The Arcade Show Part 1: Driving to and Setting up.

The Trip to Puget Sound

My trip to Tacoma was a pretty dull one. The police have publicly said they will pull over lolligaggers in the fast lane. It was pretty much heaven the entire drive to Seattle. When I was going faster than the guy infront of me, he pulled over. I would give those in front some time in case they needed extra space. It worked so nicely. There was only one guy that drove badly.

There was a rock blasting on the way to the trip. So I was stuck behind this guy without moving for an hour. It wasn’t that bad, the view was really nice.

I turned off my car, and thought about life. Others took their dogs for a walk.

I was actually driving pretty carefully, because I had a special cargo in my van.

It’s one of the original Pong machines. Someone from Church owned a building that collapsed recently. My dad has been helping in cleaning up the wreckage, and this machine was found. So, I got permission to take it to the show. I wasn’t claiming to know everything, just trying to find out a price, and possible buyer. The machine was in a barn when I picked it up. Needless to say this Pong had some history.

The drive to my buddy’s house was uneventful. I parked where I needed to, and got inside soon enough. A few texts later, and I had a spare key, and the place to myself. For the most part, I slept. There wasn’t any WiFi so I couldn’t write updates.

Day 0: Setting up the Games

I had a special budget add on for getting lost. Man I needed it this day. To get from Renton, where I was staying, to Tacoma has special exits, and I missed them. They weren’t hard to find the next day, but the first had problems.

McDonalds was an easy enough spot, and my buddy Tuan had some fairly direct directions to the place. I had a quick breakfast, looked up my route to Tacoma, and left. It wasn’t too hard to find the exit to the freeway from there, and then I hit the wrong exit into Burien. Burger King has a more expensive meal, but also has more to it. The entire free coffee/pay for soda thing irks me though.

I got on what I thought was the right exit, and instead nothing appeared. I ended up in Seattle near the wharf. After some directions, I was able to turn around, and get to the exit -there were signs and everything. The road system leaving the major Seattle area makes it so that whatever lane you are in will go a different route. So, if you are in the left lane of a freeway, you may be entering into a town. The Right lane is just as iffy, and the correct route is an exit that looks like the wrong idea.

Anyway, I got onto the correct path, and found my way to Tacoma. The exits had well placed signs, so I got off on the road leading directly to the Tacoma Convention Center. This was not the Tacoma Dome, but they are nearish to each other.

The road up to the TCC is steep. I kept thinking about Bill Cosby’s routine about San Francisco. Near the top, I found roads named Yakima, Sprague, Martin Luther King, and others. For those who don’t know North West US street names, this meant I was entering ghetto territory. No one wants to live in Yakima, let alone a street named after it. We might as well name the streets, “Gonna Get Robbed”, and “Ghetto town”. It holds true for the street as well as the town.

After stopping at parking lot, I asked for directions. You could see the TCC from where I had parked. After an awkward walk -steep hills do weird things to knees- I found the place where they were holding the North West Arcade and Pinball Show -NWAAPS to its friends. The first person I saw was Tongan. She worked there, and it would have been rude to call out to her.

On the third floor of the convention center, they were already loading truckloads full of arcade games. Imagine a world full of candy and lollipops. The sight of so many games was like that for me.

There was a system working here that needs to be explained. The trucks were being driven by volunteers who would pick up whatever games were in a given zone. So, some people drove to the northernmost parts of Puget Sound to grab arcade games for Tacoma. They would be driving, and moving games for 12 hours at least.

Once moved onto the area you see, they were taken into the display area. This was just a giant warehouse with power sources, and moveable rugs.

The spiderman webbing you see on everything is to protect them from scratches and dings. Every single arcade unit in a truck had to be wrapped, and treated with care. The leaning arcade game is on a special dolly that has legs propped out to keep it at that angle. Those legs have wheels, and this makes moving a machine way easier.

The pinball machines had a special device as well.

This was used to prop up the pin machine for balance, and leg placement. Pin machines looked like the most complex form, so I bravely decided to ask for help when I needed to hook some up.

The machines were placed in rows, and in the best order. One guy was in charge of placement, and organization of the arcade machines. He had been up since 2AM, and wasn’t in a talkative mood. To give you an idea, he has his rank tattooed on his forearm. I was told to just let him give orders, and stand back.

It slowly got filled over time. We placed tables for the booths, and started lines where we were told.

The box with the tail is a power source. The carpet is moveable, and there are major power sources all over. You could plug in a line, and power everything in that area easily. The TCC workers were really helpfull in getting the power, and equipment we needed at any given moment.

I was assigned to hook up the kids area. The last arcade machine I hooked up had someone right there to help me out. So, I admit to being nervous about what to do. The area was just outside the main warehouse, and pretty small. I think we had 30-40 games at most.

The first thing to do was place the arcade games. I could slide, and ‘walk’ the machines well enough. Walking meant shifting the weight to one side, and moving the other forward. It was slow, and I had a lot of machines to do that with.

The worst was the first two machines. I moved them to the furthest point. Then the owners showed up, and moved them out of the kid zone, and into the main area. I was a wee angry at that one.

Hooking things up was also an interesting time. Luckily most of it was well organized. Every key was assigned a color -for the driving zone- and a number. It was just like the Comic Con set up, only with hundreds of keys. There was even a bag of unknown keys.

I had to deal with bad locks, missing keys, and Doom Keys. A Doom key is when you take one key, and it opens a door to reveal another key. You work until you find the right key to do what you want.

There were a couple games that needed extra work. I asked for help right away, and let them deal with setting a machine to freeplay. Then some machines had keys that were not quite working. I had to jimmy the lock a bit to grab the power plug.

Finally, I had time to grab someone to help me out with my Pong machine. I was allowed to park in the loading area parking lot. Then finally the guy who knew the old videogames showed up. It turns out we are both part of the same facebook group. Sort of surprised me.

He told me what the price for my machine was without any damage. Then lowered it a bit when he saw the water damage and the a-freaking-building-collapsed-on-it damage. The insides were fine, but the outsides had water damage and cracks. I grabbed a dolly, and moved the Pong machine to the kid zone.

Blindog was incredibly useful. A couple machines did not have keys that worked, so he picked the locks. There was a lock picking kit and everything. It turned out the Pong machine on the outside lost a lot of money, but the inside was working fairly well. The big problem was the monitor did not seem to get the signal correctly. We could hear the sounds, but nothing showed up. So, it worked but not enough to play. Some of the owners said it would still do well in the museum.

Right next to the kid zone was the museum. There was one game older than most of my grandparents. It was a pinball machine without flippers, or much of anything. The back looked like a mad scientist’s creation.

I was placing both the museum and kid zone pieces, and tried to have a transition effect for it. So some older machines, near newer machines.

One guy that I asked for help stayed until everything was up and running. He was really useful, especially when it came to getting the pinball machines together. It turned out to be way easier than I thought. In fact, one of the managers of the show showed us a cool way to set up a pinball machine without a specialized machine. You sit on a chair at the right height, and balance the machine on your legs. We placed a batting machine together that way.

The oldest machine had some problems with its legs, so we grabbed the owner, and asked for help. He said there were more legs at his house, so he would bring them on opening day.

Slowly the hall began to fill up. People were working to make sure everything was unwrapped, and playable. The Crazy Taxi machine, and all the racing games worked very well. That was a perk of being there.

I met a guy who remembered when some of the machines on display were brand new. He knew the car machine, who dispensed it, and when it was displayed. With a quick look at a few things, he could show how he knew. One group had placed tags on their machines in a specific way, and the numbering system told the year. I wanted to talk to him more, but couldn’t.

The reason why I went through so much hassle with the machines is because many of them were not pinball, or videogames. There was no list for games like this, so I was pretty lost. There were some lost keys that helped with the spider machine.

There was a pizza break, and we all sat down and chatted about the show. This was nice. I heard a cool ‘religious moment’ from one of my helpers. He loved a game at the Seattle Center Arcade -which is a mutual thing to me- and one particular game. While at one of the shows, he saw the game. It was the actual game from the SCA.

Finally, Oz -the guy in charge of the museum area- showed up to get things working. He had me reorganize the museum and kidzone a little bit so there was a demarcation line. We sort of debated about moving the pin machine with bad legs. We leaned it against another machine in the museum in the end.

He showed off the various games, and how they played. The boozetester had to have nickels to be played. The coin was the conductor to turn the machine on. The battery was going bad, so we could screw up a bit more. There was also a batting game, and a shooting game.

We also went into the arcade to grab other machines for the museum. It seems they were not labeled well enough, and ended up with the videogames.

The reason why I say not a videogame is because these machines don’t have computers in them. They are wires, and projectors that are incredibly fun to play. I had been researching them for months to give answers to folks, and have to admit, I was really enjoying seeing them in real life finally. Somehow they fit perfectly with the kid zone.

We had to switch two machines around for display reasons. It was my idea, so I can’t yell at anyone about it. There was going to be a batter game tournament, and then a Shrek Pinball tournament. We even had a trophy for the Shrek game. That monstrosity on the table is even cooler in person. Random doodads are glued to it.

There is also a pinball machine that lets you design your own. It has a hard metal surface with various pieces connected to magnets. You could move the pieces where ever you wanted, while the flippers, and shooter stood still. It was a lot of fun to play with, and sort of soothing to figure out what worked.

Tomorrow, I will give a tour of the games I really enjoyed. Right now though, I need sleep.