Quest of D

» see questofd.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

To play Quest of D you had to buy a card from a vending unit standing in a Japanese game center, and when that card had been used a hundred times it stopped working and you bought another one. That is not a detail about the business model. It is the reason this game is a closed book to most of the people reading about it now. There was no version of Quest of D reachable from anywhere but a room in Japan with the right cabinet standing in it, and Sega never built one.

Sega AM2 put it into arcades nationwide in September 2004, on cabinet hardware, hooked to the fiber network Sega ran for its arcade titles. The game itself was a four-player 3D dungeon crawler worked with a single lever and four buttons, plus a touchscreen. The clever part was the cards. Your character lived on a rewritable IC card that you kept in your wallet between visits. Your abilities came from D-Force cards, printed trading cards with a strip of special ink along the top edge so the machine could identify them when you fed them in, and a deck held up to thirty-five of them.

There were four versions in all. Version 2.0 arrived in 2005 and added the thief class along with elves and dwarves, then Version 3.0 started on 19 October 2006 with score attack and advanced job classes. The Battle Kingdom followed in late 2007 and brought player-versus-player. There was also a 2004 crossover with The Key of Avalon, another Sega card game, which let seven monsters cross between the two cabinets because both machines read cards the same way.

The last big event, a subjugation festival billed as FINAL, ran on 24 November 2009. Three days later Sega posted a notice about the future of the series. On 9 February 2010 it announced that the network service would end, and on 31 August 2010 at four in the morning it did. The closing notice was signed by the development team and gave no reason, only the standard request for understanding.

~ the case file ~

~ what the cards were actually for ~

The hundred-play limit on the save card is the thing worth sitting with. Sega was selling you storage for your own character, metered, and the meter ran out. Plenty of arcade games of that era sold you a card; what made this one unusual is that the card was both the save file and the consumable, so a long-running character accumulated a paper trail of expired plastic behind it.

The D-Force cards worked the other way round. They were not consumed, they were read. The cabinet ejected one after each play and you put it back in your deck, which meant the deck you carried into the arcade was the loadout, built at home, out of cardboard. A companion website called D.NET held a shared item warehouse and ran an auction house for guilds, so the game had a web layer at a time when arcade games mostly did not.

~ what sega left switched on ~

The February notice is specific about what would survive, and the list of what would not is long: nationwide and in-store co-op, both versus modes, item authentication, crafting, skill changes, character leveling, shop trading, reissue of a lost IC card, anything stored in the D.NET warehouse, and the Key of Avalon cards.

What remained was scenario mode. The cabinet still powered up and you could still walk a dungeon alone, with a character frozen at whatever level the network had last agreed to.

D.NET itself kept going for years after the game it served. It closed on 28 February 2017, according to Japanese Wikipedia citing a notice I could not reach, which is six and a half years of a website quietly holding the inventory of players who had no cabinet left to spend it in. If that date is right, the warehouse outlasted the game by longer than the game had been alive.

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