New Jatre

The New Jatre cabinet taught players several important things: rock-paper-scissors is not a game of pure chance when there’s a forfeit on the line, losing has never been more motivating, and Philips’ CD-i hardware ended up somewhere nobody in Eindhoven could have predicted.

More importantly, New Jatre is one of the arcade world’s stranger technological detours. While Philips struggled to convince living rooms that the CD-i was the future of home entertainment, New Jatre took the hardware off the TV stand and put it into Japanese arcade cabinets. The result was a disc-based system board, running custom CD-i-based arcade CDs, built for one purpose and one series alone.

Between 1996 and 1998, New Jatre developed and published four entries in The Yakyuuken: Super series, turning the traditional Japanese forfeit game of Yakyuuken into a coin-op attraction. Part I set things off in 1996 and even appeared in two distinct disc versions, Red and Blue, followed by Parts II, III and IV before the series ended in 1998. Every title remained exclusive to the platform and never left Japan, making New Jatre a truly niche corner of arcade history — a board with a single-minded library, a single region, and a CD-i heritage that few players ever realised they were standing in front of. The following chart visualises the growth of the New Jatre library and how it was distributed across regions throughout the system’s lifespan.