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The Book:
A look at the modern arcade industry, who the players are, what the games are, why arcades still matter.
How To Get It:
There are a couple of ways to get a printed copy:
Here it is on Amazon.com (US). It should be available in other countries through respective Amazon sites. As an example the UK printed version can be found here.
For the digital Kindle copy, you just need to have either an Amazon Kindle or an iPad (or as pointed out, PC or MAC) or other tablet device with the Kindle App installed on it. The digital version of The Arcade Experience can be purchased there for $4.99USD. If you need the Kindle app, You can get that for free here.
Video Trailers:
Two trailers with a small sampling of some of the games talked about in the book:
History and a Deeper Look:
Back in 2011, I decided that it was time to undertake a writing project that went beyond what I write for Arcade Heroes every week. So I sat down and started hammering out text for something I thought was interesting – the technology and innovations of the arcade industry over the years. I thought it to be a great subject, however I then realized that it was looking at a niche within a niche and that with the opportunity a book has, should be something more. So I scrapped a lot of what I had and began over again. I figured that since I deal all the time with the modern arcade industry, why not present a book that tackles it? There are plenty of game history books out there but nothing that really gets into this particular subject since many have considered what we do as a thing of the past. This is also a subject I know some stuff about so it made sense to go in this direction.
After various rewrites and editing the work is finished on what I call The Arcade Experience: A Look Into Modern Arcade Games and Why They Still Matter. It does have history two it, in fact there are a lot of callbacks to the past to form a basis for how we arrived at where we are today. The chapters are split into the following:
Foreward by Kevin Williams – the same Kevin Williams that has contributed many newslinks, editorials and images to this site.
Introduction – I give a background as to my first experience I can recall of going to an arcade and how that led me down a path that eventually had me opening my own arcade business and writing then operating Arcade Heroes.
1.A Dash of History – To know how we got to where we are today, a look at some history but in particular the crash of ’83 and the Crash of the ’01 times.
2.The Location Experience – Taking a look at the types of locations as well as a few of the locations that are open and making it work today.
3. The Game Experience – I look at all of the manufacturers and what they have done over the past five years so the reader can see what has been going on in case they have been out of the loop.
4.The Social Experience – Arcades are more than just the games, its about people and events that bring them together around the games too
5.The Technology Experience – This is sort of a history chapter again that focuses primarily on technologies found in arcades that set them apart.
6.The Future – A short, self explanatory chapter about the future of the industry.
It is 204 pages long, and it is in the neighborhood of about 64,000 words long. There are pictures, many of which were provided by Kevin Williams of The Stinger Report and those are in full color. It was actually supposed to have more images than what it does but there were some technical problems with a few which is a fixable problem for down the road.
For anyone that buys it, let me give you my heartfelt thanks in advance! I sincerely hope you enjoy it and find it useful. There has been plenty I have learned about writing books and publishing and I have more ideas in my head for other works in the future as well. This did take a little longer to get put together than I had hoped but between a family and essentially working three jobs, my free time to write is not as abundant as I would like. However, that didn’t stop me from getting this together and I have a couple of more ideas for arcade-related books as well as a science fiction idea that has been occupying my thoughts for a few years now.
