Mobile Suit Gundam: Senjo no Kizuna II

» see gundam-kizuna.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Senjo no Kizuna II started running in Japanese arcades on 27 July 2021, fourteen years after the game it replaced. It was a tactical team game: you climbed into a cabinet and fought a match of up to six against six over the network, with the whole thing paid for at a terminal rather than at the machine itself. Bandai Namco Amusement operated it, and a studio called Viking built it.

The hardware is the reason any of this matters. The original Mobile Suit Gundam: Senjo no Kizuna went nationwide on 7 November 2006 with a cabinet called the panoramic optical display, a half-dome screen wrapped around one seat, driven by two levers and two foot pedals. Four of those cabinets plus one pilot terminal made a single installation, and a full match could put sixteen people in the same virtual space. II inherited the shape and narrowed the match to six a side. The first game's own service ended at 2am on 30 November 2021, four months after the sequel opened, so the two ran side by side for a single autumn.

Bandai Namco Amusement posted the ending on 5 December 2023. The online service for the game and its companion website would stop at 2am on 28 March 2024, and from 7am that morning the cabinets would run in offline mode only. That is a five-hour gap, written into the notice, between a machine that was part of a national network and the same machine as a box in a room. Nobody published a reason for any of it.

I have never sat in one. Ankara had arcades and it had internet cafes, and the networked team game of my 2003 was Counter-Strike on a PC in the second kind of room, which is a thing an operator could buy forty of. A dome-screen cockpit is floor space, and floor space is why this category of game stayed in the country that invented it.

~ the record ~

~ the pod ~

The 2006 cabinet is still the most famous part of the lineage. Card support came later: from revision 3 the game read the shared Banapassport card, and a card cost 300 yen to issue, though plenty of shops discounted or waived it. Amusement IC support arrived on 25 October 2018. II changed the money flow so you paid at the terminal instead, and it formally introduced actions built around the shield.

Producers changed too. Tsukada Yumeto ran it through the launch, and Shoji Chiaki was announced as his replacement on 20 March 2022.

~ two in the morning ~

Two things ended at 2am on 28 March 2024, and the notice named both: the game's online service and the official companion site that tracked your record. The companion site is the quieter loss. An arcade game with a card and a website is a game that remembers you between visits, and that memory sat on a server rather than in the cabinet. It went at the same minute.

~ what the cabinet can still do ~

Offline mode was not improvised at the last minute. A single-player score attack had been added in the update of 13 September 2023, under three months before the closure notice, and that mode was already specified as something the cabinet could run without a network. After the switch-off the pods kept that, plus in-store matches of up to four against four between people physically in the same arcade.

What they could not keep was identity and money. Electronic payment stopped working, and so did the Banapassport and any amusement IC card. The cabinet went back to being a machine you feed and then walk away from, which is what arcade cabinets were before anyone networked them.

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