Nicoge (ニコゲー)

» see nicoga.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The headline across the top of Nicoge read みんなでGAMEを作ろう, let's all make GAMEs, and the site meant it in the most literal available sense. You did not write code. You opened a generator and filled in the fields it gave you, and whatever it produced could be played by anyone else on the site. Its own description of itself was built out of three verbs, and the third was ニコニコする, which does not survive translation and roughly means to be doing the thing Niconico is for.

It opened on 14 September 2010 at nicoga.jp. You signed in with a Niconico Douga account and dressed an avatar called a ニコキャラ. Niconico Points, the paid currency of the wider platform, bought you a gacha pull and whatever else the site was selling. There was a button that pushed a video of your playthrough into Niconico Douga itself, which is the load-bearing feature: the games were raw material for the video site rather than a destination you were meant to stay at.

On 24 March 2011, at twenty to eight in the evening, the trade press carried the closure. By then users had built 10,459 games. The announcement set the end for 27 April and attached a schedule for taking the place apart in four steps across five weeks. It offered no reason, then or afterward. The closing line of the news report is unusually plain about it: the service was finishing a mere seven months after it started.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what you could build ~

The tools were called generators and there was one per shape of game. Action and shooting each had their own, with a separate generator for building quizzes. Between them they define the ceiling precisely: anything the generators had a field for, and nothing they did not. This is the trade every creation toy makes, and in 2010 it was the right side of the trade to be on, because the alternative was asking people with no engine and no art pipeline to ship something.

Users supplied images and sound by upload, so the raw material was theirs even when the structure was not. A game assembled this way is not really authored so much as configured, and ten thousand of them in seven months is the number you get when configuring is easy enough that people do it for the afternoon rather than for a project.

~ whose service was it ~

Everything on the page points at Niconico, and the operator was not Niwango. It was Spike, a game publisher best known for console work, and the support address on the final page ended in spike.co.jp. The connection is corporate rather than editorial. Dwango had taken both Spike and Chunsoft under its wing in 2005 and parked them beneath a holding company called Games Arena that December, so a Spike web product sitting on Niconico accounts was two subsidiaries of one parent being pointed at each other.

Spike itself did not outlast the site by very long. Chunsoft absorbed it on 1 April 2012 and the merged company took the name Spike Chunsoft, which is the name on Japanese releases to this day. Games Arena, the holding company above them, was wound up that June.

~ the wind-down, step by step ~

The schedule repays reading as a document, because it shows a service being disassembled in the order that costs the operator least. On 24 March at three in the afternoon, material uploads stopped along with the gacha, and so did the button that sent playthroughs to Niconico Douga. On 31 March everything that spent Niconico Points went off, which is the day the site stopped being able to take money. New game creation and duplication survived three more weeks, until 21 April. Everything else went on the 27th.

Members got a consolation: from 31 March the site ran a giveaway of something called ニコイン to every account holder, starting on the same day it switched off everything that ran on Niconico Points. There is one small discrepancy in the record. The announcement's opening sentence puts the end at 16:00 on 27 April, while its own timetable, printed a few lines below, says 15:00. Both figures come from the same article.

~ what the last page was ~

The Internet Archive caught nicoga.jp on the evening of 27 April 2011, hours after it ended. What it saved is 1,357 bytes: a contact link, and a single image six hundred pixels wide with a stylesheet to position it. The page title is 「ニコゲー」サービス終了のお知らせ, a notice of the end of service, and the notice itself was inside that image.

The image was served from a separate host, and the Archive never captured it. Every later crawl of that path returns a 404. So the farewell Spike wrote to the people who had made 10,459 games is recoverable only as a title tag and a file name of known dimensions. The games went with it. The published schedule names no destination for them and no way to take one out, and nothing in the record suggests either was offered.

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