2023 | 9 min read
A-Train was one of those classic video games from Japan that you played without even realising it was Japanese. California-based game studio Maxis had done the work of localising A-Train for the global market, adapting it from a popular series of railway simulator games called A-Ressha de Ikō, or Take the A-Train, first released in 1985 in Japan. It somehow feels remarkable that the original game was named after the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s swinging celebration of the New York subway, even if the game itself was played in a milieu that could not be more suburban Tokyo, with all the lack of swinging that entails.
The world of A-Train was divided into small isometric squares, which in retrospect are obviously ricefields. The landscape changed colour with the seasons; the game began in Spring with the heady optimism of a new financial year. One neat extra touch by Maxis was to hire a musician called Brad Madix to add seasonally-themed background music in a style that it would be unfair to call “funky jazz numbers” but I will anyway. These can be heard today at the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation. The track Spring is particularly lovely and instantly transports me into the mind of a somewhat solitary 15-year-old boy. Yes, that would be me.
A-Train let you build and manage your own railway, still just about an attractive proposition for a teenage boy on the cusp of discovering girls. You began in virgin territory – of course you did – and took stock of your finances, planning carefully where your very first track would get laid. Released in 1992, A-Train was slow gaming before there was such a thing. Unlike other strategy games such as Railroad Tycoon, there were no rivals to compete against. Instead of an entrepreneur, you played a faceless corporation. The gentle nature of A-Train probably explains its commercial failure outside Japan. That, and the game’s open-ended complexity.
The gameplay went far beyond railway management. To succeed properly, you needed to exploit the potential for urban development that came with the railways. It wasn’t just about laying track and scheduling services. You were encouraged to plough surplus capital into land acquisition in order to build department stores, amusement parks and baseball stadiums along your route. In A-Train, you didn’t just build a railway: you built an entire city in which the railway played the star enabling role.
By allowing you to gently steer the lives of millions of people, A-Train seemed to belong in the genre of so-called “god games” that gave you absolute control over the earth: the power to drop something from the sky, to run experiments, to see what worked. But it was really just a business simulator. It’s how things worked in Japan, where there was no god, only business. Little could the 15-year-old me have guessed that, instead of playing god, he was actually playing a simulation of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD).
In urban planning, Transit-Oriented Development is the practice of situating as much as possible within walking distance of public transportation, usually defined as ten minutes. When TOD is applied at scale in a railway-dominated transit system, as it has been in the Greater Tokyo Area over the last 100 years, the result is linear development: train stations placed every 1-2km and dense urban sprawl on either side, gradually thinning out beyond the 1km mark. Or not thinning out much at all, but definitely requiring the use of a bicycle.
To walk this idea a bit further, an alternative map of Tokyo would have at its centre the Yamanote circle, with train services operated by JR, the Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway, and then radiating outwards the following eight linear cities: Keikyu City, Sotetsu City, Tokyu City, Odakyu City, Keio City, Seibu City, Tobu City, and Keisei City. Each of these linear cities was more than just a transit corridor: it was an entire ecosystem housing several million people, with its own unique shops and businesses, guided by a privately-owned railway company with its own urban development logic.
Most of these cities were actually multilinear: they branched off or consisted of two or more separate lines. They were unofficial cities that didn’t feature explicitly on any map. But if they did, you’d see their true characters. Keikyu had its tentacles wrapped around Tokyo Bay. Sotetsu was a helpful connector. Tokyu had helped itself to a very large slice of the pie. Odakyu was a pleasure-seeker that couldn’t whisk you out of Tokyo fast enough. Keio kept it straight. Seibu meandered. Tobu had its fingers all over the north. Keisei had Narita Airport tied up in knots.
Zoom in closer and the residents of each city were living slightly different lives. True, quality of life didn’t vary much. Life just had a different colour, a different typeface, a slightly different logic to it. In Tokyu City, Tokyu Card holders earned Tokyu Points in Tokyu Stores, while Tokyu Security guards drove around pointlessly in Tokyu Security cars. That’s not to say each city was run like a monopoly. Competition was welcome. A certain mercantile vitality even held sway. But whichever company controlled the railway station became the service provider of first resort.
There isn’t the space here to describe all eight linear cities in Tokyo. Each has its own origin story, its own attempt to wrest control of an urban hub, its own special flavour of suburban escape. What’s more, I’ve only ever lived in two of them: Tokyu City and Odakyu City. Whatever residents of Seibu City get up to on weekends is their business. Just don’t bring it downtown, OK?
I’ll focus here on Tokyu City. It feels worth mentioning at this point that there’s no such thing as Tokyu City. Except there is, but it’s not called that. I’ll explain more later. Tokyu is an abbreviation of Tōkyō Kyūkō, or Tokyo Express, the name for a forced merger of privately-owned railway lines in western Tokyo necessitated by World War II. After the war, these lines were returned to separate ownership, becoming today’s Keikyu, Odakyu and Keio Lines. The Tokyu name was retained by the company that owned several lines pointing in the general direction of Yokohama. Tokyu today stands for the Tokyu Corporation, which operates eight different railway lines in the southwest triangle of the Greater Tokyo Urban Metro-Pie.
The Tokyu Corporation has annual earnings in the region of one trillion yen, which is around 7 billion US dollars. Surprisingly perhaps, less than 20% of its earnings come from railway operations. Another 20% comes from real estate. Tokyu Land Corporation is a major developer that owns buildings including Hikarie and Scramble Square at its main central hub of Shibuya. Hotels and resorts make up another 10%. The remaining 50% comes from life services: Tokyu supermarkets and department stores mainly, plus subscription-based services such as cable TV, internet and home security.
Tokyu makes most of its money not from moving people around or owning the buildings in which they live and work – though it does pretty well out of both of these – but from being present in their everyday lives. It’s there for you when you need a bento lunch. It’s there for you when you decide to treat yourself to something special. The Tokyu group slogan is “Towards a Beautiful Age” and Tokyu has several large-scale developments in the suburbs – the latest is called Grandberry Park – in which it does try to usher you under its utopian wings. But a common feature of Tokyo’s linear cities is that they aren’t centrally owned or managed, just centrally guided. Tokyu doesn’t want to control your life; it just wants you to live in Tokyu City.
Tokyu Corporation isn’t quite bold enough to lay claim to a Tokyu City. In its planning documents, it refers to a Tokyu Area instead. This urban triangle runs from Shibuya in the north to Yokohama in the south and Yamato in the far west, with significant hubs including Sangenjaya, Futako-Tamagawa, Jiyugaoka, Tamagawa, Kamata and Oimachi. Encompassing 17 wards and cities in Tokyo and Kanagawa, the Tokyu Area has a population of 5.46 million people, equivalent to a Barcelona or Johannesburg. By 2035, even as Japan’s population is expected to shrink by 10% from 2015 levels, Tokyu forecasts that the population of the Tokyu Area will increase by 4.4%.
Many of Tokyo’s linear cities grew up around leisure or tourism. The Odakyu and Keio Lines both began as gateways to western pleasurelands outside the Yamanote circle. But Tokyu Corporation’s long-term strategy is to develop centrally located Shibuya into what it calls an Entertainment City. Shibuya is where Tokyu has its headquarters and where many Tokyu rail journeys begin or end. As well as the high-rise towers Hikarie, Stream and Scramble Square, Tokyu also owns the Cerulean Hotel, Mark City, and the Shibuya 109 and QFront buildings. Shibuya is a Tokyu town.
Entertainment City Shibuya is the conceptual razzmatazz on top of the more sober Tokyu Greater Shibuya Strategy. Beginning with the 2012 opening of Hikarie, the strategic plan includes 15 developments in Shibuya, of which seven are still under construction. The final piece of the jigsaw will be the Shibuya Upper West Project, an ultra-high-rise tower on top of the Bunkamura complex, scheduled for completion in 2027. Each development has its own consortium of corporate players. This being Tokyo, playground of the private development corporation, it hardly needs saying that all this happened without public consultation. Questions are now being asked if there’s really demand in Tokyo for all this additional office and retail space.
But this concern presupposes that Tokyu is only interested in collecting rent. While real estate does account for around half the group’s operating profits, it isn’t the biggest source of income. Tokyu’s long-term prospects are tied to growing the population of the Tokyu Area and plying them with services. It knows that the more people work in Shibuya or think of Shibuya as their go-to entertainment hub, the more people will choose to live in Tokyu City, I mean Area. Tokyu Corporation is a strategiser of cities masquerading as a real-estate developer disguised as a railway company.
A-Train was never a hit outside Japan, but the game maintains a cult following at home. Artdink, the Tokyo-based game studio behind A-Train, is still putting out new titles in the franchise. The latest version of A-Train has a tourism theme, but it lacks the jazzy, 16-bit, retro-garden-city cool of the 1992 version. I boot up that version in an online emulator and find myself immersed in a pre-internet world of floppy disks, peripherals, episodes of Frasier, and endless school holidays just waiting to filled with tentative strategic moves in Transit-Oriented Development. After 30 minutes, I feel bored and reach for my phone.
While Maxis didn’t score a hit with the global release of A-Train, it clearly borrowed some elements of game design for its vastly more popular SimCity series – not least the A-Train-inspired isometric view that arrived in SimCity 2000. Like A-Train, SimCity gave you control over all the levers of urban development. Only you didn’t play as a faceless corporation and you weren’t even in the railway business. You were an elected mayor. How crazy is that.
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