If you've ever been in a pachinko parlor in Japan, one of the things you might notice -- assuming you can see through the dense walls of smoke -- are the abundance of anime pachinko games. Evangelion, Kaiji, Fist of the North Star and many others line the walls. Recently, these machines have been generating more and more money, creating a huge boom for pachinko machines with media tie-ins.

With each machine costing around 300,000 yen, Fist of the North Star selling 600,000 machines sounds a lot more impressive, doesn't it? That means that it made 180 billion yen. That's just over $2 billion. Obviously, this gives rights holders a big boost in their available money, leading them to ressurect franchises with movies or revamping the series.

On the licensing side, pachinko companies have been trying to grab up everything they can, leading to what has become a rather scarce market. Some creators, like Akira Toriyama, refuse to license their works out to the gambling industry. So with the number of available titles quickly dwindling, bidding wars for licensing rights can top 1 billion yen.

Does that money go to the animators? Well, they're getting paid quite a bit more (about 1.5x their average salary) in order to work on the animations required for the video portions of the game, but because of the approvals necessary and the re-drawings that they have to do, it essentially cancels out any bonuses they get paid.

But, the animators aren't complaining too much, because work is work. In an industry where fewer and fewer shows are being made each season, they're just grateful they're not completely out of work.

Interestingly, this pachinko craze is feeding back into the anime field as well: a character from one of Tecmo's pachinko machines is getting her own anime adaptation. These new fans from the anime market may translate into more pachinko fans, thus keeping the market going.

[Thanks, Ko!]