Monday, 1 September 2025

Replaying Japan 2025: eremeka presentation

Welcome to everyone arriving here after my Replaying Japan talk.

This post gives access to the database info, a summary of the links from the presentation, notes in addendum to my presentation, as well as an archive of my presentation.

Replaying Japan 2025 happened September 1-3, 2025, in Melbourne Australia. My submitted abstract was accepted into the Replaying Japan 2025 Journal. My presentation was pre-recorded, but the Q&A was live.  My 1:30pm AEST presentation translates to 11:30pm my time.


Downloading the database data:

 

Links from the presentation:

 

addendum / notes:

  • Research Notes: more random notes in regards to companies, years, and other considerations I've made
  • I keep a list of research materials am looking for, but I always am looking for access to magazines and catalogs from 1975 before, and especially any materials from before World War II. That includes random photos of arcades/machines, no matter how degraded the image quality. That also includes any discussions of specific machines. 
  • sometimes I will use the indicator "[presumed]" for a name or company. A good example of that is 1970 Ronin - 浪人 by こまや (Komaya) [presumed]
  • some machine years utilize a tilda, '~'. This is to convey that I believe the machine year is the given year +/- 1. There are a few machines that might be +/- 2, especially in the 1960s.  As I have shored up the data, I found that most often my year deductions & estimates have been correct.
  • My caution around listing the years became very important when I processed a PDF of the 1969 machine directory. This is the earliest catalogue I had seen at the time, and it contained a remarkable trove of information. There are many machines that appear in this document that do not appear anywhere else. This book came out in 1969, so we know these machines existed in 69, but certainly a large number of them also existed prior to 1969.
    Now, for some of them we do have documentation that shows, or implies, their specific year of release. But for most we just have this appearance in a 1969 book. When I didn’t have further information for these machines, I chose to depict them as ~1969, utilizing the tilda symbol to convey ambiguity.  This was a special case for me, since there were so many machines being listed as 1969 from this book.
  • Some machines are listed with just a decade (1970s) and some machines are placed in a decade with a lower confidence, ~1970s, where we strongly believe that is the correct decade, but are not certain. We see this often for machines that perhaps were late 1970's, but could've been early 80s.
  • The earliest phases of this project consisted primarily of low resolution black and white images from Game Machine, blurry shots of the games seen in the background of movies and TV shows, and hundreds of photographs of Japanese arcades that I had saved from blog posts and forums. A large amount of entries were just text, but I would mark them as “MENTION ONLY”, keeping track of machines discussed but we hadn't yet found a picture.
    As more sources were added the information could be refined, names and companies corrected, the year of a machine zeroed in, and thousands of photographs were upgraded.

Q&A Addendum:

I would like to add to my 2nd Q&A answer that I am a collector who owns a number of antique arcade machines. My main interest is preserving eremeka machines. I work towards that goal by helping preserve eremeka culture. My contribution towards that goal is this database. 

The way I approach research is inherently anarchic and incompatible with academia or publishing. This kind of research would not be possible otherwise. There is a natural tension between a desire to respect social norms and a preservationist mission.  Every year more and more game machines and ephemera are lost, but public efforts can assist by building a baseline of knowledge.

Presentation video:

This is my video presentation.

 

Transcript of the presentation:

SLIDE
Hello, my name is Caitlyn Pascal and I am here to present my eremeka research tool.
I am a collector and pinball aficionado and I wanted a list of all the electromechanical games from Japan. I couldn’t find one so I decided to make one. 
This is my contact info.
If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email or find me on Discord.

SLIDE
I love pinball, and I initially sought to document all of the kinetic ball machines with mechanical contraptions that might appeal to pinball fans, but my scope expanded to a more robust history of Japan’s mechanical and electromechanical arcade games.
The result is an online database of over 5,000 eremeka machines.
Eremeka is used as shorthand, a portmanteau of “electro mechanical”.

SLIDE 
This is what the tool’s display looks like. 
Year, machine name, companies associated, the best picture I can find, tags for each machine, 
and some of the names hotlink to further resources like articles I’ve written, scans I’ve posted, or videos people have shared of the machine.

SLIDE
My general thesis is that the history of arcade machines is a global phenomenon and must be understood as such, with numerous countries having a significant international impact on the industry over the last 150 years.  The story of arcade games includes France, Germany, the USA, Japan, UK, Spain, Italy, and others, and with this project I hope to at least provide a framework for understanding the Japanese part of that tapestry.
I also hope to inform collectors and researchers worldwide in the hopes that more games will get preserved, and more information can be uncovered.
You can also watch my presentation on Pinball Ancestry from Pinball Expo 2024.

SLIDE
As we look further and further back, 2 of the most significant points of arcade ancestry are shooting galleries and ball rolling. 

SLIDE
I was asked by pachinko historian Kazuo Sugiyama to do the English language research for his book on ball rolling in Japan. All of my research is up on my blog, and warning it is quite voluminous, but tabletop ball rolling has a history that we have traced to at least the 1600s in Europe with trou madam. I credit tama-koro-gashi as the start of the redemption arcade model, so if you’ve ever been to an arcade with a prize counter, thank Meiji-era Japan.

SLIDE
The oldest arcade ancestry thread I have found from Japan so far is this incredible depiction from 1797, from the “Illustrated guide to famous places at Ise Shrine”

SLIDE
Zooming in, we can see a game stall that is reminiscent of carnival games today. 
Players use a small bow and arrow to strike static and moving targets, some of which might be spring loaded. Shooting gallery arcade games can be found in many countries, but this is one of the earliest depictions I have ever seen.

SLIDE
If we contrast that with this 1978 arcade game “oni nakase” by UA, we can see some obvious parallels. Traditional demon depictions and mechanical targets that move.

SLIDE
181 years later and the similarities are delightful. By creating a timeline, we can look at trends that span decades, and sometimes centuries. 
Both of these entries are tagged with the theme gods & demons.

SLIDE
The tool lets us click on that tag and we can see many other games that give a similar representation. I very much enjoy the tag system in the database. It gives me a window by which I can view very specific slices of the arcade timeline.

SLIDE
So much has been written about the history of video games, but the absence of documentation on eremeka games startled me. 
From the beginning I wanted this project to emulate my favourite information-dense arcade books, like Dick Bueschel’s guide to vintage trade stimulators and counter games, whose grid structure, on the right, I wanted to emulate.
All research is built off the work of those that came before us, and I was initially inspired by the work of arcade historians like Dick Bueschel and Nic Costa, 
and those who gave the arcade collector community a foundational knowledgebase, like Jay Stafford of The Internet Pinball Database, and Clay Harrell of pinrepair.com.

SLIDE
This is the front page. You can search with English or Japanese.
There are links to start browsing at specific decades.
My favorite features are the randomization links, which will pull up a random tag or company or page.

SLIDE
This is the main viewing screen. At the top we have our search controls. Name, lowest year, highest year, tag, company, and a checkmark to include machines without a photograph or not.

SLIDE
The tags beneath the machines are categories I created to meet specific research needs and/or because they amuse me.
Clicking on any of them will bring up all other machines with the same tag.
The bottom company link will bring up all of the machines by that company.

SLIDE
Beneath the search is a Toggle Tags button. This removes the tags from view and can create a grid that is more aesthetically pleasing.

SLIDE
When an imported game appears in the list, we are tracking the year it appeared in Japan.
If we know the original manufacturing date, it will be included in the square brackets.

A number of imports include a Japanese company in their listing.
Like with MiniSoccer, companies would sometimes create their own flyers for the imported games.
Imported games would appear in the company’s catalogue, like any other game they made.

SLIDE
Sometimes the machines are modified ever so slightly, sometimes significantly.
Those are the imports I track the most.
Esco Trading modified junkyard to be a medal game, and the front artwork on their machine is different from the USA release.
Oriental Kogyo took Super Match machines from Germany and retrofitted them to payout.
Kansai Seiki brought Chexx hockey into Japan and you can always tell it’s their machines because of the large Kasco stickers.

Some of the earliest imports we show are ways to track the oldest known coin-op machines that were brought into Japan.
I still have to refine how I handle the more common imports. I will eventually include controls to filter them out. American pinball machines are not currently included, but were a significant presence, especially in the decades after World War II. 

SLIDE
I had to limit the scope of this project or it would feel too overwhelming.
I gave myself a somewhat arbitrary framework of “the Showa era”, and I am less interested in machines that exist after 1988. I do track modern machines that carry on the eremeka traditions.
I did not want to bother with any machine that could be reasonably emulated. 
So no digital metal games, video slot machines, or most video games.
I do include some early TTL games, like Papish on the right, as signposts of their emergence in arcades.

SLIDE
While we are not looking at pachinko, we are looking at smart ball, sparrow ball, and arrangeball, which are controlled under the same laws as pachinko. 
We also include medal pachinko, which was around for almost a decade before pachinko used balls as currency.

SLIDE
We are including omikuji machines, which are fortune dispensers sometimes found at shrines.
Prewar Corinthian toys are included, as they are often mistakenly pointed to as the origin of pachinko.
They are a;sp relevant to the early years of smart ball.
We will not be documenting rides or vending machines, but we sometimes include early & important examples. 

SLIDE
So where does all of this information come from? This project was made possible thanks to Onitama-san, who shared scans of the full run of Game Machine, an industry newspaper that ran from 1974 to 2002.
I realized I could take the machines in each issue and use them as the starting data set.

SLIDE
This gave me an immediate question about methodology: if the machine appears in 1974, it also could have existed earlier. 
We use the earliest known appearance so far, especially because of the scarcity of materials from before 1975.
Piecing together the earlier years sometimes feels like working on many puzzles simultaneously.
If a machine is in a company’s advertisement, we might not necessarily know if that company is the maker, the seller, or the distributor.
All of this ambiguity is important to point out, as this project is very much a continual work in progress, and the data presented might not tell the full story.

SLIDE
When dealing with an incomplete story I try to assemble all of the evidence currently available in the hopes that more will get brought to my attention.
My best example of that is probably the article I wrote about Sega in the 1960s.
It is a four-part info dump post, with part 1 as a quick timeline of the corporate structure

SLIDE
Part 2 links to articles I’ve written on many of the Sega games released 1965 to 68, and reveals their original design sources.
For example, Sega’s 1965 Skill Diga is based on the design of the Jaguar Crane from Italy.

SLIDE
The design for Sega’s iconic 1966 Basketball was preceded by 
Pallacanestro Elettrica, which was released 1965 or earlier in Italy.

SLIDE
Rifleman, released 1967, matches the design of the Rehbock Schützenstand from Germany, 1966.

SLIDE
One of my favourite games, 1968’s Motopolo, was based on the game Moto Ball, from France.

SLIDE
Part 3 of the post showcases every machine in the “others” section in Sega’s 1966 pricelist.

SLIDE
Part 4 is an extensive dump of every other significant article on Sega from the 1960s that I had clipped from English-language industry publications.
The late 1960s machines fascinate me, and by 1970 Japan would not only be regularly exporting their games, but American companies would begin copying the Japanese games.

SOURCES
SLIDE - ARCADE EXPLORATIONS
The impetus for starting this project came from my arcade explorations, where I would document games seen in old movies.
I have posted 63 different arcade explorations so far, and they can be seen on my blog. 

SLIDE
There are a number of machines in old Japanese movies that we have not seen elsewhere, and that’s a stark reminder of how little information from before 1975 survives.
For example, in the 1963 film Shitamachi no taiyô we see the large shooting game The Battle of Fort Laramie by the company Art Point. This is the only knowledge I have of this game’s existence.

SLIDE
I have a similar project documenting pachinko in Japanese cinema.
While I do not include traditional pachinko in the eremeka database, I have done a lot of preservation work around pachinko history as well.

SLIDE
I have begun posting video clips from all of these movies for download on my pinballnovice blog.
I see it as an effort to help inform us about how these machines existed in the cultures of their era. 

SLIDE
Another source is onsen & hotel brochures, which often include a photo of their game room, a prestige attraction back then.
And yes we have scanned this particular one, and made it available in high-res.

SLIDE
Another source has been documenting the type approval numbers associated with these games. Starting in 1969 and going into the 80s, electrical devices were supposed to get a type approval number. 
These can be utilized to verify the manufacturing company and a minimum year. I have been pulling together this information from registry files, advertisements, manufacturer plates on machines, and the mentions in Game Machine.

SLIDE
There are many other sources, but the final source I want to discuss today is Japanese arcade industry magazines.
As part of the loose collective Gaming Alexandria, we have purchased almost 400 industry publications, and we are working to scan them.
Over 100 of them are already scanned and up on the Internet archive.

11.5

SLIDE
Pong Tron did not emerge from a vacuum, and the history of videogames cannot be properly contextualized without looking at the history of the amusement machine industry it arose from.
To help assist with propagating this information, I have made my database available for download, with all of the information in a tab-separated text file to allow for importing in to databases and spreadsheets.
As my information gets updated, so too will this dataset. This also includes the over 5000 images used in the database.
There will be a link discussing this data and more on my website.

SLIDE
The information here expands on the histories of industry pillars like Sega, Taito, Namco, Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom, and I hope it can be of use.
If you have access to any further information, especially pre-1975, and especially pre-World War II, please get in touch. 
At its heart, this has been a project of immense international collaboration.

SLIDE
There is still so much more to say, but not enough time to say it in. There are a number of fascinating waves of amusement machines to review.
From Japan’s earliest coin-op imports around 1907 and one of the very first coin-op arcades at Takarazuka in the 1910s,

SLIDE
to the 1930s machines inspired by games from UK, France, and the USA, and the grand arcade of Sport Land,

SLIDE
The postwar surge of pachinko and the resurgence of smart ball in the 1950s, and the impact these had on the amusement industry,
The rise of rooftop arcades, atop shopping centres,

SLIDE
The gun corners of the early 1960s, where American and European gun games were imported and Japanese manufacturers began releasing their own,

SLIDE
The impact of the bowling boom in the 1960s,
To the growth of the amusement industry leading to major international exports by 1970,

SLIDE
The importation and modification of German machines in the early 1970s,

SLIDE
The rise of medal parlors in the 70s,
And of candy shop games at the end of the decade,

SLIDE
All the way to the 1980s and beyond where eremeka machines continued despite the powerhouse of the video game revolution.
And with traditional arcades continuing to decline, eremeka machines are once again proving to be a vital and irreplaceable part of the gaming ecosystem.
These are games that you will not be able to properly experience with emulation.
Like pinball, my favourite eremeka games are about the physical.

SLIDE
This is an underexamined history brimming with some incredibly cool machines. 
I hope you explore it and find some delight in it.
I want to stress that my work does not cover the people, the companies, the stories, and the cultures that these games existed in. 
That work will be for everyone else.

Thank you for your time.
 

fin.

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