Ashcraft and Snow walk through Akihabara, Den-Den Town, and the suburban Round 1s with the patience of cultural anthropologists, sorting the cabinets by social function rather than genre — the rhythm-game floor, the print-club booth, the all-night fighter pit. Read now, with so many of these places already gone, Arcade Mania reads as a snapshot of a vanishing institution. A book the SNK / Konami beat needs on its shelf.
Back to the shelf
The Reading Room
Arcade Mania
The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers
The cultural counterpart to the hardware books — a portrait of the Japanese game centre at the moment before it began to disappear.
- Author
- Brian Ashcraft, Jean Snow
- Published
- 2008
- Publisher
- Kodansha
- Pages
- 176
- Shelved
- Curio