Toaplan Archaeology: The Cards of Enma Daiou

[Steven]

You probably know about Enma Daiou, but if you don't, it is a lie detector game made by Toaplan. It's generally considered to be exceedingly obscure because the only way to play it is on its own special arcade cabinet, of which there are two versions (a big deluxe one and a smaller simplified one), and each has a sensor that detects your pulse, which is required to play the game. Unfortunately, both the PCBs and the cabinets are extremely rare, so practically nobody has actually played this game.

At the end of the game, the cabinet will dispense a fake/joke business card for the player. There are both male and female types and the name on each one is some sort of joke that relates to the name of the fake company on the card.

Toaplan documentary director Joe and I found some boxes of these cards recently, so although I'm not into the whole Youtube/unboxing/whatever scene at all and prefer to generally stay away from it all if I can, I felt opening a box was worth documenting, so we did. Here you go: https://youtu.be/Z9G69fQYShU

With this, the total amount of information about Enma Daiou available anywhere has probably at least tripled.

[ryu]

Nice find! But have fun scanning and translating them all for archival purposes.

[BulletMagnet]

One heck of a collector's item; almost surreal to see something so untouched with the Toaplan logo printed on it, one can only wonder what kind of journey they took to make their way to their current home.

[Steven]

Nice find! But have fun scanning and translating them all for archival purposes.

I'm not sure if Joe is planning on translating them, but I think scanning is planned, with Tatsujin's permission, of course. These rely on knowledge of Japanese word play to understand, so I'm not sure what sort of translation would be best. There are at least 200 cards that I know of, so it would take some time either way. Most real Japanese business cards have Japanese on one side and an English version of the same thing on the other, but these only have text on one side.

One heck of a collector's item; almost surreal to see something so untouched with the Toaplan logo printed on it, one can only wonder what kind of journey they took to make their way to their current home.

We were extremely lucky to get these. The flyer is by far the most common Enma Daiou item, with the poster in second place, so finding anything else is pretty hard, but these cards do show up from time to time. I found this box and a box of the male versions listed separately on Yahoo Auctions a few months ago and decided to let Joe get both of them because he really wanted them. I want to say the box with the male cards was already opened when it was listed, but I don't remember seeing an entire unopened box like this before.