WACCA

» see info-wacca.marv.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

WACCA began commercial service in Japanese arcades on 18 July 2019. Marvelous made it, which was not the obvious outcome: the company had published a great many things over the years but had never built an arcade rhythm game, and the nearest it had come was IA/VT Colorful on the PlayStation Vita in 2015.

The cabinet was the entire proposition. A round screen sat inside a round touch panel that Marvelous designed and built itself, a 360-degree ring of LED touch sensors it called the WACCA Console. Notes traveled outward from the center toward the rim, and you tapped the segment they arrived at. Some you held, and others slid around the ring or flicked in and out. Difficulty came from where your hands had to be rather than from how fast the song ran, which inverts the usual arrangement in the genre.

It ran a little over three years. Marvelous updated it four times, finishing with WACCA Reverse in August 2021, announced the end on 21 June 2022, and switched the online service off at 23:59 on 31 August.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ring ~

Development started in 2017 under the producer Tatsuya Yokoyama, who chose a rhythm game for the straightforward reason that he liked rhythm games. The team drew up twenty cabinet designs before landing on the circle. One of the rejected ideas was a DJ desk, which is the motif anyone would reach for first and therefore the one they threw out. The working title was CircuRing.

The name WACCA got picked because it sounded faintly wrong and carried nothing musical inside it, which was the distance they wanted from maimai and CHUNITHM and the rest of the Japanese arcade rhythm shelf. Character art came from LAM. The machine stood just under two meters tall and weighed 180 kilograms. A credit cost a hundred yen. Underneath the custom furniture it ran on Sega's arcade board and saved your progress to Sega's ALL.Net, read off an Aime card or a Banapassport.

~ the hardcore label ~

The other half of WACCA was HARDCORE TANO*C, the largest hardcore techno label in Japan, brought in at the start of development rather than hired later for a song pack. Yokoyama was a fan of their work. The label wrote the music and the note charts in parallel, which it had never done before, and that is an unusual way around: normally the song exists and somebody else decides where the notes go.

It gave the game a sound narrower and louder than its competitors and a reason to care about it beyond the hardware. The theme was Let you DIVE! by the label's all-stars with vocals from Saori Ōnishi, and later versions pulled in t+pazolite and USAO. Licensed songs came across from Touhou Project and Senran Kagura.

Marvelous took the cabinet further than most people assume. Round1 had units running in American arcades by late August 2019, weeks after the Japanese launch, and on 18 December 2019 Marvelous began a staged rollout across four more Asian markets, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong. On 18 July 2022, exactly three years after the game opened, it released a three-disc set with every original track on it. The online service had six weeks left.

~ the last cabinet ~

Marvelous never gave a reason for any of it, and ITmedia said so plainly at the time. What the company did instead was leave the machines alive. A twenty-five day run of songs called the Curtain Call Event closed on 18 July with one last new track, and VIP registration shut that same night. At midnight on 1 September the cabinets came back up in offline mode, every song and every difficulty unlocked from the start, and nothing reading your card.

Arcades as a place you traveled to had gone quiet in Turkey long before 2019, so I was never going to put my hands on one of these rings. The machines are out there, though, and they still play. The part that died on 31 August 2022 was the part that remembered who you were.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »