SC3 / Arcade party 9-26-09 RECAP
Neither extreme temperatures, botched cake orders, nor vicious hornet
attacks could keep SC3 down during our September 26th arcade party in
Claremont. But they didn't exactly make things easy. Southern
California's famous Santa Ana winds were responsible for 100-degree
temperatures all weekend. Believe us, when your setup process consists
of moving heavy '80s arcade cabinets around, you feel the heat. Still,
the work was worth it; after all, it led to the SC3 debuts of Food
Fight, Marble Madness, Pooyan, Asteroids Deluxe, and the rarely-seen
Stern game Rescue. Our good friend Paul Dean braved the heat to bring
us another game that had never been at SC3 before: the unusual 1988
shooter Assault. In addition to home consoles and multicarts, Mitch
came through with Atari's black-and-white classic Football -- yet
another SC3 debut. Paul also brought Donkey Kong and Warlords, which
are always crowd favorites.
We had about 30+ arcade games set on freeplay. Lots of new games to
be played like Food Fight, Marble Madness, Pooyan and more!
And then there was the cake. If you've been to SC3 in the past two
years, you know that a wacky, videogame-themed cake has become one of
our traditions. This time, our cake celebrated the SC3 debut of Food
Fight. The idea was to have a bakery "print" a Food Fight screenshot
on the top, and then to build a 3D Charley Chuck and chefs out of
marzipan. The ice cream cone would be portrayed by a piece of Japanese
ice cream cone-shaped candy. All was going according to plan, but we
were a little late getting our cake order to the bakery, who then
promptly forgot that we'd even placed an order in the first place. In
desperation, Geoff asked them to give us a solid black cake, and then
painstakingly recreated the Food Fight elements out of frosting, food
coloring, marzipan, and the cone candy. The end result probably turned
out better than the original idea -- a testament to Geoff's artistic
skills -- but it was nerve-wracking there for a while. We know
expectations are high for SC3 cakes, and we didn't want to end up with
egg on our face... although maybe that wouldn't have been that
inappropriate, given the whole Food Fight theme. Oh well, it turned
out fine, and marzipan is actually quite tasty.
The one thing we weren't able to adequately fix before the party was
the big-screen video selection. Originally, we had planned to show a
classic '80s movie in which an Atari 5200 game plays a central role.
You know the one. Anyway, each organizer thought the other had it and
was bringing the DVD, only to learn right before the meeting started
that none of us actually owned it. To make matters worse, we didn't
even have a DVD player, and had to rely to an eclectic mix of bizarre
'80s videos and Japanese clips we had on a portable video device. It
wasn't 100% videogame-themed, and for that we apologize. It won't
happen again. SC3 is all about videogames, and only videogame videos
will be shown in the future.
On a more positive video note, this party marked the premiere of the
SC3 webcam. An archive of the September 26th feed can be viewed at
justin.tv. This was our first experiment with webcams, and
unsurprisingly we ran into a few setup and technical issues. Still,
this idea has some major potential and we're hopeful to get some more
comprehensive video feeds set up at future events. Keep in mind that
what you can see on the archived webcast is but a tiny fraction of
what SC3 has to offer!
Yes, there was plenty going on besides the Rock Band room and garage
arcade you can see in the webcast. Mike from online auction site
ChaseTheChuckwagon.com returned to SC3 carrying a parcel of vintage
gaming goodies that were given away for free or raffled off to lucky
winners. Congratulations, whoever won that Pac-Man lunchbox! Robert
Bernardo of the Fresno Commodore Users Group attempted to show off
Shredz64, the Commodore 64 version of Guitar Hero (yes, it exists),
but found that nobody had a working C64 on hand. Undaunted, Robert
hooked up a VIC-20 with multicart, giving our attendees a chance to
play this underappreciated machine. Thanks, Robert! Home consoles
seemed to get a lot of love this time. There was a constant steam of
people playing multiplayer N64, SNES and Sega Saturn games. We had
intended to get an 8-player Saturn Bomberman game going, but weren't
able to locate a copy of the game in time. Luckily, people contented
themselves with Twinbee and Bust-A-Move projected on a big outdoor
screen.
Speaking of home consoles, we're very proud of SC3 member
George Riley, who bested his own world-record score on Atari 2600
Galaxian at the event. You might have missed him tucked away next to
the Turkey Shoot machine, but homer played that game for something
close to five hours, finally amassing a final score of close to
200,000 (he could have kept going, but he'd already topped the
previous record by about 40,000 points and didn't feel the need to
prove his point any further). Congratulations, homer! Hector Rodriguez, who was
going for the NES Track & Field record, wasn't quite able to get into
the groove, unfortunately. Better luck next time.
It seems like there was a lot of talk about high scores at this
meeting. People were vying for high point totals on Mad Planets and
Tron all night, and the machines were displaying crazy high scores by
the end of the evening. All this action made all of us at SC3 feel
that we had achieved our goal of bringing back the early '80s, if just
for one night. We even overhead someone in the garage arcade saying to
a friend, "This place is like a time machine, isn't it?" to which the
friend readily agreed. Comments like this make facing all those
hornets and 100-degree temperatures worthwhile.
The next SC3 meeting is tentatively scheduled for April 2010, although
plans are really up in the air at this point. As always, keep an eye
on our Future Meeting Page for details as they emerge.
Click on this link to view 350+ pictures that we have collected from
attendees...
http://tiny.cc/MGyWA
Videos from SC3...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgIUZWFwOk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8wHqMem9lE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJWD2YTpDXU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQzDymV9eIs
http://tiny.cc/x2ICG
Articles about SC3...
http://tiny.cc/Y6aBc
http://tiny.cc/wWCgp
View the webcam archives...
http://www.justin.tv/clip/f1b0860529c3d461
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