Tokimeki Restaurant☆☆☆

» see gamecity.ne.jp/tokires as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The premise was that you cooked. You ran a restaurant and six young men from two idol groups came in to eat. What you cooked them moved the relationship along. Konami shipped it on 14 March 2013 under the Love Plus production division, the part of the company that had already worked out how to sell a Japanese audience an attentive boyfriend who lives in a phone. There was a mode called skinship for the close-range bits. The two bands, 3 Majesty and X.I.P., were voiced by working voice actors and were treated from the start as if they were real acts rather than game assets.

They became real acts. The units put out music and ran a ticketed anniversary tour every summer. By 2017 the cast had done an event at Sanrio Puroland. By 2018 they were on a fifth anniversary summer tour that ran from 28 July to 26 August. Koei Tecmo had announced on 15 June that the app itself would close on 31 August, so the tour played its last date with the shutdown already booked, five days out.

Then on 31 August at two in the afternoon the servers answered for the last time, and that was the restaurant. The bands kept their calendar. Concerts were already scheduled into 2019 for characters whose kitchen no longer existed, which is a strange shape for a franchise to hold: the fictional people survived, the place they were fictional in did not.

~ the record ~

~ two landlords ~

The unusual thing in this grave's paperwork is the date 7 August 2014. On that day, seventeen months into the game's life, the operation moved from Konami Digital Entertainment to Koei Tecmo Games. Konami kept building it. The Love Plus production division carried on developing the app, and when that division was dissolved the work went to Konami's third production bureau, but the servers and the customer relationship belonged to somebody else from then on.

It is a split you almost never see stated this baldly. Most phone games have one company's name on everything. This one had a builder and a landlord, and it was the landlord who eventually decided the lease was up. When the end came it was posted on gamecity.ne.jp, Koei Tecmo's own domain, where it still sits today.

~ the till closes first ~

I was not within a thousand miles of this audience. Otome games aimed at Japanese women in the mid-2010s sit at the far end of the internet from anything I had open, and what brought me here was the shutdown notice, not the game.

The notice is worth reading anyway, because it is unusually complete. Paid currency sales stopped on 31 July 2018 at 14:00, a month before the game did. Play continued until 31 August at 14:00. Refunds for unused paid currency ran from 1 September to 30 November 2018, with free currency explicitly excluded. That is the full anatomy of a wind-down in four dates, and the first of them is always the real one: once a company stops taking your money, the argument inside the building is over.

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