What AW-NET was
AW-NET was Sammy's online service for Atomiswave arcade games. It ran in Japan from 17 December 2003 to 30 November 2006, and it tied together four things: the arcade cabinet, a card, a phone and a website.
How it worked
You bought an AW card at the arcade and put it in the card slot when you played a supported game. The cabinet saved your record to the card and, when the cabinet was online, to Sammy's servers.
To get anything more than that, you joined AW-NET Mobile on your phone, for ¥315 a month. Membership let you log in to the AW-NET website on a PC, where you could look at detailed records and national rankings, change your character settings, and spend AW points you earned by playing. Points worked across every AW-NET game.
The cabinet was the only place you actually played. The website and phone were for checking, customising and shopping between games.
The five games
| Game | On AW-NET from | What the network added |
|---|---|---|
| Guilty Gear Isuka | 17 December 2003 | Web Garage, rankings, rank courses, EX characters and colours |
| Net Select: Salaryman Kintaro | 2004 | Mahjong, Daifugo and Reversi against players at other arcades |
| The King of Fighters NEOWAVE | 5 August 2004 | Extra fighters and colours, Fight Money and Ring Battle events |
| Victory Furlong | 24 March 2005 | Network races, a stable kept on the server, a breeding simulator |
| NeoGeo Battle Coliseum | July 2005 | Bosses, colours and victory messages to buy, nine rankings |
Only Kintaro and Victory Furlong let you play against people in other arcades. The three fighting games recorded your matches and ranked you nationally, but you still fought whoever was standing next to you.
Two more games, Force Five and Kenju, were advertised with AW-NET support and never released. SNK also said in early 2004 that the Metal Slug 6 team wanted to use AW-NET; the released game didn't.
Who it was for
AW-NET was a Japanese service. Sign-up went through Japan's three mobile carriers (NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, au's EZweb and Vodafone live!), and the English versions of the games leave the network features out. At launch Sammy expected about 1,000 arcades to have AW-NET cabinets.
In this section
- Joining and AW cards: signing up, the AWID, the access code, cost and phones
- Points and the shop: how points were earned and what they bought
- Shop catalogue: every known item, game by game
- Events: Fight Money, Ring Battles, tournaments and campaigns
- The website: how awnet.jp changed between 2003 and 2006
- Arcades: where you could play, and what worked offline
- The shutdown: what happened on 30 November 2006