Akihabara Arcades: 4 Game Centres, and the Red Building Is Gone

The big red building is gone. GiGO Akihabara 1 — the tall red arcade that had stood at 1-10-9 Sotokanda since October 1992, first as a Sega arcade and then as GiGO, and that appears in almost every English guide and travel video about Akihabara — closed on 31 August 2025 when its lease ran out. A completely different arcade opened on the site in November. Most English guides have not noticed.

This page was checked against the operators’ own store pages and press releases in September 2026. Four game centres are worth your coins, and the wrong four are the ones you will be sent to.

The short version

• Newest and biggest: SILK HAT Akihabara — nine floors on the old red building’s site, open until midnight.
• For video games: Hey — over 300 cabinets, and the reason serious players come to Akihabara at all.
• For a published floor guide: Taito Station Akihabara — the only one that tells you what is on which floor before you arrive.
• For genuinely old machines: GiGO Akihabara 3, seventh floor — a dedicated retro arcade floor, not a shop.
• Do not look for: GiGO Akihabara 1 or 4, anything called SEGA, or an Adores. None of them exist here any more.

1. SILK HAT Akihabara — nine floors, and it is only ten months old

1-10-9 Sotokanda, Chiyoda-ku. 10:00–24:00, open every day.

Opened 22 November 2025 on the site the red GiGO building vacated, run by a different company (Matahari Entertainment, out of Kawasaki) rather than by GENDA or Taito. Nine levels, B1 to 8F, roughly 1,693 m². It is the largest single arcade in Akihabara and the one nothing written before 2026 can describe.

The floor plan announced at opening:

• B1 — video games, built around 58 cabinets of Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme Vs. 2 Infinite Boost, billed as one of the largest banks of them in Japan.
• 1F–2F — crane games (plush and merchandise prizes).
• 3F–4F — crane games (figures).
• 5F — card games: Gundam Arsenal Base, Pokémon Mezastar and similar.
• 6F — rhythm games: Taiko no Tatsujin, CHUNITHM, maimai.
• 7F — rhythm games: beatmania IIDX, SOUND VOLTEX.
• 8F — BEMANI Studio, darts, character lottery and merchandise.

One honest caveat: that breakdown comes from the opening announcement. Arcades move machines constantly, so treat the floor numbers as a starting point rather than a promise — but the shape of the place (crane games in the middle, rhythm games at the top, Gundam in the basement) is unlikely to have inverted in ten months.

2. Hey — the one that is actually about playing

1-10-5 Sotokanda, Hirose Head Office Building, floors 1–4. 10:00–23:30, open every day. Two minutes from the Electric Town exit, under a very large orange sign.

If you have heard one arcade name in Akihabara, it is this one. Hey has over 300 video game cabinets across four floors, including the retro and shoot-’em-up cabinets that made its reputation, and it turns 25 years old in 2026. It is the arcade people fly in for.

Two things guides get wrong about it. First, it is presented as a Taito store now — it has a Taito store page and a Taito store number — so descriptions of it as an independent Hirose Entertainment arcade are out of date. Second, several English pages have reported it as closed. It is not; it is open daily, and in fact it has just expanded (see below).

We are not going to tell you which floor the shmups are on. Taito’s own pages say only “floors 1 to 4” and “over 300 video games”, and every floor-by-floor list we could find online traces back to a blog post, not to the operator. Walk up.

Hey2 — opened 8 August 2026, one month old

1-11-12 Sotokanda, Hirose Head Office Building No.2, 1F. 10:00–23:30, open every day. A second Hey in the next block, and it is crane games only — anime and character prizes, no video cabinets. Do not walk to Hey2 expecting Hey. No English guide has this one yet.

3. Taito Station Akihabara — the only published floor guide in the district

4-2-2 Sotokanda, Kisan Building. 10:00–23:30, open every day. Three minutes from the Electric Town exit, under a large Space Invaders sign.

This is the one to pick if you have limited time, because Taito actually publishes what is on each floor and you can plan before you walk in:

• B1F — purikura (print-sticker booths).
• 1F, 2F, 3F — crane games.
• 4F — arcade, card, video and racing games, plus Taiko no Tatsujin.
• 5F — rhythm games.

That single fact — a floor guide you can read in advance — is worth more than a machine count. Everywhere else in Akihabara you find out by climbing.

4. GiGO Akihabara 3 — go for the seventh floor

1-11-11 Sotokanda. 10:00–23:30 every day including public holidays.

The reason to come here is RETRO:G on the 7th floor: a dedicated floor of genuinely old arcade machines, launched with around 40 titles spanning 1971 to 2008 — Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, House of the Dead and their contemporaries. These are machines you play, not a museum and not a shop, which is what separates this from Akihabara’s retro game stores; if you want to buy old software instead, that is the retro game shop guide.

🔴 It is on the 7th floor, not the 6th. RETRO:G opened on 6F in July 2021 and the launch announcement said so, which is why almost every listing still says 6F. GiGO’s current store page puts it on 7F. There is a collaboration café on the same floor, with last orders at 19:40.

Also in Akihabara, if the four above are full

• namco Akihabara — 1-15-9 Sotokanda, on the site where GiGO Akihabara 4 used to be. Opened 1 March 2023 as Bandai Namco’s first arcade in Akihabara; B1F has a 46-cabinet Gundam Extreme Vs. 2 bank, 4F holds roughly 800 gachapon machines. We could not reach Bandai Namco’s store page to confirm current hours, so check before you make a trip for it.
• Taito Station Akihabara East-West Free Passage — literally inside the station passage, zero minutes’ walk, 10:00–23:30 daily. Crane games; the floor was expanded at a renewal in December 2024. The best five minutes you can spend while waiting for someone.
• GiGO Akihabara 2 — 1-15-1 Sotokanda, Handa Building, 10:00–23:30 daily. Crane games only: it is the single game category GiGO lists for it. Guides describing it as a multi-floor arcade with rhythm and fighting floors are describing a different building.
• GiGO Akihabara 5 — 1-10-1 Sotokanda, 10:00–23:30 daily. Crane, video, card and sports games, plus a currency exchange and free Wi-Fi on site, and a GiGO taiyaki stand on 1F.
• Game Panic Akihabara — 1-13-1 Sotokanda, Akihabara ex, 10:00–24:00. Prize, music and video games. It stands on the site of the old Adores.
• Tokyo Leisure Land Akihabara (1-9-5 Sotokanda) and its second branch (4-3-3 Sotokanda, Minami Building, 6F–7F), both 10:00–23:55 daily.

What the listing sites get wrong

This is the most out-of-date corner of Akihabara in English, because two landmark buildings changed hands and the whole chain changed its name.

• 🔴 “The red SEGA building.” GiGO Akihabara 1 closed on 31 August 2025 after 33 years. SILK HAT Akihabara is there now, under different ownership. Guides, videos and maps still send people to a building that is no longer that building.
• 🔴 Nothing in Akihabara is called SEGA. The rebrand was announced on 28 January 2022 and rolled out from that March. If a guide says “Sega Akihabara”, it was written before 2022 or copied from something that was.
• 🔴 GiGO Akihabara 1 and 4 do not exist. Number 4 closed on 25 September 2022; number 1 in August 2025. Only 2, 3 and 5 remain, so the numbering has gaps — a list that runs 1 through 5 is inventing two of them.
• RETRO:G is on 7F, not 6F (see above).
• There is no Adores in Akihabara. Adores’ own store directory lists eight Tokyo branches and none of them is here. Game Panic occupies the old site.
• Even Taito disagrees with itself about Hey. Its Japanese store page says 23:30 and its English page says 23:45. We would trust the Japanese one and not turn up at 23:40.

Practical notes

• Money. Crane games in Akihabara typically run on 100-yen coins; most of these arcades take cashless payment now, but the change machines are still the fastest route. GiGO Akihabara 5 has currency exchange on site.
• Late night is the point. Everything above runs to at least 23:30, and SILK HAT and Game Panic to midnight. Akihabara’s shops shut at 20:00; the arcades are what the district is for after that.
• Prizes are not tax-free. Arcade prizes are won, not bought, so the November 2026 tax-free changes do not apply to them — but they do apply to everything you buy in the shops around them.
• Check on the day. Floor layouts, machine line-ups and even opening hours here are published in Japanese and change without notice — three of the four arcades above have changed materially in the last eighteen months. A prepaid Japanese eSIM is the least painful way to check a store page while standing in front of it.

Nearby

Akihabara rewards being read about first. Our retro game shop guide covers buying old software rather than playing it, the card shop guide covers where to actually play trading cards, and the gachapon guide covers the capsule-toy floors — including the one arcade floor with roughly 800 machines on it. For building rather than playing, there is the Gunpla guide, and for the district as a whole, the Akihabara overview. For the same evening on the other side of the Yamanote line, the Ikebukuro arcade guide covers four more — including a basement of tournament-specification rhythm cabinets, and the two Adores branches that closed and are still being listed. We have now checked four districts: Shinjuku has the newest and largest arcade in Tokyo and stays open latest, and Shibuya has the fewest — and not the one every guide sends you to. Two minutes from all of this is the district Akihabara was before the arcades: the junk and electronic parts buildings, four levels of component shops opened in 1950 — where the vacuum tube specialist is open five days a week for five hours a day.