Community gamecenter in Seattle, WA, USA area

[misu]

Not a project in the traditional sense, but still fine here. It’s definitely a work in progress and involves cabs and PCBs xD.

My team and I are working to create a “community focused” gamecenter space in the Seattle, WA, USA region. What is a community focused gamecenter? A bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo I just made up xD. Saying that, we have some overarching goals:

- Have a space where we show off games, both popular and obscure.
- Have the ability to have free and open to the public days where there is no cost to play anything. You can’t explore or try new things if you’re always concerned about whether you’ll enjoy it for your coinage.
- Not be beholden to solely an arcade model where we are somewhat required to focus on putting popular titles on the floor to generate revenue.
- Build and connect the community with the passion of retro and arcade gaming.
- Generate exposure for a lot of unknown and under-appreciated games.
- Have a lot of fun.

A video is worth a 1000 words though right? Last week we conducted a small test run even when we hosted a SHMUP Meet. By focusing on a single genre instead of presenting a variety of games, we got to showcase a lot of the lesser known titles in the genre for people to play… that and a bunch of CAVE games cause I'm a CAVE simp. For this event all we essentially did was shuffle around the workshop space a bit and turn on the cabs, but there's a still a lot of work to do - everything from permitting to decorations. Will def post updates and other fun stories as we flesh out the space and run more events.

[Walkthrough]

[Pictures]

 

[misu]

Some context: the space, cabs, and games are primarily for 100 Yen Life, a arcade rental provider for cons and corporate events in the Seattle region. That work necessitates having a warehouse, a lot of cabs, etc and (maybe?) pays the bills. This specific warehouse we just moved into is a dedicated warehouse (old one was shared) so we are allowed to let the general public in. Since the cabs are just sitting around doing nothing when not actively out at an event, we wanted to try to carve out some space where we could invite people over to play and run small events inside.

 

[Kidkaos]

Really really cool idea! I wish you all a lot of success. I have throught about doing this but man there's soo much to look out for to just keep the lights on!! I wish I was closer to contribute. But I'll definitely share when you're up and running for passerby's!!

 

[keiichi331]

This is super freaking cool! From one arcade operator to another, I wish you every bit of success that could possibly come your way. The road is hard and paved with lava and sharp things, but stay the course! we are a dying breed! 90% of the FGC players and people at my place never grew up in an arcade environment and I realized quickly that those who did grow up with arcades around are likely at home with their families as they're around my age lol and getting them to come out can be tricky (they be like shiny Pokemon bro)

Love this place and it's looking great! excited to heard more updates about it!

 

[erdrick1980]

Wow! Truly bad ass!! Damn.. why couldn't you be on the east coast. Love it!

 

[mattsoft]

Very cool! Curious to hear more about this as I am in Seattle!

 

[misu]

This is super freaking cool! From one arcade operator to another, I wish you every bit of success that could possibly come your way. The road is hard and paved with lava and sharp things

Super thanks! That is the one nice part about our situation is we dont need run an arcade if we don't want too. Business operations are covered by doing convention and corporate event arcade setups so we can afford to run special events like SHMUP Meet free to the public. I'm sure at some point we will have a "standard set of games" that we have available on weekends or something for an entrance fee, but really want to strive for a minimum of 1-2 open to the public events each month.

Tentatively planning for a fighting game/brawler event were we focus on kusoge for February and another SHMUP Meet in April.

Very cool! Curious to hear more about this as I am in Seattle!

Awesome, I'll DM you some more details!

 

[passion]

Some context: the space, cabs, and games are primarily for 100 Yen Life, an arcade rental provider for cons and corporate events in the Seattle region. That work necessitates having a warehouse, a lot of cabs, etc and (maybe?) pays the bills. This specific warehouse we just moved into is a dedicated warehouse (old one was shared) so we are allowed to let the general public in. Since the cabs are just sitting around doing nothing when not actively out at an event, we wanted to try to carve out some space where we could invite people over to play and run small events inside.

This is amazing! I live in Capitol Hill Seattle and I’m deep in the fighting game community here! We do a lot of offlines & tourneys! Would love to connect!!!

 

[misu]

Lol, how convenient. Literally yesterday I started hammer out some details for our next community event which will be the “Way of the Kusoge” xD

 

[JThor6]

Hi there! Super into this. There is definitely a need for a retro fighting game meet up. I have a MiSTer and a good CRT that I would love to bring to an event geared towards some Super Turbo, Alpha 2, Sam Sho, or VSav... There's no limit to the amount of Kusoge fighters there are.