Monday News: Dave & Busters Testing Out VR; VR Documentary; Fix-It Felix Trying For $20k Again

Monday arrives and suddenly do the stories as well. News has been rather sporadic as of late, I don’t mean to keep shoving everything into a single post but after trade shows this tends to happen a bit more than usual.

First off, two items that come our way from the DNA Association and they are VR related. The DNA was sent a picture of a test setup at the D&B in Irvine California called the Virtual Reality Lab, where they used an Oculus Rift DevKit combined with some racing game to see how players took to the idea. No word on how much was charged or how much it cost for D&B to put this together but they have been on the move with trying to bring more exclusive experiences to their venues as a way to drive interest. That actually is one major aspect that the arcade industry shares with home consoles – people buy the console hardware when it has exclusive content that people want to play for it (or in some cases like the PlayStation 4, just the promise of that content in the future). If home consoles all offered the exact same games only differing slightly in graphics and controls, then there would be little competition there to drive sales. Likewise with any arcade, the more overall quantity you have with the more content that can’t be had easily at home serves as an incentive to visit said arcade. This is one area redemption has had strength – yes the games are sometimes shallow beyond belief but their mechanical nature in most regards serves the same purpose as pinball – it’s different and physical. By the same token that is what makes Fortune Teller machines neat (yes, they still make those).

Anyways, back to the specific subject of VR. The DNA also shared this 10-min documentary called The Dawn of Virtual Reality. If you need a better introduction on Virtual Reality and what it’s really about, check this out. It features Kevin Williams, who is a specialist on VR tech, he also heads up the DNA Association and The Stinger Report.

The DNA has gotten into a lot of news that we don’t exactly cover here at Arcade Heroes (like unique technology to enhance restaurant experiences) so check them out and sign-up for their free newsletter. Then all of your bases are covered 😉

Finally from The Stinger Report, they sent me a link to this VentureBeat article that reports that someone is selling a Fix-It Felix Jr. cabinet again for only $20,000. This is not entirely surprising as the surprise happened the first time one of these sold on eBay for that amount. I get that it is essentially a movie prop, but $20k seems quite high to me. But if that is what collectors want to pay for these things, it’s their money.

(One of the many arcade props used in the marketing effort for the Wreck-It Ralph movie)