Tekuteku Tekuteku (テクテクテクテク)

~ the obit ~

What you were filling in was Japan. Not a Japan-shaped level and not a Japanese server region, but the actual ground, cut into 街区, the blocks of land that roads enclose, with the archipelago itself standing as the long-term thing the player base was meant to finish between them. That is a goal you can only set in one country. The board this game needed was the Japanese street grid, and no other country's grid was a substitute.

Dwango put it on iOS and Android on 29 November 2018, under a genre label of its own: 地図塗りRPG, map-painting RPG. Koichi Nakamura produced it. Kazuya Asano directed and designed it, and Famitsu pointed out at the time that the pair had not worked on a game together in twenty years. The tagline was 「一生歩けるRPG」, an RPG you can walk for a lifetime.

The announcement came on 13 March 2019, fifteen weeks after launch. Dwango's reason, in full, was 「今後お客さまにご満足いただけるサービスの提供が困難であるという判断に至り」, a judgment that going forward it could no longer offer customers a service they would be happy with. That sentence is the entire explanation on the record. Denfaminicogamer's writer offered a sharper one, that paid usage never reached a scale capable of sustaining the service, but that is the writer's wording and Dwango never said it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the unit was a city block ~

Games that paint a map usually paint it in squares or hexes, because a uniform grid is cheap to store and easy to score. This one used the 街区, the real parcel of ground enclosed by roads, so the unit changed size as you moved. A tight residential lane in a Tokyo ward handed you a small win every minute or two. A block bounded by an expressway on one side and a river on the other could take a serious walk to close.

Above the block sat the 字, the smallest unit in a Japanese address. Painting one of those to 100 percent paid a bonus you could collect once a day, which gave the walking a shape beyond wandering. The 日本列島 sat at the top of that ladder as the stated ambition, and nobody was ever going to reach it alone.

~ paint you could book from the train ~

現地ぬり, painting on location, was the way to claim a block outright, and it meant physically standing in it. となりぬり reached into the neighboring blocks from wherever you were, paid for out of TTP, the game's own currency, which is how you colored the far side of a wall you had no reason to walk around.

The one that made the game survivable on a commute was 予約ぬり. Blocks you passed through at speed were reserved rather than painted, and you had twenty four hours to open the app and tap them in. That one rule is what let a train ride count.

~ the last three months ~

Two features were still in the pipeline when the notice went up, and Dwango shipped both of them anyway. A 牧場 ranch mode landed on 14 March, the day after the announcement. A Godzilla raid battle, the fourth-form Godzilla specifically, ran from noon on 15 March to 23:59 on 24 March. The AR photo feature went dark at 17:00 on 14 March, so the ranch arrived and the camera left on the same day.

The collaborations were what did not survive. Four VTuber tie-ins were canceled outright: 月ノ美兎, 電脳少女シロ, ミライアカリ, 猫宮ひなた. The one with ヒメヒナ was shortened and finished on 26 March.

Sales of 歩行石, the paid currency, stopped at noon on 16 May, and items already bought with it kept working to the end. Dwango promised a refund of unused purchased 歩行石 without saying yet how it would run, and attached an instruction that gives the shape of it away: do not delete the app, and do not reinstall it if you change handsets, because support would need to read your data first. The service ended at 11:59 on Monday 17 June 2019. A store lookup on its old Japanese App Store identifier comes back empty today.

~ the company that came after ~

Nakamura put a line in the shutdown notice that reads less like an apology than a plan. He wanted to improve on what had gone wrong here and bring the thing back renewed: 「いつの日かテクテクを復活できるよう頑張ろうと思っております」, to work so that one day Tekuteku could be revived. Five days before the servers went quiet, on 12 June, the operations desk posted 「後継作品への引き継ぎについて」, a handover to a successor title. The development team was already aiming at one.

The bridge itself was unusually careful. Launching the dead app after 17 June put a データ引き継ぎ button on the start screen, and even players who had already deleted it could get back in through data recovery to register. What waited on the far side was part of your play data, or a reward scaled to how far you had got, contents undecided. Dwango hedged that in its own words: 「データの引継ぎを行わない（行えない）場合もございます」, there are cases where the handover will not, or cannot, be carried out.

テクテクライフ is alive today, and it arrived without any business transfer from Dwango. Asano and 田村寛人 registered a company under that name after the original service had already ended, and shipped their own map-painting game under it in 2020. The App Store lookup for that one still returns a record, last updated in September 2026.

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