ what the kit bought ~

From 15 July 2015 Konami began shipping an upgrade kit that let the cabinet run standalone, with no line back to e-AMUSEMENT. Sixteen days later, on 31 July, every cabinet that had not taken the kit had its service terminated. That is the first of the two dates on this grave, and what it ended was hardware.

The machines that did take the kit kept their network connection for another two years and got something strange in exchange. Every hidden song in the game was unconditionally unlocked. The unlock economy that music games are built on was simply switched off.

~ the night the network left ~

e-AMUSEMENT service for FutureTomTom ended on 31 August 2017. The machine did not stop. It had been given the ability to run by itself two years earlier, so what ended was the card login and everything behind it, while the cabinet carried on taking coins.

Four years and seventy-two days of online life, then an offline afterlife with no end date on it. Konami retired the service and left the body playing.

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