Synchronica

» see bandainamco-am.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Synchronica opened in Japanese arcades on 18 June 2015, after location tests the year before. One cabinet, two large touch panels set side by side, and a tagline that told you exactly what the machine was for: great on your own, better with two. Bandai Namco built the whole thing around the second player.

You touched and held notes as they slid down the panel, and in the co-op mode the chart split between two people standing shoulder to shoulder. The cabinet read Banapassport and Aime cards, which carried your scores off the machine and into a companion website called Synchronica Lounge. In July 2016 both the cabinet design and the system underneath were rebuilt into a second version.

An arcade rhythm cabinet is less a product than a piece of national infrastructure. Japan had the floor space and the operator network to carry one. The places I played in public ran rows of PCs and Counter-Strike, and a machine like this had no reason to be crated up and shipped to them.

Bandai Namco announced the end on 16 May 2019, four and a half months out, on the official site and the official account at the same time.

~ the record ~

~ two players, one cabinet ~

Most arcade music games are solo machines that happen to seat two. Synchronica was the other way around. The panels faced the same chart and the co-op mode divided it, so the second seat was a design requirement rather than a second revenue slot, which is a generous thing to build into a machine that bills by the credit.

It kept the usual company. There was a crossover with Groove Coaster 4 in August, and a tie-in with Idolmaster SideM that handed out serial codes at Namco locations. Both are the normal weather of a Japanese arcade title, and both needed the network that was about to go.

~ the night the network stopped ~

The notice put the end at 26:00 on Monday 30 September. Arcades keep a clock that runs past midnight because the business does, so 26:00 means two in the morning on 1 October, and writing it the long way lets an operator close out a Monday rather than open a Tuesday.

The producer's comment was unusually plain about cause. Continuing to update the game to a sufficient standard had become difficult, and so this was the decision. He apologized to the people still playing and thanked the venues that had carried the machine since the 2014 location tests. The development team, he said, would spend what time was left doing what it could.

~ the cabinets that outlived it ~

The offline update landed on 1 October 2019, and the trade went in both directions. Banapassport stopped working and Synchronica Lounge went dark, so scores had nowhere to go and some songs could no longer be played at all. Everything that had been locked behind a condition, though, came free: with no server to check who you were, the machine stopped asking.

Single play and multiplayer both survived the cut. Years later the official account still describes the game as running offline with around 140 songs on board, which is an odd line to leave in a profile, and an accurate one. The network was the part that died, and the thing people actually stood in front of is still standing.

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