Not only did John come up with a unique theme for an arcade cabinet, but he also went the extra mile literally "sculpting" custom pieces for his build.
In a move some might say more foolish than bold, RetroBlast frontman Kevin Steele is handing over the keys to the RetroBlast.com website to a bunch of slack-jawed ...
"Brian de Palma's Pac-man starring Mick Jagger? Woody Harrelson as Leisure Suit Larry, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson? A 12-part television series of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego produced by J.J. Abrams?
ACMI wants your elevator pitch for a film or television adaptation of a classic videogame - think director, cast, possibly location and maybe a tagline for the billboard."
Not sure if it's just a Down Under competition or not, but Retroblast! faithful Sez pointed this one out to us.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image has a contest coinciding with the Game On exhibition they've currently got going asking you to come up with a pitch for a live action movie or television show based on your favorite videogame character.
I was thinking more of a Basic Instinct meets Pac-Man with the ghosts being the stalkers.
Would you look at the size of that thing! It's HUGE! It's so big it probably has it's own zipcode! Ok, that was lame, but what more can you say about a foosball table that requires 22 players, 11 per side, to actually play a fully functioning game?
"Here’s the largest table football game in the world. In fact, Table Football XXL is so huge, two entire soccer teams — 22 players — could face off with it, settling their challenges without ever setting foos on a real field. This monster was built by Amsterdam brewer Amstel, a stunt that coincided with the European Champions League Finals."
To date it looks like he's got Dig Dug and Zookeeper nearly ready for all of you retro-hungry keychain maniacs to start purchasing.
The keychains are cut from 1/8" billet aluminum and then laser cut with a 3000 watt laser. After a little cleanup, Brian then goes on to laser etch the side art into the keychains. Click the picture at left for a larger picture and Jeff's full article.
Pricing isn't set in stone but they look to be under $15 for sure and very well could end up being under $10 for pre-orders.
Very cool and unique stuff to adorn your keys and go along side your pewter donkey kong keychain.
Retroblast! reader Phillip has pointed out a nice blog entry over at Neatorama chronicaling the Rise and Fall of Atari as it were:
From the site:
"If you know anything about the pop culture of the 1970s, the name Atari is synonymous with video games. So what happened? Where did Atari go? Here’s the story."
Check it out, and thanks again to Phillip for pointing it out to us!
A group of contributors has gotten together and put together a timeline of events in Video Arcade history.
The timeline starts in 1971 with the commercial release of Galaxy Game:
"Installed in Tresidder Union in September 1971, the game was quickly and enthusiastically embraced by the Stanford community, with players often waiting for over an hour for their next turn.
Galaxy Game is a reprogrammed version of Spacewar!, which was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen and first realized on the PDP-1 at M.I.T. in 1962"
I'm sure there's some inaccuracies to the list, but it's still a very cool way to check out the history of arcade games. Kudos to the folks at Dipity for coming up with a way cool technology, or at least, putting it to good use. And thanks to Kevin for bringing it to our attention!
Bad economy? What bad economy? At least that must have been what James Baker was asking himself when he plopped down a whopping $15,000 for a rare Nintendo World Championships Gold Cartridge.
When asked why he would pay $15,000 for a videogame he had this to say:
"Well, I don’t really look at it as purely a videogame; it’s more like the Honus Wagner of videogame collecting – or like Action Comics number one. There are 50-60 Honus Wagner cards out there and only 12 accounted NWC gold carts accounted for, so comparatively it’s pretty cheap! But, yeah, it’s pretty crazy that I spent that much on a videogame, regardless of rarity."
Meh, to each their own I guess. I could just as easily run out and buy a Harley for that price and no-one would question it, well, except maybe the wife.
Check out the full interview with James over at Next Generation
The title includes 16 classic NEO-GEO/SNK games including: Art of Fighting, Baseball Stars 2, Burning Fight, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters '94, King of the Monsters, Last Resort, Magician Lord, Metal Slug, Neo Turf Masters, Samurai Shodown, Sengoku, Shock Troopers, Super Sidekicks 3, Top Hunter, and World Heroes.
For me, I'm a huge Baseball Stars fan and given the poor quality of the two MLB titles released this year for the PSP, this is a welcome and entertaining relief to a guy who enjoys playing baseball on his PSP.
Not to mention King of the Monsters is great mindless entertainment and Fatal Fury is an all-time classic.
The title is also destined for the PS2 and Wii later this year. Rumor has it that the PS2 release has shipped and should be arriving soon.
For you young ones who don't know what Starcade is/was the wiki describes it as:
"a game show where contestants competed against one another by playing video games.
Each round began with a video arcade-game related toss-up question. The player who buzzed in and answered correctly got first choice of five free-standing arcade games in the studio. After choosing, the player had 40 seconds (later 60, then 50) to amass as high a score as they could. After that contestant was done, the other contestant got to play the game that their opponent picked. Whatever points they earned were added to their overall score."
Head on over and catch a few episode of awesomely aged cheese.
The Sega Dreamcast has to be one of the most long lived out of production consoles around these days. The fan following for this console is loyal to the Nth degree and they love it more than Hot Pockets and Jolt Cola and will defend it's games to the end of the world it seems.
It also seems that Hollywood has no problem throwing it in as a movie prop on the latest Jackie Chan and Jet Li match up, Forbidden Kingdom.
The boys over a Siliconera spotted the beloved console in some of the opening scenes:
"In the first five minutes of the movie, after Jason wakes up from his dream, you can see a Dreamcast on the left hand corner of the screen underneath his TV."
Watch for it amongst the acrobatic fast paced moves of the film.
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The $15,000 NES Cart (0) by d_Random
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