NOVA Usagi no Game de Ryugaku!?

» see p.eagate.573.jp/game/nova/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Konami showed it at the AOU Amusement Expo in February 2006 under a provisional name that translated to something like Study Abroad At The Arcade. Two location tests later 「NOVAうさぎのゲームde留学!?」 went out properly on 12 October 2006, calling itself an edutainment game, which in practice meant a cabinet in a Japanese game center that tested your English in mini-games and kept a record of how you were doing.

The licensor was NOVA, then the biggest English conversation school chain in the country, and the deal went deeper than a logo. NOVA supervised the question bank, and NOVA's mascot, a pink rabbit, was in the title and all over the screen. The whole thing ran on the same board-swappable e-AMUSEMENT CABINET hardware Konami used for several other titles, with a touchscreen you poked using a pen tethered to the housing.

Your e-AMUSEMENT PASS held the study record, and new questions arrived over the network the way they did for Konami's quiz games. It shipped with more than five thousand of them. On 31 March 2009 the e-AMUSEMENT service for it stopped, and any arcade that still had the machine on the floor was running it on its own from then on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the cabinet asked you ~

The main mode split English into six kinds of mini-game, one of which was filed under right-brain. Answering correctly paid out points called minitsuku, and after each game it showed you where you stood nationally. There was a separate diagnosis mode, free of the pass, that graded you beginner through advanced and then unlocked a fourth tier above advanced for anyone who cleared it. Grades ran from seventh kyu to first, and above that from first dan to seventh, and the dan ranks were earned on quotas rather than on points.

The sharp part of the design was the ceiling. Each question's points were fixed, and a question you had already answered right never paid again, so the only way to keep earning was to keep finding questions you had not seen. Review mode existed to farm the unseen ones more than to go back over anything. And in the periodic national tests, getting a question wrong that you had previously got right took its points away from you.

NOVA's slogan was ekimae ryugaku, study abroad in front of the station. The business ran on two assumptions baked into that phrase: that you walked past a language school every evening on your way out of a commuter rail gate, and that an arcade near the same gate was a normal place for an adult to spend ten minutes. Neither assumption describes Ankara, where the stations are not the hinge of the city and the game centers never arrived.

~ october 2007 ~

NOVA had taken about forty billion yen in tuition up front. In April 2007 a Supreme Court ruling voided the settlement terms the company used when students canceled, and a six-month business suspension order followed in June. On 26 October 2007 NOVA went to the Osaka District Court for reorganization carrying roughly 43.9 billion yen of debt. 669 classrooms shut. 7,400 staff, including the foreign instructors, were out. Students who had paid cash were holding general claims and mostly got nothing back, while the ones who had signed credit contracts were released from what they still owed.

The arcade cabinet was a year and two weeks old. Its mascot was now the face of one of the year's larger corporate failures, and the Japanese write-ups record operators voluntarily pulling the machine and retailers pausing sales of the Nintendo DS port, which had come out on 22 February 2007 with an easier children's mode bolted on. Konami did not kill the game. The brand on it simply became a thing nobody wanted lit up in a room full of paying customers.

~ the offline years ~

The last national test closed on 11 May 2008, three hundred and twenty-four days before the network did, so it stopped being a competition well before it stopped being online. After 31 March 2009 the cabinet could still test your English and still could not tell you whether anyone else in the country was better at it. The game's page on Konami's arcade portal returns a 404 today, on a site that is otherwise entirely alive.

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