Feature
On March 11th, Japan experienced the biggest known natural disaster in the country’s history as a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Tohoku, leading to subsequent tsunami waves, aftershocks, and nuclear power plant explosions.
In the days following, Namco’s Kazuhiro Harada remembers looking at the data collected from Tekken arcade cabinets linked across Japan, and seeing clusters of locations flatline. In some cases, the buildings housing these machines lost electricity; in others, they fell apart. Back at Namco’s office, his team experienced frequent blackouts, regularly shut off equipment due to power conservation efforts, discovered that their arcade cabinet manufacturing factory collapsed, and saw fellow employees question whether they wanted to continue making “fun” entertainment products.
