https://web.archive.org/web/20010210094545/http://www.sega.co.jp/AM2/news/index.html There's definitely a lot of "things" in there. Virtua Fighter 3 Maximum Battle Morinaga Angel Cup Java Tea Battle Koushien King of Virtua Fighter 3 There was also some kind of official tournaments for Virtua Striker 2 and Scud Race.
Screw it lets post some things So I guess the reason we haven't thought about these kinds of events much is because they're... uh... unremarkable. Sega owned a chain of game centers in Japan, and a lot of the time it's little competitions between branches. There won't have been many game companies with the infrastructure to organise all of this in-house, but whatever - it's just a glorified promotional campaign to increase footfall - the outcome of these tournaments doesn't really matter. But around 1995/1996-ish we start seeing nationwide competitions that are caught on camera, and while it's still nothing that the West will care about, there was obviously some thought put into Java Tea Battle Koushien King of Virtua Fighter 3. I mean for one, it's sponsored by Java Tea, fresh after tying themselves up with Virtua Fighter Kids. Also it had a theme song. Kimi ga Inai Yoru (君がいない夜) , sung by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (of Daytona USA fame). Because of course it was, he does everything. Footage of the finals were also released across two VHS cassettes instead of the usual one. Except only one of them has been uploaded: That's "King of King's", but there's also "Queen of Queen's". It wasn't immediately obvious to me why there were two (or indeed what any of this noise actually was), but it turns out it's because there were two classes - an "open class" and a "women's class". "Segregation down gender lines?? That doesn't sound very open!!" . Well actually women could compete in either class - it was men who were barred from one of them. So hurray, everyone and/or no-one is happy! You could win yourself a belt. I like the idea of the giant can of tea myself. it's also the only tournament to get its own Sega Freaks card. An event immortalised in history until everyone forgot what it was.
The tournament sponsorships with popular drink brands even continue now too, as Initial D had one with Lifeguard tied into its recent Hashiriya Festival - albeit on a smaller scale between a specific number of cities instead of nationally. What can definitely make these tournaments notable outside of their ridiculous promotional excesses and convenience for announcing/showcasing new games, though, is featuring exclusive versions. Case in point - more special editions of Fighting Vipers made for one-day events/tournaments shenanigans, as the sequel got one too. Differences to the normal arcade release in this one include BM, Delsol, and Kuhn as playable characters, the option to pick any character with any moveset, and a nurse costume for Honey (which was later added in the Dreamcast port). It also has the distinction of "known to still exist", although by the looks of things it won't be made publicly available like several other games held by its present owner until hell freezes over. After the Polygon Junkie club nights concluded, Sega liked the idea enough to help hold a few more. So here we have "FV2 vs GABBA" - participate in an FV2 tourney, and rave on with gabber techno DJs, live acts, and special guest Imaitoons at the Candlelight Club Daikanyama in Shibuya. Hence the so-called "GABBA Version" of FV2. Shinjuku Sportsland also comes into play somewhere, as their website still hosts the main source of info on both the special version and the tournament itself ... to the extent that one of their locations was later outright bought by them and became Club Sega Shinjuku Nishiguchi, which itself had a strong FV2 scene. (and there is a decent amount of writing - all in Japanese, natch - that chronicles this whole Tokyo playerbase for Sega's 3D fighters. Ex-AM2 PR rep Fumio Kurokawa's article interviewing a manager of another Shinjuku location where Sega were directly involved is of particular relevance here, and the TOKYOHEAD history books on VF2 by the late Gichi Otsuka actually received a limited stage play adaption. Has Street Fighter II ever got one of those anywhere?)
Stuff I'm not touching: Shin Sakura Taisen. I have no idea what this is because there is a fourth book that doesn't seem to be a collected volume: 新サクラ大戦 THE COMIC 1 ヤングジャンプコミックス: https://www.hmv.co.jp/artist_野口こゆり_000000000589066/item_新サクラ大戦-THE-COMIC-1-ヤングジャンプコミックス_10447149 新サクラ大戦 THE COMIC 2 ヤングジャンプコミックス: https://www.hmv.co.jp/artist_野口こゆり_000000000589066/item_新サクラ大戦-THE-COMIC-2-ヤングジャンプコミックス_10789415 新サクラ大戦 the Comic 3 ヤングジャンプコミックス: https://www.hmv.co.jp/artist_野口こゆり_000000000589066/item_新サクラ大戦-the-Comic-3-ヤングジャンプコミックス_10971314 Whatever this is (新サクラ大戦 the Comic): https://comic.pixiv.net/works/6215 And because OF COURSE Shin Sakura Taisen will have stage plays: 舞台「新サクラ大戦 the Stage」Blu-ray: https://www.hmv.co.jp/artist_新サクラ大戦_000000000821087/item_舞台「新サクラ大戦-the-Stage」Blu-ray_11393341 新サクラ大戦 the Stage ～二つの焔～Blu-ray: https://www.hmv.co.jp/artist_新サクラ大戦_000000000821087/item_新サクラ大戦-the-Stage-〜二つの焔〜-Blu-ray_12506813
I kept seeing "Eternal Battle" in my travels, and was a little confused. This VHS, and our wiki page, is called "Virtua Fighter 2 Eternal Battle", because... uh... look at it, it's all Virtua Fighter 2 renders and footage on the cover... except for those screens in the bottom right and... hey the spine says something different and oh. Maybe if I'd watched the damn thing I'd have understood this better. Virtua Fighter (The?) Eternal Battle was an event that occurred on the 12th February 1995. It acted as the finals for three different Virtua Fighter tournaments: 1) The arcade version of Virtua Fighter 2) The Sega Saturn version of Virtua Fighter 3) The arcade version of Virtua Fighter 2 It wouldn't have crossed my mind that you would have different generations of Virtua Fighter played on the same day. They were also calling one or more of these events "Virtua Fighter Championship" (バーチャファイターチャンピオンシップ) at some point. I suspect this is that. Admittedly I'm not really sure what's going on - there are dates for Virtua Fighter 2 but I'm told the arcade Virtua Fighter (1) preliminaries occurred before then and asdkjhasdghjsd In other news there's an unofficial set of Virtua Fighter tournaments that date back to 1994: http://www.beat-tribe.com/index.html it's important to Virtua Fighter culture, but a nightmare to document. I'll go on record at this point and say, while I know Virtua Fighter, I am by no means any sort of expert on the game. These events and videos feature nothing but experts.
A Gamest feature seems to title it as "Virtua Fighter 1 & 2 Eternal Battle" - was just trying to find the specific issue but didn't get anywhere.
Due diligence to make sure there aren't any glaring differences between the arcade and Dreamcast versions of Virtua Fighter 3tb. ... and turns out our wiki page was/is wrong, because x years ago I probably copy-edited some information from somewhere without checking it myself. But to be fair, it should have been obvious to whoever originally wrote it. The Japanese Dreamcast version might not have a dedicated "versus mode", but that doesn't make a it a single player game - the second player just has to "challenge" like in the arcade. I also foolishly took this video as comparison advice. I would have made the assumption that emulation was good enough, and it probably was, but: One of the really big bugs, shadows on Pai's stage, only appeared in the Japanese version. It was fine when the Western versions launched. And this might call into question the supposed inaccuracies elsewhere - most of the footage online is of the Japanese version for some reason, and it's well known that copy is sub-optimal. Although it's not like anyone has really explained why the Dreamcast versions suck, only that they do. Likewise Virtua Fighter 3 as a whole apparently sucks compared to 1, 2, 4 and 5, but then... it's still played in tournaments today so it's almost like people are making up facts. One thing that is fair to say is that at its Western launch, VF3tb went up against SoulCalibur, and yeah, compared to that, it's not great. But I'm curious to know exactly how good it was at being a port of Virtua Fighter 3tb. I can't really test things like controller response if I'm emulating everything. I'm also curious about the second revision that came out in Japan, becausae it seem to have any surface level changes over the original release.
Remembered a few things, so here we go The photo below started off a thread of Harmony cover scans to commemorate Sonic's 30th anniversary, done by prolific Twitter poster, writer, and ex-Hi Tech Sega location manager @yog49. I think I linked a bunch of their Sega-related tweets here before, but there's also some more with notable talk of early Virtua Fighter events. The one above is accompanied by a mention of a national tournament held in 1994, "Final Battle 94" (ファイナルバトル 94). There's an incredibly poor showing for this one online (i.e. nothing besides these posts), and other tweets by them make it clear that it was separate from everything surrounding LIVE UFO that same year. Why? The apparent story with this tournament is that it was singlehandedly, semi-officially organised by all of the Sega venue managers and regional staff - and thusly wasn't really planned with a view to it as a big promotional exercise. Yet the tourney still was a great success, with good turnout from players at locations, and the managers who organised it even managed to wrangle the use of the lobby at one of Sega's headquarters buildings for the finals. Word is then said to have got out elsewhere in the company about this tournament, and at the end of the finals day, AM2 staff are supposed to have quickly set up a pre-release version of Virtua Fighter 2 to show those there. Dates are still up in the air on much of this though - there might be bits of coverage in Gamest if we're lucky. Another post of theirs indicates that even the Japanese internet might be wrong on some of these old VF events, at least in terms of where they were held. There's also talk of a second national tournament for VF2, held at On Air East in Shibuya (which was where all the Polygon Junkie events happened) and called "Maximum Battle". Yes, partly the same as the VF3 tourney that followed it, although this one doesn't seem to have been sponsored by Morinaga.
I mirrored this from archive.org: https://retrocdn.net/File:78YuugiKikaiSougouNenkan_Book_JP.pdf '78 Yuugi Kikai Sougou Nenkan ('78 遊戯機械総合年鑑) aka the Japanese amusement industry, circa 1978. There aren't too many surprises from a Sega perspective, but still plenty to digest. https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:78YuugiKikaiSougouNenkan_Book_JP.pdf&page=253 Modern Sega believes it was born in 1960, but this Sega claims April 1951. Also the "give your children nightmares" award goes to...
You've heard of Metropolis Zone... you've probably also heard of Megalopolis Tokyo City Battle... now get ready for Megatropolis Powerslam (メガトロポリス・パワースラム), a drum and bass + happy hardcore club night held at Club Citta Kawasaki in March 1997. Not only did it feature several DJs and a few MCs from both Japan and the UK (including the likes of Kenny Ken and Slipmatt), but also official support and (of course) arcade games from Sega, with Scud Race, Sega Touring Car Championship, and even Top Skater, some months ahead of its release later that year. Again, an incredibly poor degree of documentation seems to exist for the Sega side of things, possibly in part due to it not having a tournament aspect this time. There is an hour-long video of everything else doing the rounds though: And this one-off did effectively bridge the gap between Polygon Junkie and a new series of events - that "FV2 vs GABBA" one mentioned previously? It's actually the second "Skull Polygon" (スカルポリゴン), which apparently started in July 1997. That's the extent of all known about it so far, as this one seems to be even more elusive. I was vaguely aware of a few of these happening before, but had no idea Sega had an official hand in quite so many from around 1994 to the late 90s in Japan. At this rate we may well need a specific category for this stuff.
Mistakes were made. There are 18 WCCF games (maybe more if you count the revisions... which I'm not sure if we should). 13 "Winners Cup" tournaments, 2 "Footista Player's Cup"s and at least three others. I fear there might be the concept of "pre-season tournaments" as well, but given most of the games aren't playable anymore and barely any left Japan, I don't have high hopes for detailed coverage anytime soon. But there is another Sega game series I'm more qualified to talk about: Puyo Puyo. Competitive Puyo Puyo tournaments have been held since the game was made competitive in the mid-1990s, but given the last (non-Tetris) game was literally called Puyo Puyo eSports in Japan, you'd think any Japanese national championships would be easy to document. I mean, it's the whole raison d'etre of the game - how hard can it be? (guess who knows nothing about eSports) Well it seemed fairly promising at the start. Sega organise yearly "Puyo Puyo Championships". It's all online so no need to physically travel to a store, and no interruptions from Covid 19 means we they've managed five "seasons" since the game launched in 2018. A little confusing because it has its own logo for whatever reason, the Championships lead to "Puyo Puyo Finals", where Sega decides who is the best and moving coloured blobs around. Fine, we can work with this. Then there's the "Puyo Puyo Cup", which I think is a level down, presumably as some sort of feeder tournament for the Championships, but I don't understand yet so don't quote me on this. Oh and we've got to have our special "Puyo Puyo Ladies Cup", which has been hosted twice, for the ladies. Apparently it isn't popular enough for people to post transparent PNGs of the logo. I don't know what a "Puyo Puyo Ranking Pro Senbatsu Taikai" (ぷよぷよランキングプロ選抜大会) is, but it also exists. And because it's Asia, Japan obviously has a general eSports tournament that's been running every year since 2019. Every four years we have some noise about eSports being part of the Olympic Games, and this is why - some countries have official eSports sporting bodies. Puyo Puyo eSports has been an "event" since this thing's inception. Spoilers: these are just the main national competitions (for one game) held since 2018. There are countless smaller and older events.
So people are idiots. There's been a steady stream of noise about eSports being an Olympic event since about 2017, particularly in the lead-up to the Tokyo 2020 games. And people were all excited until the IOC started asking questions, such as "which video games?" and "do you have the slightest idea about what you're proposing?" eSports was big, but it wasn't coherent and organised, and certainly wasn't multi-national. Apparently there were three different eSports bodies in Japan lobbying the Tokyo bid, and the response seems to be, "it's not happening until you sort yourselves out". The first order of business was to create a unified, official governing body for eSports that everyone could rally behind. Our Lord and savior, JeSU, was born in February 2018. Now we need some games to promote. Japanese video game companies were clearly in bed with JeSU in some form because in March 2018, Sega revealed that Puyo Puyo was an officially licensed eSports series. Puyo Puyo Tetris was the stand-in until Sega could engineer an eSports-specific version of the game (which we know as Puyo Puyo Champions) in October 2018. (Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown would be Sega's second game specifically designed for eSports in 2021. Others you may have heard of include Gran Turismo 7, and eFootball (Konami's successor to PES)... and there's also some mobile games you probably don't care about.) And finally, you need people, and that's where Sega's new job comes in. Find the best players at the game, on the off-chance that JeSU can influence the world eSports and (yes) get Puyo Puyo at the Olympics (or maybe not, since it looks like the game's been dropped. Oops). Let's get some official player rankings and some national tournaments going, and soon everything will be ours. The very first official eSports-licensed Puyo Puyo tournament would come at Sega Fes 2018 in April. We're starting with a base of nothing, so anyone can join up and compete for the very first Puyo Puyo Cup. The best would become JeSU-certified eSports... uh "athletes"(?) and come back the next day for The first Puyo Puyo Championship. https://web.archive.org/web/2018041...ga.jp/portal/topics/Puyopuyo/20180312_001564/ And this is how it would work for the next four years: enter the cup, win, enter the championship, be ranked nationally. Think of it similarly to Tennis - you want to keep coming back to retain your title, win the prize money, and possibly represent your country at the Olympic Games. Except spoilers: that last bit hasn't happened for eSports yet. If it ever happens at all. Also rather than fly around the world competing at the different Opens, Sega were hosting tournaments every couple of months, just in Japan. And it was always the same game. Will Sega games ever make it to the Olympics? Probably not - the IOC's idea of eSports seems to be literally "electronic" versions of sports, so "virtual track and field", as opposed to video games people would recognise and want to play. I think you're going to have a hard time finding a video game that's popular enough worldwide to make its inclusion viable - Sega sell Puyo Puyo all over the world now, but is it a household name? ehh.
Slight amendment because I like to post things. Puyo Puyo Champions/eSports isn't a singular game: you've got "Tsuu/2" and "Fever" modes, one from 1994's Puyo Puyo Tsuu and the other from 2003's Puyo Puyo Fever. Are both in use?? No of course not, everyone picks Tsuu because it's the best version of the game. What a stupid question. You should feel bad for asking. Except there is a slight issue for non-Japanese audiences. We didn't get Puyos 2, 3 and 4 - we jumped straight to Fever... and then missed another four entries in the series. So given I'm not sure Fever has a Tsuu mode (and I'm not sure how popular Puyo Pop on the GBA was), long-time fans who never thought to import would have had to wait until 2014's Puyo Puyo Tetris to see this ruleset on the big screen. That is to say, the Japanese have had a 20 year head start. Obviously you could learn (you've had nine years) but if you're up against experts who have been playing this game all their lives, it might be a challenge. For this reason, were this game at the Olympics, I'd expect Japan to win everything (unlke say, a Fortnight match where the whole world was exposed to it more-or-less at once. But then Fortnight has shooting people with guns, so I'm not sure the IOC would like that). Probably means Virtua Fighter is a better fit - it's not super massive in the West, but it's not like Tekken was the only option. Why is Fever an option in Puyo Puyo eSports if none of the tournaments I've read up on actually use it? Because Sega invented that one.
"Compile must have hosted some Puyo Puyo tournaments back in the day, but they can't have been very big" Oh of course, they set up their own tournament governing body in 1995 that has its own Wikipedia page: the All Japan Puyo Association (AJPA) Yes those are Mega Drives, which means we might need to care. Argh.
Thanks to Phonograph who frequents VGMdb and is very good at Japanese, I now know that calling Laキーボードュ "La Keyboard" is a problem. キーボード is Keyboard, but then you've got an extra ュ (yu) sound. So it would be something like La Keyboardyu or maybe La Keyboardu. Well, SEGA doesn't usually write out an English title for the game (it was one of the games that didn't have a page on the English version of SEGA ROSSO's website), https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.segarosso.com/game/gametop_eng.html ...but maybe URLs can help. Sometimes they'll use La, like on the Japanese SEGA ROSSO site https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.segarosso.com/game/la/latop_jpn.html but the SEGA catalogue page for itused https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sega.jp/arcade/lakeybor/. The most complete then is the image files used on the game's SEGA ARCADE GAME HISTORY entry. That gives it being La Keyboardu. https://www.sega.jp/history/arcade/uploads/2019-01-02_cab_lakeyboardu.png https://www.sega.jp/history/arcade/uploads/2019-01-03_ss10_lakeyboardu.jpg https://www.sega.jp/history/arcade/uploads/2019-01-04_bro_lakeyboardu.jpg I need to know now if La Keyboardu was ever used another time, or if it's ever been officially called La Keyboard. I was hoping other developer G.rev might have a lead on their website, but they didn't have the game in their products page.
Looks like the Americans are on to me. "Undocumented video game tournaments? We have those too!" https://picclick.com/Vintage-1990-Sega-Genesis-Video-Game-College-Tournament-175556129053.html Sega Genesis Video Games College Tournament 1990. It must be real because Al Nilsen posted a different T-shirt. ... actually they might have been on to me for a while: Spoiler Al Nilsen retweeted this back in December: https://twitter.com/timeextension64/status/1602332462071402497 I hadn't seen this article, but I was exeedingly close to posting something similar at around the same time. I had noticed the terms "7th gen" and "8th gen" being used in Digital Foundry videos, and was all set to post a big rant about how everyone sucked, but it took too long and I got bored. I'd stripped the concept of numbered console generations from Sega Retro years ago anyway, because it doesn't work at all from a Sega perspective. tl;dr you can't group consoles reliably by "generation", and if you use Wikipedia's definitions, Atari and Sega competed with themselves. But you know this instinctively because the Nintendo Switch exists - you have to add so many asterisks to make the system work, that it would be less of a statement of fact and more of a constellation. It's made up garbage and no platform holders have ever acknowledged it as a thing.
Leftover text in Venom - Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety seemed to suggest a 32X version might have existed. Great news! It did. https://picclick.com/Acclaim-1995-Promo-Press-Media-Kit-Batman-NBA-154625301210.html And this press kit can be all yours for $550. Greed.
I learnt a thing There is a special French build of GTA 2 on the Dreamcast. One where you have to enter a code before it lets you play, as some crude way to stop the kids from getting their hands on it. No matter what region or language or television system your console is set to, if it tries to run this disc, you'll be forced to enter this code (the screen always being in French). What is the code? it was provided: "WFUSDFCF". There is only one code. Why is this a thing? I don't know yet - I'm sure there's a fun story attached, but GTA 2 is probably the least controversial in the series, being in some ways just "GTA1 but better" rather than something groundbreaking like GTA III. I don't recall it being significantly more offensive than the first game, and no parental safety screens were bundled there (I haven't checked GTA London because... Sega wiki). Is this a feature of the PlayStation version too? I'd have to be pretty sad to waste my Sunday evening finding out! ... Yes. Same code too.
A common feature across CD-ROM games: three text files, usually named ABS, BIB and CPY (or words to that effect). Akane went through most (if not all) of Sega's home consoles a few years ago, so Sega Retro does a pretty good job at documenting their existence, but there's a problem: developers abused these files, which means we probably need to mirror their contents, in full, for every disc-based game on Sega Retro. Thing is, if you ask the internet what these are, you won't get much of an answer. They're "files that exist except when they don't" - many CD-ROMs have them, but not all, some CD burning software demand that they exist, others don't care, confusion abound. So why are they a thing? Because ISO 9660, the CD-ROM standard suggests they should be. When a device starts reading a CD-ROM, the first thing it should see is a "Primary Volume Descriptor" (PVD), which explains how the disc is formatted and relays various other bits of technical information, so the device knows how to cope. And in addition to "actually useful" features, ISO 9660 dictates that parts of the PVD be reserved for "maybe useful one day" features, including three filenames of text files. As that wiki describes: Code (Text): Offset Length (bytes) Field name Datatype Description 702 37 Copyright File Identifier strD Filename of a file in the root directory that contains copyright information for this volume set. If not specified, all bytes should be 0x20. 739 37 Abstract File Identifier strD Filename of a file in the root directory that contains abstract information for this volume set. If not specified, all bytes should be 0x20. 776 37 Bibliographic File Identifier strD Filename of a file in the root directory that contains bibliographic information for this volume set. If not specified, all bytes should be 0x20. aka "here's where to look for the 'Copyright', 'Abstract' and 'Bibliographic' information". Though as you can see, you can just pass in blank characters and nobody cares. It's an optional feature of the CD-ROM format, which I can only assume was intended so that devices could quickly read general, human-readible descriptions of what was on the disc, and who was responsible for putting it there. Cataloguing, basically. "Copyright" is meant to be the entities that own the contents of the disc, "Abstract" is meant to be a brief description of the disc, and the "Bibliographic file" (or "bibliography" if you like using real English) is a list of entities that helped you produce the contents of the CD-ROM. In means that if a CD-ROM publisher has followed the recommendations, you should be able to tell what the disc is just through parsing the PVD. Sounds good, until you remember it became an ISO standard in 1988. A Sega Mega-CD could parse this information and relay it back to the user, but a) that takes effort and b) you just want to play the game. Chances are you know what's on the disc - it's printed on the label, so realistically this only comes in handy if you've got some fancy pants automated system where cataloguing matters. If 99.9999% of users don't care, why waste development time making these text files? Sure a PC could read this data, but you're not meant to be putting these discs in a PC. They exist on Sega CD-ROMs because Sega said they had to. And Sega said the files must be called ABS.TXT, BIB.TXT and CPT.TXT. And if the files don't exist you could fail QA testing and your game wouldn't be released. In reality, they don't need to exist, don't need to have those specific file names, and it's almost certainly the result of crappy CD authoring tools not understanding the standard. Oh and more importantly, the other reason these files didn't matter is that Sega didn't check their contents. There were no rules of what to write in them, so developers wrote all sorts of nonsense, sometimes slagging off their employers safe in the knowledge that nobody would read these files. And they were right - nobody did. Why weren't they used for cataloguing? Because Sega had a system already in use with Mega Drive cartridges: the ROM header. A Mega-CD doesn't just need to check the disc to make sure it's a CD-ROM - it needs to know there's a program on there that can boot: This is the information Sega care about: product codes and build dates (and TMSS compliance). They could have used ABS/BIB/CPY, but why bother? They already have tools for Mega Drive software, now we've got Mega-CD for free. And the same questions were asked of the Saturn and Dreamcast - the hardware will look for own headers, but you must supply three text files on the disc because we said so lol. So in theory, these files should exist in every disc-based Sega game, but how useful will they be? Most of the time, not at all useful, but there are exceptions like Dark Wizard That's a bit more than a brief abstract. I have wondered for a while if it was worth keeping track of ROM headers for completion's sake. Now I'm inclined to add the APS/BIB/CPY files in there too, though I still think it classes as "hidden content" if there's details that aren't brief abstracts, bibliographies or copyright details. I don't know the best solution to handle this on Sega Retro - I'm open for suggestions.
