That gorgeous screenshot you see before you is from Sega's Dottori-Kun. Those of you who are old enough (or who watched enough Game Room Quicklooks) will recognize this lay-out to be similar to many games. Dodge 'Em for the 2600, for instance.

Who cares? Two games look a like! And you'd be right, until this point. Dodge 'Em came out in 1980. Dottori-Kun came out a full decade later in 1990. And in many ways it's inferior to Dodge 'Em as there's no color and no real sound effects to speak of. Should you be especially young or naive and think that all video games made before 2004 were just colored blocks chasing each other around... This is the same year that Golden Axe was released in arcades. And as far as technology was concerned, Golden Axe was made by the same company at the same time using the exact same processor as Dottori-Kun. And much like Golden Axe, if you were an arcade operator, you'd be shelling out thousands of dollars to get your hands on it.

What gives?

Like all good stories, this one begins with Japan's Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law. The magic and specific regulations that governs all the electric wonderment that land has to offer. Like many laws, it's not necessarily perfect on it's face and can have unintended consequences. In this case, it adversely affected the sale of JAMMA cabinets.

JAMMA was and is a uniform standard for arcade cabinets. Standard voltage, standard buttons, standard video, standard connections. Before JAMMA you couldn't really change arcade games. Have a Pac-Man? Want a Donkey Kong? Well, you're buying a whole new cabinet.

With games and cabinets built to a JAMMA standard, you can just yank out the game specific hardware and swap it out. Kids on your route not playing DJ Boy like they used to? Well, take that cabinet and convert it to a Street Fighter II!

And that's how you'd wind up with arcade machines that say "Sunset Riders" but really it's playing "Battletoads".

But let's say you don't want to sacrifice one game for another. You can buy generic cabinets. Famously the Irem Madonna, Namco Consolette and the Sega Astro City to name a few. Then your Japanese OCD will be satisfied with nice, uniform cabinets.

Researching Dottori-Kun you'll see two theories it exists. One says it's for testing purposes only. The other says it's due to the Electrical Appliance and Material Control law. Doing some digging into the subject, I think they're both correct. In order to appease the law and not be selling an item in an 'unfinished state' and also as an easy way to test the hardware that you've received.

Even more digging shows that while produced in 1990, it was decided to make the game as cheap as possible (because you're essentially giving it away), so it was a re-purposed version of a game called Head On, which was developed in 1979 by Gremlins Entertainment for Sega.

So now you know about the shovelware, pack-in, game of the Arcades. Dottori-Kun.