The underground network bringing Japan?s arcades to the US

Between his arms, leaned at a 45-degree angle, was a video game arcade machine; its title, MUSECA, could be glimpsed over his shoulder. The machine had come a long way—from an arcade in Tokyo to an anonymous warehouse in Osaka and then, after a long wait on a container ship outside Long Beach, California, to Arrington’s warehouse in San Pedro. Like the other machines Arrington helps import, it’s primarily sold and played at arcades in Japan. “They don't want these machines to be sold outside Japan,” says Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese consulting company Kantan Games. They don’t want the hassle of providing that knowledge and those maintenance services to companies outside Japan.” Lately, the Japanese arcade chain Round1 has installed locations across the US; but outside of that, the typical American has almost no access to the thousands of authentic arcade machines that brought glory to Japan as the holy land of gaming.Today, though, Japan’s arcades are in crisis. (Arrington calls this “the mafia treatment.”) Finally, the third: A Japanese distributor swoops in and buys up all of a dying arcade’s machines. Others, on the down-low, are sourced to enterprising Westerners like Arrington, a self-described “muscle guy” for the gray-market entrepreneurs who import thousands of cabinets from Japan every year.Over the past five years, as Japanese arcade machines have become more available than ever, Western demand for Japanese machines has exploded. To support that demand, an underground network of gamers has risen to the challenge of evacuating these cabinets from Japan, hauling them across the world, and hacking their code so fans like me can finally, after all these years, play.Like a lot of bad ideas, my obsession with Museca began at a Long Island mall.That mall was one of the lucky few with an American Round1 arcade, and in a far corner, I found Museca blasting bass and beckoning in Japanese. Then, a couple days later: “I got a tip from someone.” MechaCrash passed me off to Arrington, aka BossSalad, who had heard that this other guy, who goes by Koun, was importing a Museca cabinet in a container ship somewhere between Japan and Long Beach. At first, he was baffled by the idea of operating a video game with his feet, but after he found some of his mom’s most-played songs in the menu, he was lost to euphoria.Phil Arrington playing Pump It UpTo take on the one DDR machine he knew of in his area, Arrington would travel three hours by bus to a mall many towns over. That’s where video games came in.” Arrington dreamed one day of owning his own arcade, where he could be a Ninja Turtle. Months later, after a journey across the world, those cabinets might all end up at a house in New Jersey, where the gamers would park their U-Hauls, check their wares, clean the smell of cigarettes off their machines, and drag them home like a winter fox with a hare.By about 2016, the American arcade importation scene was professionalizing—or more accurately, de-amateurizing. Living in his “bachelor’s-pad-slash-sister’s-garage,” Arrington became obsessed with tinkering with Japanese arcade machines, buying them on Craigslist, fixing them up, flipping them, sometimes accidentally catching them on fire and discreetly dumping them on the side of the road. Now, Rocovits desperately needed Arrington to hop the first flight over, rent a 26-foot box truck, fill it with Japanese arcade cabinets stored at Rocovits’ 4,000-square-foot warehouse, drive them to Southern California, unload the games, load up some more games, and haul ass back to an arcade convention in Las Vegas. While I waited, Arrington recommended I talk to “the Museca guy.”For every Japanese arcade game that escapes the country, there is at least one “guy.” And without that guy—or girl, as a number of women do this, too—the DDR cabinet you just imported will, upon arrival, be no more than a $6,000 doorstop.Museca, like many other Konami games, is designed to only work in a Japanese arcade with an internet connection to Konami’s proprietary server, E-Amuse. (Enjoying the drama, Arrington tweeted a video of himself loading a DDR machine twice his size into his truck: “When I strike the heart of [Cammy] and he don't realize who the Boss is.”)Phil Arrington's warehouseJapanese game publishers have taken great pains to make sure their machines only work in Japan and Southeast Asia, with very few exceptions. But Maggie Museca and David DDR are shit-out-of-luck.“Most of these services are unavailable or locked away for anything that was legally imported,” says one hacker we’ll call Dominic, who helps Japanese arcade games work outside Japan. And why, in the tradition of Programmed World, a new crop of hackers has established their presence over Discord servers, which buyers effortfully track down to find their games’ “guy.”“We just wanted to help people get the arcade machines they paid for working,” a hacker who asked to be called Albida says. “This game is for sale and use in Japan only.”Playing a 6-foot-tall Museca machine at home is a particular gaming experience, to put it lightly.