Tokyo Blog, Tokyo Story
The blog of Stephen David Smith, Tokyo, Japan 2012
Super Potato Retro Video Arcade Chaos
Doosh! Found Super Potato as planned. It’s amazing, but if you want to pick up some archaic silicon, you’d better be packing a full wallet (Japan, being a cash culture, is a place where shops don’t often accept credit cards). That said, you can just as easily treat it like a museum. They have every console I can remember with a seemingly hand-picked selection of all the best and rarest games for them. They also stock a massive range of game soundtracks, including 8-bit, that they play in the shop, and broadcast outside the shop to guide you in. My new favourite hangout though is up on the top floor. A smokey room full of arcade machines, cocktail tables, a life-sized model of Snake from Metal Gear Solid, and some one-armed bandits. The machines are by Tecmo, and alow you to select any game from the extensive library stored within. A bit like MAME, I guess. Thinking about it, they probably are using MAME; I can’t see how else those machines could work. It was also funny how the natives watched my screen out of the corners of their eyes as I started to play X-Men vs Street Fighter, and were shocked when I started stringing combos up. Didn’t they know we imported this stuff into England since the 70′s? As I remember it, Cornwall was where I played the most arcade machines. Back then I didn’t realise that all the good stuff came from Japan.
