A Taiwanese man died while playing video games at an Internet cafe as dozens of other patrons carried on for hours afterwards apparently unaware that they were sitting near a corpse, according to police.

The 23-year-old checked in at the cafe in New Taipei city on Tuesday night and was found dead but still sitting rigidly on a chair with his hands stretched out the following night by a waitress, police said.

The waitress last saw him talking on the phone around noon on Wednesday and his body had apparently been sitting there for up to nine hours without any of the 30 other people in the cafe noticing.

An initial police investigation found he might have died of a cardiac arrest triggered by low temperatures.