Nicole Express on Throwaway Arcade Games

Now here’s something fascinating I had not heard of before Nicole Express recently wrote about it. Because of a law in Japan it was (maybe still is?) illegal to sell an arcade cabinet without a game in it. When the market for replacement cabinets opened up, targets for upgrade kits without gutting an old machine to host them, they still had to have some game in them, even if everyone knew its PCB would be just be taken out and thrown away. It was also a way to assure a game center owner that the cabinet worked as advertised, as it could immediately be plugged and tested. But games cost money to develop and need parts to implement, so these games have to be really simple. So there arose a micro-genre of games, usually a simplified remix of something from the cabinet manufacturer’s back catalog, using ancient processors, minuscule ROM and RAM, and the simplest means of driving the video signal possible, to fulfill this tiny and strange market need. Sega’s Dottori-kun (image from linked…