Comic Con Day One: Set Up

For most people, the Emerald City Comic Con started on Friday. This is the days the doors were opened up for everyone, and attendees got their various geek tribes recognized. For exhibitors though, it started on Thursday, and was entirely about moving things to their needed spots.

I was working with the North West Pinball and Arcade Show folks to set up a room perfect for arcade enthusiasts. This involved taking a perfectly ordinary hotel room, and filling it with all sorts of pinball and arcade machines.

The room was on the third floor of the building, while the loading dock was on the second. We needed to take the machine out of a moving truck, through various working room hallways, and then finally onto an elevator. It wasn’t a super long trip, but anything involving a heavy box has technical tricks to them. Luckily we had these amazing devices for moving the machines.

The guy on the left taught me how to move an arcade machine using these handy trucks. They have a special set of extra legs so that whatever is behind held will not go back too far. It basically went from two wheels to four with the press of a foot. I made sure to hold onto the truck and the arcade machine as I pushed forward. The elevators were for workers, and thus designed for extra wide tables, and other things that needed extra room. This worked out great for moving arcade units.

The set up took several steps. The first was to get the machine out of the moving truck itself. The second was to move the unit over to the arcade room. Finally they placed the machine where it was needed. I did mostly moving, while technicians worked to turn on, and plug in each machine. While setting up, we discovered an interesting problem.

Seattle is a place where the sun doesn’t regularly show up. In fact, the windows you see behind the arcade machines don’t have curtains. The brightness was making it difficult to see the screens. The arcade room was able to solve the problem because it actually had curtains.

This was great for the arcade room, but we would have an arcade display along a hallway.

The display was to promote the upcoming show in June. Also, we were going to try and sell some of the old T-Shirts, Posters, and Hoodies from previous shows. There would be arcade games next to the display, and as I said earlier, there were no curtains.

It was decided to move forward, and hope for the best -IE normal Seattle weather. This meant setting up the arcade games along the wall. I decided to help out the best I could with that. Each machine had to be plugged in, turned on, and adjusted for the area. I was able to move some units to the area, plug them in, and even find the on switch.

To open up the machine required a set of keys. Each machine had its own set of keys, which would make all sorts of confusing problems, if someone hadn’t worked to organize it all. So the keys were all placed on hooks in the needed areas. Then the labels on the hooks, and keys were recorded on a paper, which also told us what key went with which machine.

There were some fine tuning adjustments to be made. For example, the XMen game was too loud, and needed its volume adjusted.

The Real Ghostbusters game also needed some special addons to make it free to play. It was from Dorky’s arcade, and thus set up to take quarters. One of our engineers hooked up buttons to the coin slots to get around the problems. It was an easy set up that could be undone just as quickly.

Also, the bigger problem was that we did not have the needed power, or plugs for the room. Everything worked, but there were worries about a circuit breaker turning off. These are giant machines, and there were about five machines to one plug.

While we worried about this, we set up everything up.

The posters on display were adjusted to say the actual date, and location of the upcoming arcade show, and T-Shirts were placed everywhere. We even put hoodies on art display things.

After everything was set up enough, I wandered the gaming area, and took pictures.

Everyone was busy setting things up, or placing things to be ready for the next day. It was sort of like watching a city being built before anyone moved in.

The next day would be packed, but for now it was quiet. People chatted, and talked about their jobs, or whatever interested them.

For the arcade, we had one final test. Every machine had to be checked, and double checked that it was free to play, and working. This meant the grueling task of playing every single machine.

We made sure to do a thorough check of all the machines.

Finally, it was all set up, and ready for the next day.