Games of the Abstract: Haunted Casino (1996)

Developer: Societa Daikanyama

Publisher: Societa Daikanyama

One Player

Originally for the Sega Saturn

 

For the Sega Saturn, there were a string of adult releases under the Japanese only release rating of "RedX18". In Japan, Sega used their own age rating, an optional one for its systems in Japan. Zen Nenrei was considered for all ages, and Nenrei Seigen 18 Saiijou was for adults over the age of 18¹. X Shitei 18 Saiijou, the aforementioned RedX18 as I have initially called it, was also designed for adults over the age of 18, but also subject to more sales restrictions for explicit erotic content. There is one exception - the 1996 Japanese release of Mortal Kombat II for the Saturn got the X Shitei 18 Saiijou rating for violence - but this is a rating entirely for games with explicit nudity. Some adventure games (Can Can Bunny Premiere (1996)) qualified, and to my surprise, a licensed game for a popular anime franchise from the time, called Tenchi Muyou, Tenchi Muyou! Ryououki Gokuraku CD-ROM for Sega Saturn (1995), fell into this rating too. There are also full motion video works with live action footage of models, such as VIC Tokai's Playboy Karaoke Collection games, licensed from the Playboy magazine company, and Virtua Photo Studio: Cameraman Simulation (1996), where you play a cameraman and as the title entails, involves photo shots with real models. Most of these games, however, are strip mah-jong games, a staple in Japanese video games from Gal Jan (1996) to the Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai games, and then you get Haunted Casino, an outlier in the set. Alongside how this was the biggest game in this group, in terms of three discs being required, this is a strip game in the western mould of blackjack, poker and roulette with an explicit horror slant.

Erotic games have been licensed from the Atari 2600, to unofficially for the likes of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but with the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer in the nineties welcoming erotic software with open arms as a console, the increase in graphical capabilities and full motion video allowed for erotica in video games (or interactive movies) to have more to work with, to depict its content with more explicit and also more visually vibrant work than in a time, like the Atari 2600, the hardware prevented more than vague shapes in lewd positions. This era completely stayed in Japan when it came to the Sega Saturn, but in mind how, in vast contrast to its disastrous history in the United States and the small era of release in Europe, this console was a success for Sega in their home country. With the vast number of software genres their home land got - from the scrolling shooters to the visual novels – it makes sensible logic for better or worse to be more accepting of this genre on a marketing perspective. Haunted Casino does however need to be explicitly talked of in how, compared to the modern day in gaming, and what you could publish on the likes of the PC-98 personal computer before the Saturn, this is tame in terms of erotica as it is entirely softcore nudity. It is, without considering the gender of the dealers you play in the titular casino in these games over three rounds, nudity with the anatomy mostly of dolls, and you would not have gotten anything more explicit in Sega software for the console.

Likewise, the erotic and card games have been bedfellows for a long time; said to be developed in the United States in the 19th Century, in New Orleans around strip clubs², strip poker is an idiosyncratic choice to include instead of mahjong, seen once in a game which focuses on a strip take on blackjack predominantly. The horror theme as well is as idiosyncratic. Horror intermingling with the sensual, the fear of loss replacing the risk of harm in this case, is a curious tonal choice with more monstrous and unnatural female dealers to play against than "cute" female characters in other RedX18 mah-jong games. The developer/publisher Societa Daikanyama worked prominently for the Sega Saturn alone, though it was the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer where they made their start. With the original 1994 version of The Yakyuuken Special, the console from the United States had however managed to have a good foothold in Japan, even South Korea, with exclusive games. The console allowed both for these types of games, the 3DO and Saturn versions strip "rock paper scissor" with real footage of actresses, and with the console having allowed new developers to publish software for the system at a cheaper cost, something of note with a famous FMV horror game originally from the 3DO, Kenji Eno and Warp's D (1995). Societa produced little after the few games they released for the Saturn, and Haunted Casino still stands out among their work as an ambitious (and curious) hybrid of a casino gambling game, strip card games, and interactive walking sections which feel influenced by Myst (1993), the legendary Cyan release that became the most successful game of this wave of CD based productions financially in this decade.

It is implicitly Western, i.e. European, in aesthetic with no Japanese horror iconography at all. Set in a gothic castle which follows the tropes of classic European horror iconography - gargoyle door knockers that talk, suits of golden feminine armour and western interiors - the protagonist is genderless though with mind, as we get into, the likely target audience of  this being male gamers. This casino is run by supernatural figures, and upon entering, you are introduced to a cackling blue imp with a nice raspy voice, a female voice actor as common in Japanese voice acting to play characters like these as much as male children in anime. A mischievous figure, he is one of the sole explicitly non-human characters in this abode, barring a portrait on the ground floor of a female imp. Starting with the first disc (ground floor), you play blackjack with a red haired mermaid, roulette (its sole inclusion) with a harpy, and a game named Heaven and Hell with an aquatic figure with a tail and possible Chinese influence in her costume design.

A slight disappointment with the game, with characters that are explicitly hyper-feminised in design, is how they do not really play up the idea of these figures being supernatural entities despite the initial two mentioned referencing mythological figures linked to their female counterparts. Mermaids in numerous global folklores are figures of beauty but also talked of as dangerous in their allure, talked of causing shipwrecks, whilst harpies are far more common than their male equivalent from Ancient Greek and Roman mythology. These are clearly very western looking (for the most part) ideals of beauty in design, but with no sense of the monstrous involved which feels a lost chance. When the implicit point of Haunted Castle is this Western horror tone, these female characters in their design, mostly moving away from Eastern and Japanese costume designs and with full figured proportions, do look like models with fake ears and horns on, which still stand out as good art work but miss something in terms of the supernatural tone. Stepping away from the titillation, the idea of the dealer of gambling tables being the most sensual figure, whether male or female, is a really interesting premise for a gambling video game, something which could be leaned on in terms of erotic card games where ideals of beauty can be eroticised in monstrous forms that undercut conventional ideas of attractiveness. The idea of mixing the thrill/fear of losing in a card game with the promise of sexuality is something already there, but adding to this a figure you desire and fear, or at least get a Halloween party sense of spookiness in a fun way, is a subversive idea, making the sense that these figures do not go further in their unnatural nature disingenuous to the premise.

There is the obvious skeletal elephant in the room of the notion of the male gaze. In mind this would have been sold for a male audience in Japan, the "male gaze" concept as developed by the likes of Laura Mulvey involves male heterosexual depictions of women in the arts, turning them into figures of sexual desire for their pleasure. The concept is one I have ambivalence for, bearing in mind I am a heterosexual male and not the person to analyze this concept, because it can be oversimplified when it comes to who the player of a game like this could be. It needs to ask how would a gay male player react to this game, where as you play the rounds (one with the women clothes, second in exaggerated lingerie, the later nude), or how a female player would react to the material, factoring in LGBTQ female gamers as well. Far more dubious, in truth, is if you win the three rounds, the female dealers against their will are sucked into a void and turned into a playing card of your choice which you possess, which is cheesy in hindsight, but does present the literal possession of women as objects. Considering the likelihood, if you lost, your character would likely lose their soul, this is still the more questionable thing if part of a game, in historical hindsight, whilst still pure cheese in presentation.

The lascivious side is on full display, including a theatre of the bottom floor where you can watch presentations of the female cast in still images in various states of undress, but that was the game’s selling point; instead the sense of having to raise the stakes in this to the act of capturing your beaten opponents, whilst befitting the horror tone, becomes the thing which will cause people to roll their eyes. Games like this do cause one to release that, because video games were dominated by male creators selling games to male costumers, that factors in how a mere fragment of gender and sexuality has ever been brought to the medium for a few good decades, where a game like this does not present a wide array of body shapes and types even among fictional monster women, or imaging how an LGBTQ version of this, such as strip poker with male dealers for a male audience, would feel in tone. As a result, Haunted Casino’s mild sexuality in the expanding of voices even in terms of sexuality does feel pure cheesecake that feels of an entirely different time.

To get these images of the dealers nude too, you need to actually beat the games, and for starters, whilst these gamers transpire in rooms, you have to move around the casino, in which this presents itself as if it was a puzzle game in full three dimensions without any actual point and click puzzles to solve. Having needed to double tap the controls after a delay to move or turn my unseen character, very little of the world is interactive at all, merely aesthetic context for the game: you can find yourself in an entirely lightless room on the first floor listening to dialogue, and an attempt to enter the treasury leads to a trapdoor down into the cellar, which you can climb back out of, but this is contextual flavour to a game where the challenge itself is entering the rooms where gambling tables are found. Gambling as a video game as well is also with the concern of random chance being a factor, meaning one can, as in real life, lose many of your newly earned coins with ease. Poker, when played on the second floor with a cat girl, here really depends on luck with the cards you get, and especially involves playing safe, even if you know the rules, and the Heaven and Hell card game, which appears twice, proves a challenge. Whilst aesthetically appropriate, it needs to be described in terms of how it can be a frustrating game among those here if diagrams are not at hand – there are three stages, each where you can choose to put coins on Heaven, Hell or that there will be a draw, and you need to guess from the card chosen for Heaven and the other for Hell which will be higher in value. A success means you can risk further with a larger reward on the second stage, with the new cards and the older ones totalling the amount for Heaven or for Hell, the third stage the same if you manage to bet right. In comparison, I find myself realising I have a better skill at blackjack which thankfully makes up most of the seven dealers you encounter with three games of it played between. This will be a nightmare depending on your luck to beat the dealers, even if the game itself is short; even if all need to be beaten three times each, and is extended out into three discs, those seven dealers and the theatre itself are the main core of the game, , where a lot was designed for wanting full motion video scenes that are not even erotic but for their spooky tone, such as a cut scene of two suits of the armour talking to each other on the second level.

The result is a curiosity of its time, where practically, it would have made more sense to stick to the card games and not have its sections investigating the manor. They do add a lot in terms of mood, and make Haunted Casino for its obvious flaws absolutely compelling. This is not scary horror, as it would have been inappropriate for its content unless desiring a more transgressive erotic tone. It is instead the kind of game for the more open minded player on Halloween, and a really ambitious project to even attempt back then. This is pretty extravagant in mind to this being a production from a developer/publisher specialising in erotic games, as FMV and fully rendered animation at this time would have been a lot of hard work for window dressing, which could be summed up in there being a bedroom on the second floor which is never of use barring for the sake of its appearance. It evokes The Mansion of Hidden Souls (1994), the Sega Saturn sequel of the similar named Sega CD original, where you only interact with items with a purpose, in the case of this later game with less interaction barring the equivalent of flavour text, such as dialogue from gargoyle door knockers or ram your head into a locked door. There is also the added aspect that there is no music in the game barring a slight flourish when dealers are defeated. As a result, this will put people off for what is a very simplistic erotic gambling game, but for those who are not, it adds to the eerie and strange mood of the entire production. It is, if not off-putting, a very ambitious style which is just there. For the sake of style, now dated, the artistic decisions add to the game.

It also means that, with each floor a disc, you win a key off the last dealer you beat per the first two levels, needing to give them to the female demon tending to the elevator to move between discs. This game manages to have more discs than some cult games on the Saturn as a result of this – Mr. Bones (1996) is only two as another eccentric one-off perfect for Halloween – and it means Haunted Casino sits alongside the Saturn port of Konami’s cult hit Policenauts (1996) in terms of having three discs within its physical release just because of how FMV took a lot of space in CDs. Next to lengthy JRPGs like Shining the Holy Ark (1997) and Dragon Force (1996) from the console, which were long games to immerse oneself in however designed around the limited space of CDs/cartridges for video games, many of these multi disc games were shorter but ballooned in disc number due to the amount of information needed to store full motion video. Enemy Zero (1996), from our friends of Kenji Eno’s Warp studio, is technically a three disc game too, but the four (the first) is the intro cut scene, whilst Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997) used the four discs for each world as a much more ambitious follow-up to the critical and financial success of Myst. RPGs and other genres would have more discs, see Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), but that was when they started adding FMV themselves and started taking advantage of the disc space for content, whilst these FMV centric games with hindsight present a fascinating passage in gaming's history trying to work with technical limitations. Haunted Casino is the kind of game a hell of a lot more easier to make nowadays, and with less discs needed in the modern day, itself a peculiar artefact only contrasted by the likes of the Saturn port of Phantasmagoria (1995), the Sierra computer point-and-click horror game, which was Japanese exclusive and eight discs long due to how much FMV it used.

The second disc / floor is where the war of attrition and grinding with the money credits comes into play as this is where the cat girl and her poker table comes in, entirely based on having a good enough hand immediately rather than hoping the one new card you get switch for being remotely of use. Pamela the dragon-like figure with a unicorn horn presents another Heaven and Hell game, and you encounter an elf that plays blackjack. The lack of music is contrasted by the voice acting, where even if with some repetition varies, including some use of English in the instruction as a dealer to the player tells them when to bet. This is a good point to bring up one of the other curious aspects of this game’s existence, in that Japan’s has strict gambling laws would prevent Western card games like blackjack and poker being possible to play with real financial stakes when the game was released. Until 27th July 2018, when the Japanese Diet passed the Act for Development of Specified Complex Tourist Facilities Areas (the Act), which legalises gambling to be operated by licensed private entities in certain designated locations within Japan, gambling in general in the country was prohibited barring public sport and lotteries under the Japanese Penal Code (Act No. 45 of 1907)³. There are poker players from Japan in world tournaments, but playing for money itself is the issue, where money transactions from card games was not allowed in the law⁴, and how gambling licenses until this 2018 act were only allowed for local governments or government-related entities to have  for the likes of lotteries³. Tellingly, with pachinko parlours, hugely popular in Japan, you won steel ball bearings meant to be exchanged for prizes in the parlours, and financial transactions come with the stores where such prizes can be exchanged in close proximity even if unmarked stores⁵. Haunted Casino as a result really sticks out as a niche in mind to this, when mah-jong games including the erotic kind are a more commonplace genre, with mah-jong popular in Japan. It presents Haunted Casino, using western games in a western horror aesthetic, as a curious creative decision in terms of video game erotica, not even factoring in the challenge its gambling mechanics thus bring in, with no way to accumulate more money and hoping you win each dealer to survive.

Befittingly the last dealer, the big head of this casino, is a female demon, effectively the Queen among them in how more stylish her design is, even if the fact you return for another game of blackjack undercuts any grandeur to the proceedings. It does however present an accidentally bleak ending where, even if a language barrier is involved to understand the dialogue, you become the real monster of the game just from how the ending plays out. With no dealers left not turned into cards, the casino crumbles to the ground, and even our lovable imp guide dissipates into nothing, making one feel truly the villain of the game for decimating the location from existence. The only thing left standing is the theatre, merely a wall left standing with a sheet on it, the projector in the dirt projecting the films of the dealers as ghosts to lust over, and in itself it proves a misanthropic ending in leaving one culpable of destroying the place and left with only one’s fantasies to have. You do not even have the insinuation of any physical relationship with these figures, just these images left preserved on these films, certainly the befitting horror appropriate ending even if a killjoy to the sensual tone.

Societa Daikanyama do not really exist beyond the Saturn, and in terms of this game, a stigma against erotic games will view it as an oddity that would not reward in playing it, even in terms of titillation as sexually explicit games now are easier to purchase least for PC players. For a Saturn game, of its own type and in terms of both horror and FMV titles, it is a real oddity. I mentioned earlier this game would be easier to make nowadays, but few would try to recreate the presentation, just create the card tables within the world for ease. Legitimately a curiosity in the truest sense, Societa themselves would vanish by 2013⁵. Their old site, preserved through the Wayback Machine (and Japanese only, requiring translation), does talk of a Windows PC version of Haunted Casino they intended to release, including a front page apology for its release date being undecided, a port which never came to be⁶. An erotic gambling game in the decades after, the kind found on Valve's Steam site, would never have this elaborate tone with the Myst-like FMV walking sequences, as it would be impractical for financial cost or even in terms of a suitable aesthetic. This makes the game a compelling one-off in terms of a genre and attitude to gaming that feels ambitious even for pure lascivious reasons. It is a game you could bounce off just because as a gambling game, you unless you are good, lucky or cheat are at the mercy of the cards' favour, but as a game for the Sega Saturn and in its spectrum of horror adjacent games, even others from other consoles in that era, it stands out greatly.

 

======

1) SEGA Rating page on Sega Retro.

2) The History of Strip Poker: The Bare Facts of the Game, written by Ali Amel for Previous Magazine and published on March 6th 2019.

3) A general introduction to gambling law in Japan, written by Anderson Mōri & Tomotsune for Lexology, published on May 11th 2022.

4) Playing Poker in Japan: What's It Like? by Ivan Potocki for My Poker Coaching.

5) The Secret Life of Pachinko: How Japan's gaming parlors really work, written by David Kushner, and published for IEEE Spectrum on October 1st 2020.

6) The Societa Daikanyama page for Sega Retro.

7) Societta's Web Page (updated 2001/02/05). From March 1st 2001 by way of the Wayback Machine.