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- Jul 29, 2019
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Greetings!
My wife works for a large global corporation and they have been having a multi-day workshop for a major project at the local office. There are people in town from around the world. Each night they have some sort of a social/team building event. Normally these are fancy dinners, or last night they rented out the nearby Top Golf. My wife had offered up my arcade to host a "Barcade Night" at our house, and to our surprise the project team went with it! So Tuesday evening we had about 30-35 people over for a few hours — a few gaming fans, but mostly just business people who haven't seen a legit arcade game in years or longer. There were folks there from across the US, a Spaniard, and a few from India that had flown in. Even some young professionals who have never really seen a "real" arcade. To my utter surprise, they absolutely loved the arcade! Everyone was just blown away by my small collection (I had 13 games operating for the event). Everything was (as always) running on coin, but I had some quarters spread out on the games at the start and kept the dish on the Rowe changer full all night. I also created a label for the changer to let everyone know that hitting the "Reject" button would drop coins (I wired the test switch up to this button when I got it to put the changer on "free play").
The event went for about 3 hours, and all games ran great, no problems, no coin jams, no surprises, just lots of fun — that was nice!
Anyway, a few things I observed:
People were really interested in the machines themselves. Eventually I opened a couple up to show people how they work. They were enthralled with the MVS carts. I even took a group back to the work area to see my in-flight projects (A T2, Afterburner, and an Altered Beast).
My space also has a lot of room for food/drink, seats for the theater setup, and tons of memorabilia and little details on the walls, plus a functioning payphone that connects to a mini PBX I configured to do things like play the Jenny song when you dial 867-5309, etc. People loved just wandering around looking at all those details.
My wife told me that the next day during the project meeting my arcade was still a major topic of discussion! I am really thrilled with how the night went and that I was able to share my games with so many people who haven't had an experience like that in years, or in some cases ever! One young buck was amazed when he saw my SmashTV and said "I didn't know this was an arcade game! I remember playing it on my brother's Super Nintendo!"
My wife works for a large global corporation and they have been having a multi-day workshop for a major project at the local office. There are people in town from around the world. Each night they have some sort of a social/team building event. Normally these are fancy dinners, or last night they rented out the nearby Top Golf. My wife had offered up my arcade to host a "Barcade Night" at our house, and to our surprise the project team went with it! So Tuesday evening we had about 30-35 people over for a few hours — a few gaming fans, but mostly just business people who haven't seen a legit arcade game in years or longer. There were folks there from across the US, a Spaniard, and a few from India that had flown in. Even some young professionals who have never really seen a "real" arcade. To my utter surprise, they absolutely loved the arcade! Everyone was just blown away by my small collection (I had 13 games operating for the event). Everything was (as always) running on coin, but I had some quarters spread out on the games at the start and kept the dish on the Rowe changer full all night. I also created a label for the changer to let everyone know that hitting the "Reject" button would drop coins (I wired the test switch up to this button when I got it to put the changer on "free play").
The event went for about 3 hours, and all games ran great, no problems, no coin jams, no surprises, just lots of fun — that was nice!
Anyway, a few things I observed:
- Non-arcade hobbyists don't care about LCDs that much… I have a couple cabs that still presently have LCDs in them (I have CRTs on the bench to swap in, on the to-do list). But since they are decent quality LCDs, running in the right aspect ratio, no one seemed to notice or care that a couple of the games had them.
- The most well-known classics got the most play of course: Class of '81 (Ms. Pac/Galaga), Centipede, and to a lesser degree Pole Position
- The driving and shooting games also did very well as usual. Everyone loves the sit-down driver (Cruis'n USA cab, I have USA, World, and ORC boards for it, but that night it was running USA)
- I have various multi game setups on many of my cabs, and while I never like to leave a menu accessible for guests to have to navigate, throughout the night I changed a few active games to freshen things up.
- My gun cab has several boards on a RiddledTV switcher. It started on Area 51 (I figured it would be the most well-known), but part way through the night I switched it to Police Trainer, and a whole new group start playing it and competing with one another. Later, I was talking to a guy my age who asked if I remembered Lethal Enforcers, and that's the other game on the cab so I switched over to it and we played that together for about 15 minutes. Then someone asked me what happened to "the zombie game" so I switched it back to A51.
- I changed the MultiWilliams a couple times throughout the night to a different game, and each time it got renewed interest
- On the 4-player TMNT I have an ArPiCade setup, so after people started ignoring TMNT I switched it to The Simpsons and later X-men, and again each time a new group found it and started playing
- I had made sure to put some crowd-pleasers in the MVS beforehand (Metal Slug and Windjammers) but during the evening someone started telling me about his memories playing The Art of Fighting on a NeoGeo at his local 7-11 when he was a kid. So I quick grabbed the NeoSD from the shelf and loaded up AoF for him and he was in his glory trying to pull off all the moves he memorized decades ago!
- I have a Mistercade on my Big Blue (switchable from the CPS SF2 board), and I recently got Super Attract Mode all configured on that. Wow, that worked out great! I have SAM set to run SF2CE for about 15 minutes on boot, but then it will rotate through a list of CPS0/1/2/3 games, spending about 5 minutes on each before loading up the next. No game selection is required, you can drop a quarter at any point and start playing the currently displayed game. After that game sits idle for 10 minutes with no inputs, it will start rotating again. That kept that cab fresh all night, and also means we didn't have to listen to the goddamn elephants in the SF2 attract mode all night!
People were really interested in the machines themselves. Eventually I opened a couple up to show people how they work. They were enthralled with the MVS carts. I even took a group back to the work area to see my in-flight projects (A T2, Afterburner, and an Altered Beast).
My space also has a lot of room for food/drink, seats for the theater setup, and tons of memorabilia and little details on the walls, plus a functioning payphone that connects to a mini PBX I configured to do things like play the Jenny song when you dial 867-5309, etc. People loved just wandering around looking at all those details.
My wife told me that the next day during the project meeting my arcade was still a major topic of discussion! I am really thrilled with how the night went and that I was able to share my games with so many people who haven't had an experience like that in years, or in some cases ever! One young buck was amazed when he saw my SmashTV and said "I didn't know this was an arcade game! I remember playing it on my brother's Super Nintendo!"
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