Tomorrow will be the official launch of NTT Communication's 72game.com, powered by GaiaX, the project that has been keeping me busy these last three months. 72 is Japanese for nostalgic, and on 72game.com you can play classic NES games such as Elevator Action (or Binary Land, my current favourite). At the moment users can choose from ten titles but more are in the pipeline. It is basically a pay-per-play service (not cheap at 30 to 80 yen per game) with several subscription models, too. The games itself are converted from the original games' ROM images (and thus authentic) and run in an ActiveX emulator (meaning you cannot play them on a Mac).

My contribution is the web site system which maintains high-score rankings, and allows players to discuss the games, buy items for in-game use (sic!). The HTML is produced by a Perl/FastCGI program, sitting on top of an Oracle database with all the business logic implemented in PL/SQL. NTT will be doing a lot of promotion for the site, so it is important that my code can handle many concurrent users, which of course has not been really tested so far. I am quite confident about its performance, though, and also still very happy with the code in general, which is unusual since like most programmers I normally want to trash and rewrite everything once it is finished).