The shutter and curtain come down on the first arcade Sega ever opened in Japan’s biggest gamer neighborhood.
With Sunday being the last day of August, and so arguably the last day of summer, there was already cause to be feeling a little wistful. Things were even more bittersweet in Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood, though, where more than three decades of video game history came to a close.
In mid-July, it was announced that the GiGO Akihabara Building 1 arcade, located on Chuo-dori street in Japan’s biggest video game/electronics district, would be closing at the end of August. GiGO might not be a name that’s acquired historical significance among gamers just yet, but it’s the company that inherited the operations of Sega’s arcade management business after Sega bowed out of the industry in 2021. So while the place has only been called GiGO Akihabara Building for a couple of years, the arcade itself had actually been in continuous operation since 1992, when it opened under the name High-tech Land Sega Shintoku, followed by a renaming first to Club Sega Akihabara and then to Sega Akihabara Building 1 before entering GiGO’s stewardship.
Even prior to the arcade’s closing, construction scaffolding was already covering most of the building. Still, for its final days, GiGO Akihabara Building 1 hung up a giant banner reading “Thank you, Akihabara” (ありがとう秋葉原) in a suitably pixelated font, and “Thank you for 33 years” in English.
10 p.m. on August 31 had been announced as the official, final closing time, and fans gathered en masse to say farewell to the local landmark
As mentioned above, GiGO Akihabara Building 1 is located on Chuo-dori, the main street that runs through Akihabara. Chuo-dori actually has pretty wide sidewalks by downtown Tokyo standards, but even still, so many people showed up that there were crowds on the side of the street opposite the arcade as well.
It’s become a tradition that when major arcades close, the staff holds a ceremony to thank them, and the building, for all the happy memories. So in GiGO Akihabara Building’s final moments, the arcade’s manager took a few moments to address the crowd, and then everyone counted the last seconds until the shutter, and the curtain, came down on this video game landmark.
Even Sega was feeling reflective, posting a photo of the arcade from 2020 and reminiscing about how it was the company’s first-ever arcade in the neighborhood and served as a location-test site for a number of pre-release versions of Sega arcade games.
While video game arcades have remained more viable in Japan than just about any other country, it’s no secret that even here, they’re going through a difficult, transitionary phase. With the gap between home and arcade video game hardware processing power having disappeared, and online gaming providing a greater number of versus-play opponents and co-op partners than any single location ever could, arcades have lost two of things that used to make them so special. At the same time, though, there are veteran gamers who remember the atmosphere of fun and excitement that can only come from being in the same physical space as other fans, as well as younger gamers intrigued by those nostalgia-tinged tales of what used to be an integral part of the hobby. Some solace can be taken in the fact that GiGO Akihabara Building 1 is closing not because the arcade was bankrupted, but because its lease is expiring and a new tenant is coming in. GiGO isn’t abandoning the arcade business either, as it’s just opened a new multi-floor arcade in Tokyo’s Fuchu neighborhood, and the GiGo Akihabara Building 2, 3, and 5 arcades are still in business too.
Source: Twitter/@GiGO 秋葉原1号館 via Hachima Kiko
Top image: PR Times
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