In Tatsuno, a small town nestled within Japan’s central alps, there’s a quite remarkable place. Takai Shokai’s been running for over 40 years, the work of one man operating from a warehouse stacked with row upon row of arcade boards cataloguing the entire history of commercial video games in Japan. It’s as close to comprehensive as you could hope, and it’s come together almost by chance.
“He’s a businessman who has been doing this since the 70s,” game researcher, historian and writer Brandon Sheffield tells me. “It’s just his business, you know – he’s out in this middle of nowhere place where it’s cheap to get space, and it’s just him and one assistant. And it’s this incredible archive of knowledge that I really hope can be documented at some time. Who knows what secrets are lying there?”
Brandon found his way there a few years back while pursuing his own business, at that point working alongside SNK for its 40th Anniversary Collection and digging into the company’s rich – and often obscure – history and presenting it digitally in these expansive compilations. There are arcade flyers, developer interviews and details on games that have been long forgotten.
In Tatsuno, a small town nestled within Japan’s central alps, there’s a quite remarkable place. Takai Shokai’s been running for over 40 years, the work of one man operating from a warehouse stacked with row upon row of arcade boards cataloguing the entire history of commercial video games in Japan. It’s as close to comprehensive as you could hope, and it’s come together almost by chance. “He’s a businessman who has been doing this since the 70s,” game researcher, historian and writer Brandon Sheffield tells me. “It’s just his business, you know – he’s out in this middle of nowhere place where it’s cheap to get space, and it’s just him and one assistant. And it’s this incredible archive of knowledge that I really hope can be documented at some time. Who knows what secrets are lying there?”Brandon found his way there a few years back while pursuing his own business, at that point working alongside SNK for its 40th Anniversary Collection and digging into the company’s rich – and often obscure – history and presenting it digitally in these expansive compilations. There are arcade flyers, developer interviews and details on games that have been long forgotten. Read moreEurogamer.net