A few others from later in its life: - Fantasy Catcher Center Set ファンタジーキャッチャーセンターセット - Buzz Lightyear Hockey Planet バズライトイヤーホッケープラネット - Chip & Dale Itazura Wagon チップ＆デール いたずらワゴン - Magical Town マジカルタウン - Magical À La Carte マジカルあらかると - Magical Colon マジカルコロン https://web.archive.org/web/20090717065211/http://segaprize.com/read/dfs/lineup.html A lot of these were retooled versions of older machines. This is Fantasy Palace, or Dream Palace II in a different colour scheme. They didn't even change the sign. Of the 23 known machines I could find (real life) photos for 6. And even less for the exclusive prizes: Multiple people signed off on this.
Coming to you from the location not at all confusingly once known in part as "Fantasy Square"... Sega World Alpark's Fun Square installation, circa 2002: We have these on the wiki already, but in a lower resolution than the highest that was actually archived by the Wayback. Even at this quality though, by comparing later photos it looks like one or two of the machines seen here had their Disney trappings later removed - presumably when contracts with them expired? Alpark is supposed to be a pretty significant location in the grand scheme of the amusement operations side of things. I really should get round to detailing it and others (e.g. Joy Square) from that period one day.
According to this, a "Sega Disneyland" game corner opened in July (?) 1980. About three years before Tokyo Disneyland itself. (no, I don't know if they were actually authorised to do that either)
Authentically 'creepy' in the way that only actual commercials can truly be (content warning: clowns and Beethoven): This is advertising Sega Tomei Bowl, which apparently opened in December 1992, and had an AS-1 at some point. There might be more out there. In other news, some people restored a statue or something
Fell down some rabbit holes, found a thing: https://twitter.com/onionsoftware/status/1678752730393763840 "Hi-Tech Land Sega Numazu" ハイテクランド セガ 沼津 The internet has no record of this existing - did it become something else?
Judging from how excited they got about it, I believe that's one of the very locations @yog49 later managed. I know I've linked a bunch of their tweets here before but some of the many photos and behind the scenes revelations from the era they've posted out on their account appear to be of it in particular. They even wrote books that talk a bit about the place, by the looks of things! More can probably be found if digging is done, e.g. interesting things about how the different "Hi-Tech" brand names related to the management status of these locations... at least at one point in time. There's stuff in there about Sega jointly managing with other companies, and it could get confusing fast.
And another: https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19870101p/page/n8/mode/1up セガ・レジャービル Leisurebuil? Leisure Building - it's got "casino" games, pachislot and arcade games and apparently sat here.
https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19900701p/page/n8/mode/1up Now I know what this is: https://segaretro.org/File:SegaWorld_Japan_OtsuPark.jpg (it was named wrong - blame Google circa-2014)
About a year ago (i.e. when I had a bit more free time on my hands than today), I machine translated a load of articles from the Japanese gaming press, including the one above - they've all been sitting there in my Google Drive for some time now and I really should make better use of them, try to fix some errors, or even translate more occasionally. Here's all the pieces I got done from Game Machine on new AM facility openings, fwiw. I did focus on places that seemed important, like O2 Park, Fantasy Square, and Cineset (which became Sega World Tempozan), however I also seem to recall there being a whole bunch of others in it that weren't as notable and didn't have any other documentation out there. I think I actually tried to start one on that "Leisure Building" place as well, but gave up as the results just appeared incomprehensible. From what I remember it was saying things about Sega starting up some sort of casino business around that point, which I simply wrote off as a garbled mistranslation, but may well be correct in one or two respects for all I know.
"Shinjuku Sportsland" (新宿スポーツランド) is credited in a few Sega games. Back when it looked a bit like this, it was apparently part-owned by Sega: https://archive.org/details/game-machine-magazine-19860801p/page/n1/mode/1up The other owner was "Sanpei", who still run the place to this day, apparently.
Nothing's simple. https://web.archive.org/web/19981212032953/http://www.spolan.com/ There were three Shinjuku Sportslands, 1, 3 and... 9? #1 "Shinjuku Sportsland Chuuouguchi-ten" (新宿スポーツランド中央口店) https://web.archive.org/web/20030411134925if_/http://spolan.com:80/map/map-1.html https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@35.6...T000000!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i32?entry=ttu #3 "Shinjuku Sportsland Nishiguchi-ten" (新宿スポーツランド西口店) https://web.archive.org/web/20030411135315if_/http://spolan.com:80/map/map-3.html https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@35.6...e0!5s20221001T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu #9 "Shinjuku Sportsland Honkan" (新宿スポーツランド本館) https://web.archive.org/web/20010205045400if_/http://spolan.com:80/map/map-9.html https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...!4d139.7018671!10e5!16s/g/12hk8rtpv?entry=ttu Only one survives today, but yes, Shinjuku Sportsland #3 did indeed become a Club Sega, and is now a GiGO. https://archive.org/details/gamest0011/page/n53/mode/1up it's been around a while. Were they all part-owned by Sega? Who knows.
I don't believe Sega ever actually stopped having something to do with the Sportsland that remains, at least not until more recent times of course, seeing as numerous job listings for GiGO still mention the place. Why? From what I understand... this is one of those locations that had a joint/rental agreement with them - Sega jointly ran things with another company, and rented out machines to them... except when they didn't. There's a bunch of different cases of this, and it's something I'm still trying to articulate, let alone attempt to accurately document on the wiki itself. Not a lot of detail exists out there, and I don't ever really expect it to, but there's some noise about the several Shinjuku examples in this interview with one of their managers by Fumio Kurokawa. Sometimes this business agreement would include fully-fledged Sega branding. Sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it sort of would (?). A few of these already have pages, but not with any real distinction of their ownership status. Sannomiya Sanx was seemingly one of them right up until its closure in 2021. I am pretty sure Pasopiard Yokohama was another from opening to the late 1990s, and that's gone now too. There's a bit about it in an even older issue of Gamest that I don't quite get. Then there's others like Hyper Messe, and going even further back "Big Burn", that only had their own bespoke branding... but at the other end of the spectrum, apparently the Hi-Tech Land brand was specifically for these locations at some point, including the one discussed upthread. Big places (e.g. Roppongi GiGO) were also jointly managed, idk. Confusing. If you ever wanted to see the cold hard facts of earnings data from Shinjuku Sportsland Nishiguchi in January 1993 though, here's your chance, courtesy of that Teradrive HD dump from some time ago. Tetris was still doing really well over four years after release!
Sega Entertainment, the old Japanese "physical arcade-like venues" company which no longer exists were doing all sorts of things in the late 2010s. Keeping on top of it all while it was brand new and active was a fool's game - now none of this exists, it's easier to work with because we can get a full story. Between 2018 and 2020 Sega ran a sandwich shop. Kinda. It was a joint venture: Komeda Kinsei Yawaraka Shiro Coppe Akihabara-ten. It's not really all that exciting, because the other half of the business, Komeda, had other outlets across Japan selling broadly the same stuff. But they did sell chilli dogs for a while: I was going to look this up once - see who invented the idea that Sonic ate chilli dogs, and how long it took until it became part of accepted canon. I'm half under the impression DiC made it up in 1993, then Sega adopted the idea in the mid-2000s. Turns out they even put some on sale.
I think Joypolis started serving chilli dogs even earlier on, and still does to this day (?). According to someone in its Game Machine article, Cineset was Sega's first proper attempt at doing this hospitality stuff on the side in their arcades (apparently P.J. Pizzazz doesn't count). Then as covered at some other point in this thread there was also the obscure Ages Kumamoto from around the same time, as well as another one under that name in Jiyugaoka. There's a number of examples after this point that I haven't been keeping proper track of, besides Fish "on" Chips. But off the top of my head I do also know that Sega World Sydney had a delicacy called "Virtua Fighter fries".
I was inspired to make that page because we've still got 3428923094320 old press releases mirrored from Sega of Japan's website a few years ago. I dumped a good chunk of those on Sega Collabo Cafe a while back, but there's still a bunch on the pile (like this one). Unfortunately Sega went back to text-based press releases, which means we need to get the wayback machine involved and that's slow and ughh. So most things post-2020 are currently a mystery to Sega Retro.
This wasn't on the wiki, so screw it: Sega Shizuoka opened in February 2022, after the sale to Genda. It was under construction as the deals were happening, and presuambly had Sega logos sitting on site instead of GiGO ones. It means it's the only Sega arcade opened by Genda, and indeed the last Sega arcade to open to date. Even on launch day Genda were saying the branding would change. "Come to Sega Shizuoka, hopefully it won't be called that by the end of the year". And yeah it is a bit of a miserable one. Kind-of wished they'd carved Sonic the Hedgehog's face into the wall, just to spite the new owners.
And now, with the power of the homeplace of Momoko Sakura's maternal grandparents, you too can get your fix of Sega arcade action.
Genda GiGO did conveniently announce whenever the rebrandings were happening, with specific dates, in their press releases nearly every month. So Shizuoka's will be in one of these somewhere, by the looks of things: April 2022 April 2022 2 April 2022 3 June 2022 July 2022 September 2022 October 2022 November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 Ironically, they've seemingly continued putting it all in PDFs as well, long after Sega abandoned doing that themselves and making things more of a pain for us. So those might be better?
It's like losing a child. If you had no concept of losing children. I just went through every Sega venue that was still operating when the switch occurred, but while Sega Retro isn't classing them as "open" anymore (save for a couple of weird ones that the templates don't like), I haven't put any precise dates, and I haven't added the new GiGO names like was done here, complete with new "notsega" fields. I'd be tempted to mirror the GiGO PDFs when there's Sega info involved. It's also worth checking the individual Twitter accounts for each venue - some arcades genuinely closed in 2022 and 2023, and their social media accounts went with them. For the record, I didn't see a single rebrand that looked better than the Sega original. Granted some of these were just BROWN BOX or BLACK BOX so were hardly lookers anyway, but if you were expecting radically new and fun designs, look elsewhere. Honestly I think it's only a matter of time before Sega gets back into this business. GiGO looks like a dodgy knock-off brand - like it's a video game and they didn't have the rights to use the real logos.
