Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE

~ the obit ~

Tokimeki Memorial had been Konami's dating simulation series since 1994, and by the middle of the 2000s the obvious question was what it would look like with other people in it. Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE was the answer: a Windows MMO where you enrolled at a fictional high school, went to class and talked to whoever else was in the room.

The first closed beta ran from 26 September to 5 October 2005 with 5,000 players. The second ran through February 2006 and kept being extended until it held 60,000. Service opened on 23 March 2006 at 1,200 yen per thirty days.

There was no combat and no leveling grind, which is the reason to build an MMO out of this franchise and not some other one, and it left the whole game leaning on conversation and on small activities between classes. Konami's own roadmap of promised additions then failed to arrive on schedule, so what players had in month eight was roughly what they had in month one.

In 2006 I was finishing university on a TTNet line that had finally turned into broadband, and none of this was ever going to be on it. It shipped in Japan, in Japanese, and it never left the country. There was nothing to miss out on from Ankara because there was nothing on offer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it charged for ~

1,200 yen every thirty days was ordinary money for a Japanese MMO in 2006, and the complaint recorded against this one was never really the number. It was what the number bought. Japanese write-ups go on at length about how narrow the play was, and about a roadmap that kept slipping while the billing did not.

The payment model made the first impression worse. You paid up front before you could see any of it, with no free trial in the early months, so the first thing the game asked of a curious Tokimeki fan was a month's subscription on faith.

~ the chat filter and the fan sites ~

The word filter is the detail that turns up in every Japanese account of why this failed. In a game whose entire content was talking to people, the filter was tuned tightly enough to mangle ordinary sentences, and players spent the run working around it.

Konami ran the community outside the game with the same grip. Fan sites needed approval, which players described as Konami screening them, and the rules about what you could publish from a screenshot were strict. For a game selling a school full of classmates, the surrounding community was kept on a short leash.

~ the graduation ceremony ~

Konami announced the end on 7 March 2007, less than a year after launch, and set the date for 31 July. That put the total run at sixteen months. On the night itself the servers held a graduation ceremony and the producer appeared in-world to see the students out.

The ceremony did not stay ceremonial. Japanese accounts of that night describe 怒号, angry shouting, aimed at the producer through the chat box and through whatever emotes people had, from players who had bought sixteen months of high school and were being told the school was closing. The last thing that happened inside Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE was a room full of graduates jeering the man who built it.

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