Category Archives: nostalgia

Chat with Tim Skelly

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Jeff Rothe, founder of the arcade collector’s site CoinOpSpace, is kicking off the first of a series of developer open chat sessions this Wednesday (Feb 4th) from 6:30-7:30pm PST in the CoinOpSpace chat room. This first session will be with Tim Skelly, formerly of Cinematronics and Vectorbeam, and creator of such arcade releases as Warrior (arguably the first fighting game), Rip-Off, Armor Attack, Reactor, and the vector rarity War of the Worlds.

Tim Skelly at CoinOpSpace

If you aren’t familiar with Tim’s work, Jeff has posted a slew of additional information covering his history in the industry, so check that out, make yourself a CoinOpSpace account, and drop by the chat on Wednesday night!

link love 01-27-09

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The Offworld 20: 2008’s Best Indie and Overlooked video games. Good stuff, Offworld, your placement in my feedlist continues to improve.

Mail Order Monsters

Fond Memories: Mail Order Monsters. Levi Buchanan reminisces about the game I loved most when I was young, and one I’d love to play a part in revisiting someday. Hey holders of the keys to the Electronic Arts IP vaults, call me, let’s talk.

The Pinball Blog (now with RSS, hurray!) interviews the Pinball Hall of Fame’s Tim Arnold.

Play Meter’s 2008 State of the Arcade Industry report. What accounts for the nearly doubling of video game per-cabinet revenues, especially when compared to the static or lackluster performance in the other coin-op areas? [via Arcade Heroes]

link love 12-28-08

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New retro-indie-coinop blog Just One More Game is off to a great start. Check out his first month of great content, and add ’em to your rss reader.

Capping off the holiday season: the fascinating and sordid history of bubble lights.

Lastly, ya can’t end a year without lists. Eurogamer’s Top 50 of the 2008 and GameTrailers Game of the Year Awards are a couple worth checking out.

Polishing balls.

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My latest project cabinet is a Missile Command upright, and my plan is to get it looking and working as close to new as I can. Step one: strip it down and get that big black ball rolling smoothly again.

The upright version of Missile Command was one of the few games (along with the first Atari sports releases) to use a massive four and a half inch Atari Trak-Ball. As these things take up a fair chunk of control panel real estate, most cabinets were designed with a smaller 2.25 or 3 inch trackball. Personally, I like the big ones.

PRO TIP: A 4.5 inch trackball is exactly the same size as a candlepin bowling ball, with similar construction. Feel free to swap out your beat up Trak-Ball for a candlepin ball with a skull embedded in it and save yourself a couple hours of polishing time.

PRO TIP: I didn’t even know candlepin bowling existed until last week.

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link love 11-15-08

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Once Upon Atari part four and part five are online.

Chasing Ghosts, that other movie about breaking arcade high score records, is finally going to see a release, with several airings on Showtime in December.

Also from Peter Hirschberg, an iPhone version of Adventure!

Check out this beautiful home remodel and arcade.

Couple food blog additions to the local RSS folder: Kristi’s Vegas Musings, and Eating Las Vegas by John Curtas.