Surprise, people still play arcade games (my arcade update)

Well day one for my arcade (Tuesday) was slow. Slow enough that no one came! That was expected really as I don’t have much in the front to indicate what it is other than a small paper sign in the window and an LED OPEN sign above. I do have some vinyl lettering that should be ready today and a big sign that will be ready in a week or two. That and the weather here in Salt Lake has been miserable for June – not because it’s hot but because it’s cold with intermittent rain or cold when it’s sunny – not your typical summer weather. But yesterday was interesting – several people came, more than I expected that would. First a gentlemen came in around 1PM and played a couple of games and left then later a previous neighbor of mine came by and spent some cash and played for quite a while. As time went on some employees from the Red Robin next door came through to check it out and a couple of them played some games. They are quite excited about it and I was happy to hear that they thought that my arcade was cool and much better than the other one that the mall has. On top of that we had people just coming in to check it out as they would walk by, notice the games and come in. It was great to see people coming in and enjoying themselves. As I have been saying for a long time now, developers just need to make good games that operators can afford and people will play them.

In what was some cause for panic I didn’t realize that several of the games don’t have the proper coin mechs in them when I thought that they did. Fortunately more coin mechs are arriving today but I hadn’t realized that we need so many. So in a way it’s good that we haven’t had many people come through as several of the games can’t accept tokens and I don’t want people to walk away with a bad impression. I had thought that only a couple of games didn’t have all the proper mechs in them but this was a lesson in checking my assumptions twice. Fortunately all of the new games have them and where those are the most popular, no problem there.

So far House of the Dead 4 has been my most popular game followed by Indiana Jones pinball, The Act, Blazing Angels, Big Buck Safari and Crystal Castles. As we get more people in it will be interesting to see how it pans out for each game. I am quite pleased with how well The Act is doing since it did lousy in testing because it wasn’t put into the right venues by the distributor (which angered the developer who then pulled the project) and I think that I’m going to prove that in an arcade setting it will do very well.

Today we’re supposed to get the replacement guns for Carnevil so I can finally get that running. I also am going to look into putting Ninja Gaiden into a cabinet. Chase HQ2 still isn’t here but all I can do is wait. Warlords came down with a strange issue, I’m not sure what to do about it though. I did get 1942 fixed, the monitor went all crazy but my dad’s cousin came by and taught me a few things about monitors which was helpful. I also ordered Oriental Legend 2 today and it should be here next week. AFAIK I’m the only arcade in Utah that will have OL2 along with The Act and Chase HQ2. Air hockey is coming in this weekend which I think I mentioned already but I’m excited to be getting that.

We also got the computers running a little better and they will probably be ready to go in a few days. We were having a problem with a couple of the games crashing but after some updates and tweaking they are running better (except for COD4 which we’re still trying to figure out). At least Unreal Tournament 3 runs beautifully.

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