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History
On August 8th, 2000, TOMY announced their newest endeavour, the kiss-site. The device was a Karaoke device for home user aimed at elementary and junior high school students and housewives who cannot go to a karaoke booth to easily enjoy dance karaoke.
In the 90s, the Karaoke was an extremely popular activities in Japan and a lot of company were looking the home market. But home karaoke system were expensive and complex. You needed a screen for the lyrics, good quality audio system, specially encoded song, etc. Music distribution was probably the biggest problem. In a age where the Internet was not as fast and popular than today, you had to rely on specialized compilation that were expensive, or uses a a machine that could connect to an online catalogue. In 1994, Sega released the Sega Music Network to be used with their commercial Karaoke system, the Prologue-21. In 1995, Taito offered a similar service for their home Karaoke system called the X-55. All of these systems required an online connection and subscription, leaving the door wide open for TOMY to provide a true “professional” Karaoke system for cheap. According to a survey conducted by TOMY, many elementary and junior high school students have never been to a karaoke booth because it is prohibited by school rules, yet half of them said they would like a home karaoke machine
To make sure the kiss-site would fell professional, TOMY reached out to Toei Video for the production of the Dance Karaoke series software. They used the Furikara technology, a karaoke with choreography function that the company provided for the commercial online karaoke service “Super B-Max.” In Furikara, the dancers’ movements are digitized through motion capture, and a Computer-generated character made of 3D polygons reproduces the choreography in time with the music. As it is rendered in real time, the user can also change the angle of the character. Since the kiss-site didn’t have any 3D rendering capabilities, the choreography data would converted into MPEG-compliant video data before being recorded onto a CD-ROM. This would eliminates the ability to switch angles, but provided live-action footage of the same quality as professional-grade equipment.
The kiss-site was basically a video CD player. And since it’s target audience was primarily students, TOMY had planned to develop edutainment and hobby content for the platform. TOMY was so convinced that the kiss-site would be a success, that they announced before the launched of the kiss-site a new model would be launched by the end of 2001 that would support online distribution.
TOMY had ambitious plans for the kiss-site, hoping to sell 200,000 units of the machine and 600,000 software in the first year, starting with this year’s Christmas sales season. To achieve this TOMY launched various even including a national audition contest on the TV Tokyo’s Oha Suta show. The constest was called Kiss Girl Audition and had a 1,000 participants. The finalist made a TV ads promoting the upcoming console. In the end, Hasegawa Ai won the first place of contest, followed by Aragaki Risa in second place and RENA in third place.
Release
The console launched with 20 titles in the “Dance Karaoke Series” with two to three new titles planned to be added each month. In addition to SPEED, Morning Musume, and Namie Amuro, the lineup will also include artists aimed at housewives, such as Pink Lady. Each software contained two songs and costed ¥680. While 2 songs might be seems to be a rip-off, it was in fact a marketing ploy to lower the price, to ensure that even elementary and junior high school students can easily purchase the software.
But the a few days before the launch of the kiss-Site, Takara launched their own Karaoke system for kids called the e-Kara. The e-Kara became an instant success leaving TOMY and the kiss-Site in the dust.
But TOMY kept pushing the kiss-site. At the 2001 Tokyo Game Show, TOMY schedule a talk show and live performance by voice actress Nana Mizuki.
Demise
While the kiss-site wasn’t a failure, it never rose to it’s true potential as the e-Kara took most of the market.