Gapoli is not the Sega/Sammy Super Game, but you can trade your points for a TV, so maybe it actually is

You ever hear about the Sega Super Game? Don’t worry, it’s something only sickos like me who follow translated Japanese press releases even know about, and it’s probably not actually real. At one point, the Super Game was Hyenas, a shooter so short-lived it was cancelled in alpha testing. But every year or so Sega’s Japanese side tells the press that the “Super Game” is still under development at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, which is fine because it’s also going to print hundreds of million dollars. It will exist in all formats and be all things to all people. Will Super Game be streaming, or a crypto scam, or an esports FPS, or a AAA Sonic RPG? Yes.

The Super Game is beyond your comprehension and mine. It is the be-all and end-all. Such is the Super Game. When the Super Game is out, you will no longer have time to want other video games.

Anyway, I think that over on the gambling side of the company, Sammy/Sega has already made their own Super Game. It involves playing medal games, mahjong, pachinko, and the slots until you win coins that you can then spend on actual goods. Gapoli is all-consuming. It’s not the Super Game, but it might just have the same idea.

(For reasons that will shortly become clear, Gapoli is not available outside of Japan unless you use a VPN located there.)

Previously on this newsletter, I got hooked on Konami’s online medal games. Konami’s effort to get their arcade games playable on the cloud online amid the Covid pandemic was ambitious. But judging by a lack of content updates and the 2021-2022 trademarks of the available games, Konami seems to indicate that this was a one-time experiment brought on by world-historical circumstances.

Gapoli takes the opposite approach, for both the dying arcade amusement industry and the devastated pachinko business. If the customers are never coming back, it suggests, then we need to come to their phones with an app that will do it all— the soft gambling of the medal game, the medium-to-hard gambling of pachinko, and what the hell, a little home shopping– at home.

What drew me in to Gapoli was hearing from my fellow Sega arcade maniac Ted that it had a bunch of re-constructions of Sega medal games. I actually think that if you’re a Sega arcade fan you should probably give these games a look; the developers did an amazing job digitally re-creating machines that rely heavily on physical machinery and the specifically designed movement of objects like coins and balls.

Konami’s digital coin pusher is acceptable, but the coins still move like 3D objects in a video game. Sega’s digital coin pusher is CG, but the coins move so naturally, so much like real physical objects, that I was amazed. Much like pinball, the gameplay of a medal game is the physics of its moving parts. The light ball in Tower of Babel W buzzes unpredictably and delightfully between the slight indents in the bonus wheel, jumping over spots, whirling on the edges, crossing the board on a whim, before finally settling down. That's by design; just a different kind of design than we're used to when talking about games.

I’ll get back to these games, as I think they’re the thing you’ll be most interested in as readers, but before I go any further I need to explain the weird, fascinating legalized prize-room gambling going on in this app.