You need a countdown timer on your Wii to tell when Santa will be here?
There’s a (homebrew) app for that.
Many years ago, I gained a kind of momentary internet fame (if you want to call it that) for my elaborate (and yet, on reflection, kinda cheap) game room setup, originally erected in a room of our old rental house. Rob O’Hara even covered certain parts of the game room (and asked me for a few pictures too!) in his book Invading Spaces, a guide to collecting arcade games and building the perfect game room.
The idea was to create an approximation of the stand-up arcade experience without spending stand-up arcade collecting money (and without taking up stand-up arcade space). Two things drove this idea: this magnificent arcade joystick (made for the Playstation 1), and one Playstation 1 each from the U.S. and Japan. The latter allowed me to play the wealth of arcade game collections released in Japan that never came out here.
This also entailed collecting a large number of retro arcade games for the PS1, both domestic and import. Come to think of it, I made a name in video game collecting circles for that too. The game room setup was really neat – actually, it’s still set up that way in my current house, and has been since 2004 when we bought the place.
It’s in the interests of keeping the aforementioned place we’ve occupied since 2004 that I’m now in the process of selling almost all of the above. I’ve been out of work for nearly two months at this point, and we’re definitely on the pain train as a result. I’ve tried getting on as seasonal retail help, but I’ve spent my entire adult life in one industry and I’ve never worked retail before because, well, I’ve never had to. At a time of the year when they’re hoping to hire folks to can get up to speed very quickly, I’m pretty damned useless.
Anyway, here’s what’s up for grabs: anything that’s not nailed to the wall or on fire! Well, okay, maybe that’s an overgeneralization. All of my PS1 games will be up for grabs – domestic and foreign. My Japanese PS1 will be on sale soon. I’ve even got a small handful of PS2 imports that I picked up years ago in anticipation of modding my PS2… which I’ve never had done, and don’t really care to now.
I’m selling my 30-year-old Kick arcade machine as well, but only to any interested parties who want to drop by and pick it up in person and transport it themselves. Also on the block, and again preferably only to local folkels who can pick it up themselves: my Vectrex and its paraphenalia.
I’ll probably be selling some action figures and other fannish items soon, non-video-game-related.
Am I keeping anything? Yes.
As I mentioned above, the centerpiece of the original game room setup was this glorious joystick that beautifully recreates the feel of ’80s arcade games. I have USB PC adapters for PS1 controllers, and as such I’ll be keeping this joystick for future emulator use. It’s kinda what started me down this road, and I still love it. I’d like for my son to know a little something of the “feel” for these old games I used to spend so much of my income on.
But I don’t want him to know what it’s like to not be able to keep the lights on, so here ends that thing that used to get a lot of people looking in my direction. I’ve said for many years that, as I’ve gotten older, I’m more interested in playing games than in playing the (money) losing game known as collecting. Now it’s time to put up or shut up on that claim. Sacrifices have to be made, and anymore, in the day of near-perfect emulation on a computer or a tablet or the Wii, these games haven’t been opened up and put in an actual Playstation in a long time. If you’re looking to pick up some pieces of a much-loved, well-cared-for collection that are nearly impossible to find outside of Japan, please proceed to eBay with all deliberate speed and level up. I’ll be adding more items through the weekend.
The boy and I happened to have time to kill in Conway this afternoon (while mom was at a work-related function – things being what they are right now, she’s about the only one with work-related functions to attend), and not far from our hotel was a massive store with all sorts of video game logos in the windows: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii… whoa, wait, a vintage Atari logo? Since Little E is already my video gaming buddy (it just so happens that most of the games reviewed in Phosphor Dot Fossils these days are picked by him almost at random, which explains why recent reviews there have been such an eclectic mix) and an avowed Mario fan, we made it a point to visit this place called Game Point.
Sadly, this photo was taken as we were back at the car, so it doesn’t show the giant Atari logo ↓ I went on and on and on about this.
The Game Doctor is out.
One of the founders of Electronic Games Magazine, the very first publication devoted entirely to video games and computer games, Bill Kunkel and his cohorts Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley created the field of video game journalism, at a time when no publisher thought an entire magazine could be devoted to a topic and support itself with both advertising and subscriptions. Electronic Games Magazine managed to prove them wrong, and Katz, Kunkel & Worley were suddenly on the ground floor of a whole new field of entertainment journalism. Oft-imitated by copycat publications that occasionally managed to look cooler but never quite read like they were written by the Katz/Kunkel/Worley team, Electronic Games was suddenly making its publisher a boatload of money. As with the rest of the video game industry, it flamed out in the mid-1980s, mired down by indecision on the publisher’s part on whether or not to ride out the apparent crash of the “fad” industry on whose coattails it rode. Its three founders moved on to pastures new. Bill Kunkel eventually moved on to a whole new field of publication, getting aboard the strategy guide train when the getting was good.
It would be a disservice to imply that Bill’s entire career was wrapped up in video game journalism. He had already done seminal work in other areas of entertainment reporting that dwelled, like Electronic Games, in areas that no publisher would’ve thought profitable – until he proved them otherwise. He had covered professional and semi-pro wrestling, and written comics in the company of some of the greats in that industry, among other things.
Of course, it was Electronic Games that I latched onto as a kid, making its debut when I was almost ten years old and had come down with a bad case of Pac-Man Fever. The writing in EG was funny, to-the-point, and called a spade a spade. You could trust the opinions in those pages. The art direction was near-legendary, with incredible painted artwork depicting scenes that the games’ own graphics weren’t quite up to showing us yet. (The art department also came up with that nifty E-and-G-in-a-circle logo that I misappropriated back then, since it happened to be my initials, and continue to “borrow” now. In case you’d missed it somehow.) To put it mildly, I was in love. I still maintain to this day that, somewhere between Electronic Games, Starlog Magazine, Douglas Adams and some Harlan Ellison books I had as a kid, I learned more about how to write than I ever have in any journalism or creative writing course I ever took at any level of my education.
It didn’t ever even occur to me that I’d have a chance to thank Bill personally for his part in that. I just went about my business writing for print, the web and broadcast, eventually winding up as one of the frequent-flyer freelancers for Classic Gamer Magazine about a decade ago. (Indeed, there was one issue where apparently there were a couple of complaints that I had written too much of the issue. Oops.) It was understood by everyone on the staff of Classic Gamer that we were trying to evoke a little something of the “feel” of the long-defunct Electronic Games – unapologetically so.
To my amazement, our editor-in-chief, Chris Cavanaugh, made contact with Bill Kunkel himself and got the man himself to critique our little magazine. I went back to dig up the e-mail that Chris forwarded to me to see exactly what was said that made my day back in early 2001:
…on first look, my favorite piece was Earl Green’s superb overview of
the Odyssey2.
Not to toot my own horn – and to be fair, there was a fairly even-handed critique of my article to follow – but I’m not sure it’s even possible to get better validation than that from someone whose writing I looked up to with intense admiration from a very young age.
Oh, but it gets better. A couple of years later at the 2003 Classic Gaming Expo, I was lucky enough to win a drawing to hang out and dine with the special guests (i.e. the ones who we were all paying to show up and hear from) the night before the show actually started. There was an open bar shortly before a really great meal – the kind you spend the rest of the weekend recovering from – and I did my best to blend into the wallpaper. I wasn’t even in the industry. What in the world would I have to say to these guys? Fortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual: Steve Woita got me out of hiding and took me around to introduce me to everyone else in the room. Finally, Chris Cavanaugh made sure I was introduced to Bill, who stunned me by remembering exactly who I was and what I’d written (keep in mind, this was two years after Bill’s critique of Classic Gamer Magazine), and insisted that I join him at his table for dinner, where we were easily the most boisterous table for the entire evening. Every year that I was able to make it to CGE after that, there was no question and there wasn’t even time for me to ask permission – it was just assumed I’d be hanging out at Bill’s table year after year (though I don’t think were ever got around to quieting down). And sure enough, I did.
Nobody – nobody – could tell a story like Bill. When he later put some of his best anecdotes in print in Confessions Of The Game Doctor (Rolenta Press, 2005), my only beef was that the book could’ve been twice as long – and it should’ve been an audiobook, because the only thing better than reading about Bill’s misadventures in the industry was hearing him tell those stories personally. Here’s a pretty good example of Bill preserving the oral history of the early video game industry, as he read a chapter of his then-upcoming book at CGE 2005:
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I wish I could pass along some of the stories from the CGE dinner table discussions, but I’m not sure I could. Not that there was any priveleged information exchanged, but I couldn’t do justice to the way Bill told his own stories.
They say you should never meet your heroes. I think you should, on the off chance that they’re as cool as Bill Kunkel. As starstruck as I was initially, it quickly dawned on my that he was as much a fan of my work as I was of his. He was as interested in hearing about my unlikely adventures (namely the horses) as I was about his. Once we got that obstacle out of the way, he was more than just a childhood idol. He was just my friend, Bill Kunkel. And this is in no way a name-drop on my part: everyone who approached him at Classic Gaming Expo, or e-mailed him out of the blue, seemed to have the same experience. Bill was just Bill.
Bill Kunkel died unexpectedly this weekend at his home. That particular piece of news is still busy kicking me in the gut with steel-toed boots. I wish our paths had crossed sooner and that we’d had more time, but I’m proud – and I consider myself lucky – to have had the mutual friendship that we had. I have yet to see a tribute from anyone who doesn’t feel that way about Bill. He’ll be keenly missed.
The past 18 months have been really tough on the bevy of computers in this house. The Avid bit it (but is feeling better these days), Zen bit it, a tablet cracked up and then came back good as new, even my wife’s netbook bit it and was returned, zombie-like, from the dead by the manufacturer. It’s not like we’re getting massive, knock-out-Manhattan-Island power surges every twelve minutes or anything… but it does seem like Murphy’s Law is being enforced pretty vigorously upon us of late. Money’s insanely tight right now, and my job prospects are looking… well… clouded. There’s no money to be thrown at the problem.
As it just happens, the benevolent hackers of the world have got my back. ↓ I went on and on and on about this.
I recently dug up something from my past, just for laughs, to post on Facebook – namely, a newspaper article from over 10 years ago in which I’d been quoted. It took a bit of Googling to find the thing, and then I thought… why not save myself the trouble of looking this stuff up later if I need to?
So I’ve created this page to chronicle such things. Really more for my own amusement than anything else. Hopefully everyone else gets a chuckle out of it.
It’s been a stormy weekend here, so it’s a good thing the tablet‘s been charged up, just in case the lights go out and we get bored. (We’ve got four nervous cats and two nervous dogs in the house – what are the odds of boredom there?) I tried out a couple of Anrdoid emulators on my tablet, and here’s what I found out. ↓ I went on and on and on about this.
OVGE, the annual Tulsa video game convention, looks like it’s going to be held in June this year rather than the fall, and of course I’ll be there unless that horrible dirigible accident with my name on it finally happens. But what should I bring? ↓ I went on and on and on about this.