W's version of TG was here in our town from Nov 1981 to spring 1984. He never lived in our town, was rarely in town, he doesn't even really like our town since it has hog slaughter facility and damned souls and bad energy, all that hokum stuff.

GAK!

When I was a teen I bought in to all that!

You mean the video game article that read.. ugh, must have been 84ish.. I don't remember.. the arcade was failing, he was sleeping on the floor of the arcade, the only thing keeping it afloat was the money from the pop machine.... I remember it-ish, but I have never been able to find the article again...

he didn't even live there? oy, my teen age life has been a sham....
 
...can we get back to Billy Mitchell being a cheating bastard and Walter Day being the puppetmaster please...

:D

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*props to the meme-master ED for the original...
 

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GAK!
don't remember.. the arcade was failing, he was sleeping on the floor of the arcade,

maybe that is a story in his book? the only mattress reference i know of is a pic of me sound asleep in the backroom probably after one of the all night marathons for someone or other, but the caption on it mislabels it as Tim. Tim finds that humorous.
W meditates throughout the day which is why there was a mattress in a backroom.

The story as us kids observed it since we were fully immersed in our towns arcade culture day in and day out was more like this.
A few 1982 workers which were a family of females were the key employees in 82.
They got disgruntled and left. I won't mention their names as they don't have any care to revisit the era.
The original game vendor also disassociated with TG and opened a massive arcade down the street (It is a store front called Appanoose Rapids Pub, for the google mappers in the audience). That guy employed the 3 ladies. And that arcade was boomin'. You know how the newest club gets the crowd, and the crowd also included girls so that'll attract teenage nerds in droves...

TG was never the most popular arcade in town. We had a place called the Ice Cream Factory which was well stocked with the latest cool games and it was a light hearted ice cream shop so had normal families and....cute girls.... That was the first place I saw games like Burger Time or Food Fight. Someone said it was the first place with Pole Position, but I don't remember that specifically.

A new vendor was found for TG and the guy was effectively a street thug. He had two henchmen (brother and sister) who were notorious in our town. Connected to the drug culture. You could find lists of police reports nowadays if I told you the names and I don't think one of them is alive now or they are in prison. Shady stuff happened. I had an altercation with the thug guy and quit working at the arcade. A couple few years back W asked me if I knew what happened to the $500 that was stolen from the token machine. I guffawed that I had quit when those fools were the attendants. geesh.

Shortly after W closed shop I recall B reopened TG in the same spot. One day I stopped in to say hi to Jerry and saw this crazy thing on the counter playing a cool scrolling game. The console was NES and the game was SMB. Wouldn't that have made a good iconic picture if we had it nowadays...

Our high school kept a lounge with arcade games and a pool table into the late 80s.
Jerry says he kept TG open into the early 90s.
And the main spot for arcade hanging out was a place called Gramps. It doubled as a low end rec room for teens.
I was well onto other things by 84-88 so I have minimal to no stories from that era.
 
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...can we get back to Billy Mitchell being a cheating bastard and Walter Day being the puppetmaster please...


shhh, everyone is attentively watching Dwayne's perfect fraudman docu online right now.
Could you please pass the popcorn, and are there any milkduds left in that container?

More stories for the arcade tales compendium.

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People you don't hear about in the storyline.
middle blonde guy is the one who's brains pulled off the score system for the That's Incredible contest. Used his programming prowess for a successful engineering consulting business, last I knew is into cross-fit and looks like an american ninja warrior.

To his right heading toward W is a guy named Shawn. He was the most passionate of us arcade gamers and the one who was with us when Tim talks about seeing Tom play Nibbler for the first time. Awesome Dig Dug and Centipede player. We were moped buds in summer 82 and daily hit both North and South side McDonald's scamming them for Atari scratch off game tickets. That was the summer of Chicken McNuggets being the rage, too. Also the person who taught me the value of not eating lunch to save the $1 for games after school! We used to visit an arcade in a metal building behind a gas station, which was the first place with DK Jr. That site got torn down to build a Hardee's and is currently a Family Video.

Beside W is Billy McAllister. He was a Lost Tomb marathoner using some looping pattern. Years later I tried to learn that game in mame and it just frustrated the livin' shit out of me, then got irritating so I quit trying. He started working at the arcade somewhere around 83 and had a big boat cruiser vehicle. One day W mentioned the spring industry expo in Chicago was that weekend. so we waited for Billy to close up the arcade around 10 and we(Tim, Shawn, me, Billy) piled in his car and drove all night to chicago. It was very foggy so the interstate lights looked like Close Encounters UFOs. We got to the hotel way early in the morning and sat in the lobby with very well dressed ladies who were friendly....they could tell us wet behind the ear hicks had no idea what they did for a living. Sat in the lobby until the day started and anyone we knew happened by. Somehow we got a room that night but I have no memory of how we pulled off getting that comp. First time I ever had thick chitown pizza from Giordano's. At the event we met Don Bluth at the Space Ace display, shook hands with Larry Holmes at the Punchout booth. and saw a fancy car with cameras in the tail lights and a video screen inside...thought that was weird and unrealistic...ha.
A few years back W mentioned that he got called into the main office during that event and was told to get his kids under control because we were running wild on the convention floor. See it only took two exposures for the patience to wear thin.....that moderation thing, we probably only belonged at the Nawlins event....

another character that never made any of the stories was a guy named Karl. He was a tough kid from The Hole arcade, one day he came down and asked me to get him on at TG. So I worked it out. A Star Wars master showed up at the arcade and we copied his patterns. Karl got it quickest so I watched him more and repeated the patterns until I could play a super long game until boredom. Karl ran into the troubles a local kid does without a vision for getting out. I've seen him around but his lifestyle has ravaged him it appears. He was registered as from an Alaskan village so he would get a govt oil check from the reservation every so often, that's when you'd see him with lots of friends and new cars while it lasted. He saved my ass somewhere in the later 80s, we were all sitting around in a parking lot way too late one weekend listening to Judas Priest Turbo on cassette. A vagabond kid named Injun Joe started getting salty and I got into an argument with him. He was about to crush me and ol Karl calmly gets out of his car, throttles the guy like a WWF move and pinned him to the ground flat on his back. whew. karma helps every now and then.
 
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Billy Mitchell the Musical!

https://www.gofundme.com/arcadefire-billy-mitchell-fringe

ARCADEFIRE! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is the latest musical IndyFringe offering from Indy's Catalyst Repertory Theatre. In fact, this show is the 10th IndyFringe for Catalyst Rep's founders! IndyFringe is a 10 day theatre festival in the Mass Ave cultural district of Indiana. Arcadefire! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] will be one of 65 shows playing at this huge festival. To celebrate our decade of ambitious, original IndyFringe scripts, the Catalyst team wants to bring royalty to the IndyFringe Theatre Festival. Video game royalty.

So, what's ARCADEFIRE! , you ask? (And no, not that band your sister listened to during her phase...). Arcadefire! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is Catalyst's 2nd original musical with a book by Casey Ross and music by Christopher McNeely. ARCADEFIRE! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is an irreverent, wacky, and inspirational journey back to Fun Spot Arcade and the good old days of gaming: Billy Mitchell, Video Game Player of the Century, had it all, until a 2007 documentary brought the gamer back into the public eye. Now, Billy faces the worst accusation a classic arcade champion can face: they're saying he cheated...

For a lot of us gaming laymen, we learned the name 'Billy Mitchell' from the cult-hit documentary, King of Kong: Fist Full of Quarters...if at all. To classic gaming fans, he is a God. In his home town, he's the 'Pacman' guy, the first man to ever achieve a perfect score in Pacman, seeing the end of the game, himself, and to the internet, he's a cheating fraud, a con man, a liar...and some other words that were too colorful for a GoFundMe campaign and that you'll have to come to the show to hear. But what's Billy Mitchel to himself? Maybe he's just a hot sauce selling family man, who plays Donkey Kong from time to time. Hopefully, by the end of the show, we'll help you make up your own mind...

29297832_15242615360_r.jpeg
 
https://www.gofundme.com/arcadefire-billy-mitchell-fringe

ARCADEFIRE! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is the latest musical IndyFringe offering from Indy's Catalyst Repertory Theatre. In fact, this show is the 10th IndyFringe for Catalyst Rep's founders! IndyFringe is a 10 day theatre festival in the Mass Ave cultural district of Indiana. Arcadefire! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] will be one of 65 shows playing at this huge festival. To celebrate our decade of ambitious, original IndyFringe scripts, the Catalyst team wants to bring royalty to the IndyFringe Theatre Festival. Video game royalty.

So, what's ARCADEFIRE! , you ask? (And no, not that band your sister listened to during her phase...). Arcadefire! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is Catalyst's 2nd original musical with a book by Casey Ross and music by Christopher McNeely. ARCADEFIRE! [The Redemption of Billy Mitchell] is an irreverent, wacky, and inspirational journey back to Fun Spot Arcade and the good old days of gaming: Billy Mitchell, Video Game Player of the Century, had it all, until a 2007 documentary brought the gamer back into the public eye. Now, Billy faces the worst accusation a classic arcade champion can face: they're saying he cheated...

For a lot of us gaming laymen, we learned the name 'Billy Mitchell' from the cult-hit documentary, King of Kong: Fist Full of Quarters...if at all. To classic gaming fans, he is a God. In his home town, he's the 'Pacman' guy, the first man to ever achieve a perfect score in Pacman, seeing the end of the game, himself, and to the internet, he's a cheating fraud, a con man, a liar...and some other words that were too colorful for a GoFundMe campaign and that you'll have to come to the show to hear. But what's Billy Mitchel to himself? Maybe he's just a hot sauce selling family man, who plays Donkey Kong from time to time. Hopefully, by the end of the show, we'll help you make up your own mind...

29297832_15242615360_r.jpeg

cool I cant wait to not see that
 
Billy Mitchell as you guys know it is gone.

He officially opened a small mexican cantina and legally changed his name to Juan Sanchez.
Locals call him by his nickname, Dirty.

Rumor is that Walter is the guy who cuts the onions and peppers for the world's greatest Fajita.

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Billy Mitchell as you guys know it is gone.

He officially opened a small mexican cantina and legally changed his name to Juan Sanchez.
Locals call him by his nickname, Dirty.

Rumor is that Walter is the guy who cuts the onions and peppers for the world's greatest Fajita.

Everything here went over my head. :D:rolleyes: It made me hungry, tho'.
 
Just an FYI the whole necro bumping multiple threads any given topic is not going to fly here. The next person or people to do this will be perm banned from this forum.

Go fill your need for attention somewhere else on the Internet.
 
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