by Cat DeSpira
Buried Arcade History #1 here Once again I'm back with more "lost photos" from national newspapers that I often find while I'm conducting research. For a while there I felt that, surely, the well would run dry, but that hasn't been the case at all. With every new cache of newspaper archives I begin leafing … Continue reading Buried Arcade History: Newspaper Photos From The Video Craze That Deserve To Be Seen Again #2
I always dread explaining the plot of The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters (2007) to people who haven't seen it or heard of it before. The reason being is, the documentary/mockumentary created by producer, Seth Gordon and directed by Ed Cunningham about Twin Galaxies and competitive Donkey Kong playing, is one hot mess of creative fabrications (by … Continue reading King of Kong 2006 Secret Life Rights Docs Reveal Collusion: Co Star Roy “Mr. Awesome” Shildt Barred From Future Profit?
From the moment I saw her face smiling back from a heart-shaped mirror on a Magic Heart game, in a long ago arcade from the World War II era, I knew I had to know more about Wonderland Arcade...
Somewhere in the Midwest, down an old road that leads across a washed out and crumbling bridge, in a stand of overgrown trees and in what appears to be a field on the edge of an industrial tract of land, sits a house that's seen better days. The abandoned house, filmed in December 2016 by … Continue reading Man Discovers Arcade Games in The Basement of An Abandoned House
It was somewhere around 1990 and I was living in Portland, Oregon, just a few blocks from Washington Park, that enormous green space that rises from the mist over a city always caught in between transitions of clearing and of rain. Just a mile down Burnside, a straight cut from the heights to the middle … Continue reading PUNX: Hubert Gloss’ 1986 Fashion Punks
Corny sexual double-entendres of the variety your dirty Uncle Johnny might conjure up, one-liners about "cocks" (roosters), firearms, phallic-looking hot dogs, allusions to rape and suicide are just a few of the most common themes found on 1950s and early 1960s adult Valentine cards.
Honestly, if Atari is hiding their relation to this film, it's not because they're ashamed of having funded it. It's because it's so bad.
Details are still emerging, but the premise of the dispute on Billy Mitchell's record is fascinating and the evidence against its legitimacy compelling in that the story contains the kind of weirdness one has come to expect from Twin Galaxies scoreboard shenanigans.
For this is a tragedy. For him. For classic gaming. For Twin Galaxies. For everyone. We didn't need this. And as angry as it makes me that he lied to us all, in the end we all lied to each other, too, by going along with the charade for as long as we did, when we all knew something was wrong. Some of us for years. We knew, just as we know other "iconic champions" aren't champions at all. They cheated just the same and have been exalted as "legends" and "Kings" even though most of us know damned well that their stories are 100% manufactured.
Sometimes I find myself studying the faces of the people in the photos next to the games or milling around the arcade. They're usually young teenagers, just as I was back then, examples of American naivete and valor rolled up in a fuse so hot that any new interest could ignite it with a single spark. The 80s was an age of unending successive fads...except one. Video games. That was no fad. Falling in electronic-love was never a passing fad as much as people today want to claim it was.