Is the Retro scene having a revival in the US as it is in the UK ?

 
Yes it is getting big with the collectors and home owners.  But the retro arcades are
very hard to find. It is an interesting phenomenon which is a godsend to those in the
business of selling classic arcade  video games and new systems with the classic arcade
game titles such as the 39 in 1 and the 4 in 1  and so on.  




As video game operators are going out of business, some of the smarter ones have turned
to the sales side of business with the retro scene and will build any classic game that 
you want, and now you can get graphics for that retro game that are very near to the
original silk screen of the hey day of the golden 1980's.  

The coin-op video game auctions always have the first two rows of video games going for
anywhere from $1000.00 to $2000.00 a piece for the old classic Pacman, Ms. Pacman, 
Galaga, Centipede and Donkey Kong. These games are rough games that have not been shopped
out at all, with missing graphics and even have holes in the cabinets of these games.

Local distributors are making 125 complete cabinets of the classic 39 in 1 coin-op
games in the cocktail version cabinets.  This is big business, and the distributors
can't make enough of these games fast enough to fill the orders. The home owner will
do just about anything to have a classic game get into their game room, and price is
not an object in many cases. Those of us who played in the Golden Era of the 1980's
Arcade Generation are now in the big bucks, in are 40's and are at the top pay bracket
of our career and we want to relive that golden era of the arcades in our own backyard,
and that is why there has been such a revival of old classic games.




Classic games will not make any money on street locations unless they are in bars or
other locations that 35-40 year old crowd frequents, which is a very tight and
limited market, but in general, the video game operator has to concentrate on 
new software for making money in the video game route operator business.

Neo Geo System


Metal Slug and the Neo Geo series is the game operators choice in many circumstances
because the game is so versatile.  When the location gets tired of one game, another
cartridge can go in and now the game is something new without the operator having
to go out and buy a brand new game.


This is a link to my Neo Geo Metal Slug 5 link:
Link
 
There are just a few notable Retro Arcades in the States.  The biggest ones
with contests are the Funspot, at Weirs Beach, New Hampshire
and there is Ground Kontrol Arcade in Oregon.  Each have over 100 classic
games to choose from.  The other game rooms in other parts of the country are much
smaller and their games are not kept up because the profit incentive isn't there
for old games. Funspot Classic Game Contest Link
 
Some of these game rooms are actually Sales Floors because every game
has a price tag and that is the real way these arcades stay in business.  If
the home owner stopped buying games for their homes, this business would
be done and the shops would be closed.
 
Joystick With Games Inside

Atari 10 in 1 Joystick - With Games Inside the Joystick

The other side of the coin is the home entertainment systems which are getting
huge in their popularity.  Classic games that have never been released before
are now becoming available for the home market at very reasonable prices.
The joystick has inside of it the chips for several popular games built into the
joystick so all you have to do is plug the game in and your now able to play
many games without even needing a game console or game cartridges.
 
The Hottest Coolest System Out! Power Play (2005) comes with 100+ games 
built in and creates 76,000 ways to play - all the old favorites like Contra, Dig Dug, 
Excite Bike, Super Mario Bros, Kung Fu, Space Invaders, Tetris, Donkey Kong & 
many, many, more! 

Power Play 2005


Link to Power Play Joystick with 100 games built into the joystick:
Link
 
The other part of the gaming business that has changed is the internet gaming community
that had never existed before.  This group is very large and has massive buying power.
 
There are now contests over the internet in which you can win prizes up to $125,000 in cash
if you are the best at that game.  

Twin Galaxies

www.twingalaxies.com

Twin Galaxies $125,000 story Link:
Link
 
On October 19, Meng Yang, 21, of mainland China, won $125,000 while distinguishing himself 
as the only contestant to defeat Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel during the ACON Fatal1ty
Shootout at the Great Wall of China. This historic invitational exhibition, presented by
ABIT Computer Corporation, was part of the Fatal1ty Road Show titled “Giving Back to Gaming.”

In the 1980's the most you could win would be a new video game and some gaming tokens,
if you were lucky.

Cash money prizes weren't available in the 1980's like they are today.
 
There is the Mame system which will emulate the original game perfectly so that players
can play video games with the correct feel and coding of the original coin-op games in the
arcades. 
 
When Gaming isn’t just for Fun

Can you survive three days of disciplined fragging and tactical warfare, from early
morning to late nights? That was precisely what gamers competing in the recent
Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) Asia Championship, had to go through. Being
the first professional gaming competition held in Singapore, the competing gamers
went through the grueling event in total seriousness. Was it the $20,000 top prize 
that made all the exuberant, fun-loving gamers behave like good students during
an exam?

Prior to the event, competitors in Quake III Arena and teams participating in 
Counterstrike went through pretty much what looked like a major exam. They sit 
outside the hall while waiting for their turn, clutching good luck charms and 
personal gaming gear (mouse, mousepads, headphones), and discussing their strategies
for better gameplay. Once they entered the room, there’s only time to set up the
hardware and a brief warm-up before the competition commences.

During the tournament, gamers used headphones to minimize distraction to others. 
Server administrators put in charge of each "arena" acted like invigilators for
an exam, ensuring that there was no usage of cheat codes, no looking at other 
people’s screens, no talking and strictly no profanities. Apart from some bickering
about restarting the game and an occasional exclamation, most of the time there 
was silence except for the furious tapping of keys and clicking of mice. I can 
scarcely believe these are the same people I see playing with wild abandon at 
LAN shops.

For most of us, the highlight of CPL Asia is the opportunity to witness top 
players from overseas like Blue (Henrik Bjock from Sweden), Fatality (Jonathan
Wendel from US), and S21.0 (Lee Won Yang from Korea) fragging it out with each
other and with our own local fraggers Carnage, Shearer and Cantona.

So do the gamers feel that gaming professionally takes away the fun? Darren 
Lee, a.k.a Carnage, who is the current Quake III Arena champ in Singapore, feels 
that fun is when he is playing with friends. "There’s this issue about maintaining
your reputation as a top player. Most of the time, playing well on public servers 
is like a job I that have to do. I think some people take gaming a little too 
seriously. In fact, it’s more fun when I’m losing because there’s more I can learn."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update on Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel  1/19/06

Top Cyber Athlete Is No Couch Potato Link

By Andy Court , January. 19, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel (CBS)

  
(CBS) The world's best video game player practices for hours to hone the skills that 
have earned him more than $450,000 in prize money. But being the best is also a matter
of being the fittest, says Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, who credits exercise with being 
an integral part of his training. (You don't see the out of shape computer types that
you typically would expect to see, raking in the money. It's the athletic types that
are doing well in these video game competitions.)

60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft profiles Wendel this Sunday, Jan. 22, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. 

Fitness makes for a sharper brain and hand says the 24-year-old "gamer." "I work out a lot,"
says Wendel. "Being physically fit and making sure your neuro-transmitters are working
properly…making sure you’re on…beat and you’re ready to go,” he tells Kroft. "It’s like
your neuro-fitness…it’s basically ways you can think faster," says Wendel. 

"[Playing videogames] is that fast and the game is all about hand-eye coordination,
reflexes, timing, strategy…being able to think fast….You’ve got to be doing everything,"
he tells Kroft. Wendel still plays tennis, the sport he starred in for his high school,
and runs regularly, in addition to playing video games sometimes more than eight to 
10 hours a day. 

Wendel has been a pro for six years in the fledgling sport that is trying to capitalize 
on the enormous size of the video game industry. Sales of video game consoles and software 
are expected to reach $35 billion in 2006 – more than twice the revenue of the NFL, the
NBA and Major League Baseball combined. He’s won more than 40 tournaments and has competed
all over the globe for prize money. 

Even more riches await Wendel, who expects to make millions on licensing deals that are
already in progress. Products such as computer mouse pads, headsets and keyboards
customized for video game playing now bear his "Fatal1ty" screen name. 

Some believe the time is near for video game competitions to become large spectator
events. If and when that happens, Wendel will have played an enormous role. "For the
new millennium comes a new sportsman…[Wendel] is the first cyber athlete," says Wendel’s
marketing agent, Mark Walden. "Look back 50 years from now….There had to be someone at
the turn of the century that played baseball. There had to be a Babe Ruth, a Ty Cobb.
There has to be a Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel." 

Wendel feels that he is living a dream that nobody else is, that no one probably
thought was possible. He feels very fortunate he has gotten a chance to 
love what he is doing and actually get paid for it. "I want to keep doing it; I want to
contribute to the gamers and create some cool, high quality products for gaming", states
Wendel. Also, I want to go back and do things to help sponsor and help grow the sport.
So we're trying to do a lot of cool things and make this an accepted sport.

Wendel signed a massive licensing agreement with Auravision in 2003, which will give
them the rights to manufacture all of my products, say Wendel. So we'll have a Fatal1ty
computer coming out soon.

Everyone thinks that when you become a celebrity you become egotistical and Wendel
would like to dispel this image. "You always have an image of that top guy being a real
jerk or whatever, and my goal when I got into this game was to get rid of that image,
especially from the gaming point of view."  Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Mame allows you to play the Classic Retro Video Games



What is MAME ?

On December 24th, 1996, Nicola Salmoria began working on his single hardware emulators
(for example Multi-Pac), which he merged into one program during January 1997. He named
the accomplishment by the name of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME for short
(pronounced as the word 'maim' in English, other languages may differ). 

The first official release was MAME 0.1, which was released on the evening of
February 5th, 1997 (23:32 +0100). Using a modular and portable driver oriented
architecture with an open source philosophy, it soon grew into immense proportions.
The current version supports 5578 ROM sets, 3083 unique games. Because MAME releases 
happen whenever they are ready, at one point the wait between new versions was almost
4 months. To help the agony of the users, a public beta system was used, with a beta 
release happening every 2-3 weeks on an average. However, now the beta designation 
has been removed in favor of a good old 0.xx version number. 

Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some 
newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software)
of the arcade games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function has been
brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games is just a nice side-effect. The 
huge success of MAME would not be possible without the talent of the programmers who
joined to form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on the team,
but there is a large number of contributors outside the team too. Nicola Salmoria is 
still the coordinator of the project. 


MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Running this program, in conjunction 
with a game's related data files (ROMs) will more or less faithfully reproduce that game
on your PC. In other words, with MAME you can actually play over 1300 classic arcade video
games on your PC. These are NOT recreations; these are the actual arcade games that 
appeared in arcades in the 70's and 80's. The game's code is dumped into ROM files that
MAME loads and replays on your computer. The purpose of MAME is to actually pretend to
be the CPU and support chips that these games need to play. MAME is the "hardware" of 
the arcade game, the ROMs are the "software". It was designed to digitally preserve games
and gameplay that would otherwise be forgotten in the modern day rat race of console games
and computers. 

Mame Coin-Op machine:

Mame can now be put in a coin-op machine with multiple types of joysticks so one game
can play multiple genres with different joystick types.
 
All this helps players to be able to get the real arcade feel of the 1980's without 
actually having to go to an arcade, an besides that, the arcades of today don't have
the classic games so you have to use alternative measures to be able to play the 
classic games.  The other problem with classic coin-op games is that the boards are
20 years old in many cases, and very likely to fail because of their age.  That is
why it is great that there are new systems like the 39 in 1 which is on a brand new 
board.  Emulation is not perfect but for many it is close enough.
 
I hope that this hobby of Retro Gaming continues to grow and I am sure that it
will because there are many people who don't care for the new games!
  


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Thank you,
Paul Dean, Spy Hunter Champion, June 28, 1985
www.spyhunter007.com

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