The Lost Sega Worlds

Suggested that one in Gaming Alexandria's Discord server yesterday


I love post-modern ruins game center architecture.

The August and October issues of Coin Journal that surround it apparently have reports on Espacio and Sega World Bournemouth as well. Looking forward to whenever those drop.

 

Page 90 has Sonic and Tails UFO Catcher plushies.

Right next to Condom-kun plushies.

 

That $1 elephant with the speaker is my spirit animal

 

https://twitter.com/SEGA_no_omise

Cinemagic


Virtua Fighter 4 Kakutou Shinseki


Sonic throat lozenges


Lots of things being posted on this new-ish account, many directions to go off into from them. And quite a few better photos of locations than the ones on the wiki too.

 

Looked a bit further into that account for all the specific places they've posted

Have now come to the conclusion that whoever's running it (someone who is/was on the inside?) must have access to Sega's secret stash of old location photos, as many are genuinely higher quality versions of the exact same official (but very poor) ones we've nicked off their old 1996/97/98 website snapshots.

Old:

New:


It'd be nice if they uploaded all the original scans directly to Retro. But still, lots of better photos already, the knowledge that Sega World Zama was originally a Hi-Tech Sega, and a couple of new pages, e.g. Hi-Tech Land Sega Rock.

Google Translate mangles it as "Hi Tech Landlock". Which is actually closer to obscure Sega-related things from that period than you'd first think.

There is even a more recent one in there that slipped through the net: Sega Maker's Pier Nagoya. It didn't even last a full year before closing in 2018, and we don't have Wayback captures of its official location page or any of its own social media accounts to work with either - I'm going purely off of an account that posts game center closures in relation to Beatmania IIDX here, which is pretty bad for something from only six years ago.

This one had its own restaurant, and apparently even the addition of that wasn't enough to make it do well. There are some noises that the entire shopping centre it was part of was a bit of a failure overall, with other tenants shutting up shop very quickly too, but things like this and a bunch of late 2010s games flopping are why COVID isn't just to blame in the subsidiary that managed these being sold.


If one cared enough, they could even attempt to date this specific early photo of Sega Kagurazaka (the one where the Sonic throat lozenges later came from) when it was still known as "Twin Star Geoce Sega" to the exact time period it was taken - all because of the Print Club collaborations advertised on their curtains:


This one's easy though:

Sonic R's poster on the side of Ikebukuro GiGO here dates it squarely to late 1997.

(Also, a few of those weird cases where Sega managed things jointly, like "Pengiun House Sagamihara", and the one that's now pretty famous for living on as different independent locations. Still not sure how to cover those)

 

We've had that one for a while now... https://retrocdn.net/File:AmusementSangyo_JP_1992-12.pdf

 

There's also one from September 1992 that I'm going to upload to Retro CDN soon... I could have done it already but I've had a few beers, which slows me down...

Edit: here it is... and by the way, just for the record... Retro CDN can now handle files larger than a gigabyte... cool, isn't it?

 

There are six Gekkan Coin Journal magazines here... but there are really only three because the rest are duplicates?... anyway we don't have these yet so I'll get right on it ...

 

The pieces that really caught my eye were those from the December issue, which like Game Machine went over the first press conference Sega did on their theme park plans (and the Model 2 hardware) - though we've had the early outdoor park and VR-1/Rail Chase The Ride concept art for a while in better quality, the top two are completely new to me:

Yes that is the "Rocket Escalator" that later ended up in London (and to a lesser extent Tokyo) during 1996. But four years early.

It's amazing just how much here made it into the end product. Those cabinets at the bottom would even be startlingly Virtual On-like if it weren't for the arrangement.

 

...and viking ships... I think Leif Erikson was dying to try some Sega arcades...

 

https://archive.org/details/aou-news-issue-104/AOU News Issue 104 (March 1995)/

https://archive.org/details/@chuulimta?sort=title

AOU News... There are seven issues of this magazine in that account... but I still have some issues of Gekkan Coin Journal that I need to upload to Retro CDN...