written by Ted

Within the canon of video game magazines, few occupy as much of an integral and obvious place as Famitsu. To date in all of its guises, it is the longest-running publication dedicated to the subject, now clocking in at 36 years and counting with over 1770 issues at present. During those years, it has gone from monthly, to bi-weekly, to weekly release, and continues under current editor in chief Saga Hiroko. Not too bad for a brand that first began merely as a name for a small, serialised column within a bigger magazine (Login).

Only the likes of EGM and The Games Machine come close to Famitsu’s long and storied run; the previous longest-running title holder, Computer & Video Games, lost that particular claim a few years ago after the 2015 discontinuation of its online edition. By contrast, Famitsu continues to defiantly weather the consolidation, controversy, …

Written by ted90909

Arcadia – among many words with an etymology that leads many on a trail of it in numerous uses, meaning many different things to many different people. From its ancient Greek utopian coinage, to long-standing use in culture and inevitably amusement arcade businesses in more recent centuries, possibly one of the most well-loved and cherished of those uses has been for Japan’s Monthly Arcadia (アルカディア); a “Coin op’ed Videogame Magazine” or “Arcade Video Game Machine Magazine” depending on which official subtitle you’d like to believe. A summarisation of its inception, active period, and demise is essential to understanding part of the Japanese arcade scene’s recent history.

Crisis

The background of Arcadia’s rise is a troubled point for arcades, even in its strongholds of Japan. Not since the new fueiho law scares of 1984 that inspired giants like Sega and Nintendo to innovate and open up new console-based …

For close to ten years, not one other fighting game tournament mattered quite so much to many players across the world as Tougeki – Super Battle Opera. Once the biggest eastern ying to the western yang of EVO and others, Tougeki’s ubiquity over the course of the 2000s is ultimately hard to overstate. Its story is a short rise, a glorious near-decade long run, an equally short fall – and an arguable prelude that remains a curious artefact of the confused era that the tourneys were borne out of. All of which are vital to understanding the legacy of a complete fighting game icon, one worth remembering and celebrating to this day for its precipitation of esports as much as its operatic namesake.

Overture

In tracing Tougeki SBO’s inception, one can arguably find themselves at the most unlikely of origins for an event which came to be among the biggest …