With JapanвЂ™s arcade market in sharp decline due to increasingly powerful home consoles вЂ“ the number of game centres has dwindled from 44,000 to 14,000 in the past three decades вЂ“ VR doesnвЂ™t represent a futuristic new paradigm as much as a return to the industryвЂ™s roots. вЂњThe goal is to get in multiple customers at once: couples, or a group of friends.вЂќД¬rash course вЂ¦ Mario Kart VR. вЂњWhat arcades are trying is to make VR social,вЂќ says Toto. Afterward, he breathlessly announces his intention to buy a PlayStation VR headset.

Before weвЂ™re shepherded into the cavernous Zero Latency area, one of my Japanese teammates mentions he has little interest in games that donвЂ™t predate the 1986 Famicom. When I visit Sega Joypolis on a weekday, thereвЂ™s barely enough people lined up to fill the eight player slots, but the simulation is impressive enough to turn anyone into a VR evangelist. In other words: they put all those leftover headsets to use in JapanвЂ™s вЂњgame centresвЂќ instead. With interest in consumer headsets nonexistent, вЂњthe VR pioneers shifted their focus to applying the tech on a different target group, and under a totally different business modelвЂќ, says Serkan Toto, CEO of the Tokyo-based analyst firm Kantan Games. In Japan, on the other hand, the hype only started building after 2016. Rather than setting the standard for interactive entertainment, the technology has remained a novelty вЂ“ despite the backing of companies such as Facebook and Sony (whose Playstation VR headset, though relatively successful, has been adopted by just under 3% of PlayStation 4 owners). In the west, a couple of years after the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets became available to the public, VR hype is fast evaporating. And further south, on the artificial island of Odaiba, Sega recently cleared out a massive room in its Joypolis amusement park to make space for Zero Latency VR, a вЂњwarehouse scale, free-roam, multiplayer virtual reality entertainmentвЂќ where a team of zombie hunters are equipped with вЂњmilitary-gradeвЂќ motion-tracking backpacks and let loose on the undead with an arsenal of plastic firearms. IвЂ™m staring at a billboard for a virtual brothel.ДЄ stoneвЂ™s throw away is Bandai NamcoвЂ™s massive VR Zone complex, an indoor, 38,000 sq ft all-VR theme park that opened just over a year ago. As my eyes wander to the logo in the corner, I realise that the poster is promoting Soft On Demand вЂ“ one of JapanвЂ™s biggest porn, or вЂњAVвЂќ (adult video), companies. At first glance, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary: a woman cheerfully donning a VR headset, with kanji lettering welcoming passersby to come in and try the technology for themselves. O ne day, on my way past the outskirts of KabukichЕЌ вЂ“ TokyoвЂ™s red-light district, infamously depicted in the Yakuza games вЂ“ I spot a curious advertisement.

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