NatsuGame

~ the last words ~

NatsuGame came out of beta on 4 October 2004. NTT Communications ran it. The name contracts natsukashii geemu, nostalgic games, and the tagline across the front page said roughly that old games are more fun online.

The shape of a session was three-quarters community site and one-quarter arcade. You waited in a lobby. You wrote a diary in the space assigned to you at signup and decorated that space with purchased items. When you wanted to play you clicked a game and a self-extracting program came down and launched itself, Windows 98 or later only, nothing for the Mac. Inside that lobby program other players could join you, play against you, watch you, or type at you. It had a bug it carried to the grave: the connection would drop mid-game and your score would not record. Users worked out that chatting while you played made the drop less likely, and passed that around as the fix.

The closing notice went up on 26 October 2006, nearly half a year ahead of the event. The service ended at 13:00 on 30 March 2007, thirty months on from the full launch. A later upgrade of the lobby client had been shipped under the name NatsuGame Navi, and both versions went off at the same minute.

~ the record ~

~ what fifty yen bought ~

The currency was gold, sold in blocks of fifty, with one gold worth ten yen. A game cost five gold. So a single play of Solomon's Key or Elevator Action was fifty yen, under half a US dollar at the time, for software that had been in Japanese homes for eighteen years. Cheaper game passes arrived later. The catalog ran to roughly twenty-two titles and was deliberately unglamorous: Arkanoid, Space Invaders, Nuts & Milk, Mighty Bomb Jack, Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, all of them matching the Famicom versions closely.

This is the part that never translated. By 2004 the same catalog had been sitting on the open internet for years as ROM files anyone could pull down over a slow line, and where I was that was simply how those games were encountered, free of charge and played alone. What NTT was charging fifty yen a play for was the part an emulator could not supply: a room with other people in it, watching the score go up.

~ the avatar that expired ~

Every community site in Japan had avatars by 2004. NatsuGame's distinguishing cruelty was that its avatars were rented. An item you bought carried an expiry, usually somewhere between thirty and sixty days, and when the clock ran out the item vanished. It was not disabled in an inventory and it was not archived. It left the account, and you could buy it again.

Taken with the per-play pricing, that made the whole place a meter instead of a shelf. You never owned a game and you never owned a hat. By the standards of most shutdowns the 2007 closure therefore took very little away, because expiry was already written into every purchase the site had ever processed.

~ the clock you could not beat ~

There was a way to play free, called refill. You registered for it while logged in and waited out a timer, and at the end of the timer a game ticket appeared. The timer started at thirty minutes and was later lengthened to sixty.

The flaw is the best small detail in the record. Refill would not run if you had any gold at all in your account, and there was nothing in the shop that cost one gold. A player who spent down to a single unit was stuck permanently: too rich to qualify for the free ticket and unable to spend the remainder on anything. Some accounts, by the Japanese account of it, could never refill again for as long as the site existed.

~ the card game that split the room ~

On 4 November 2005 NatsuGame launched something that had no business being there. KING OF WANDS was an original one-on-one online card game set in a magic school called Malkuth, where you summoned monsters off cards, and it was designed by Kazunari Yonemitsu, who had led the design of Puyo Puyo. The reaction before release was reportedly bafflement, since the retro catalog itself had been starved of new additions and here was an entirely new game instead.

Then it worked, and in working it broke the site in an interesting way. KING OF WANDS pulled in a fresh population who had signed up for it specifically and had little interest in twenty-year-old Famicom titles, while barely any of the existing regulars took up the card game. Two groups ended up occupying the same diaries and boards as separate factions with almost no contact. The Japanese write-up notes that they only started mixing right at the very end, in what it describes as a graduation-like atmosphere.

The card game nearly outlived its host. Dex Entertainment reopened it as a standalone site on 2 November 2007 with no data carried over, went to formal service on 12 February 2008, failed to make the relaunch pay, and closed it on 30 April 2008 after about two months. A mobile version followed that December. The retro arcade it had been built inside was by then a year gone, and the thing that had split that room in half ended up the only part of it anyone tried to save.

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