Welcome to Classic Arcade News Feed for January 2019! This is the second instalment in this series. Feedback was good from last month’s inaugural news article, so I can see this being a regular feature here on Arcade Blogger.

Let’s get to it!

First up is a great interview with American Classic Arcade Museum curator and founder Gary Vincent on NPR radio. Gary is a supporter of Arcade Blogger, and here he talks about how he started work at Funspot Arcade in New Hampshire and the creation of ACAM. This is a great listen and well worth ten minutes of your time.

You can listen to the interview here.

Earlier this month, I visited the EAG Trade show here in London, where the great and good of modern arcade manufacturers show off their wares to operators and arcade owners from all over the globe. I covered last year’s show here in some detail. Sadly this year’s event wasn’t quite so interesting from a video games perspective, with much of what was on show regurgitated from last year (or at least that was my opinion). However, there were a few highlights, not least of which were Stern Pinball’s two most recent releases on display, namely The Munsters in both LE and Premium guises and The Beatles. Both were good fun to play, Munsters especially:

The only other thing I thought worthy of sharing was a pic of the Atari licensed Pong tables, which were on display. Pretty cool looking:

Over on the KLOV forums, user “pcjohn” shared a couple of pictures of his 3D printed encoder wheel for a Missile Command trackball:

Great to see modern technology being used to keep these old classics alive. This does bring to the fore again the debate about spare parts for our old classic arcade machines. Parts like this are becoming less and less available. I can see 3D printing being one of the saviours of the hobby as the years go by. Check out the original thread here.

I stumbled across a couple of cool pictures shared by someone on Twitter (sorry I can’t remember who shared them!). Here you can see Darius cabinets being built on the factory floor at Taito in Japan:

I’m sure we’re all familiar with AirBnB. How about staying in a place that gives you exclusive access to a classic arcade during your stay? Well, should you find yourself needing somewhere to stay in Georgia, you get exactly that if you choose to stay at Don Hopkins’ Oasis Arcade & AirBnB!

Located near to Atlanta, GA, this small home has great reviews, and is available for rent here. Tell Don I sent you!

Coinopwarehouse are pickers specialising in coin operated machines. Located in Maryland, they recently listed for sale a very rare game called Blasted. Released by Bally in 1988, it was the result of a somewhat troubled development:

Originally, this game was a 4 player shooter known as International Team Laser, an attempt to capitalise on the lazer craze of the late 1980s. However, the game was canned, and its game play elements were re-themed to create Blasted, which included reducing the number of players from 4 to 2.

Now the fact that this game has turned up is interesting in itself, but someone pointed out that the game was developed by the legendary Brian Colin. Brian subsequently shared a couple of Polaroids of him and his wife posing from back in the day – turns out these pictures were used as the basis of the original side art that you can see on the arcade cabinet!

How cool is that? Check out the original listing here.

It’s always heartening to see that world records are still being broken on classic arcade games. Over in Europe, Petr Prokop recently broke though the million point barrier on Universal’s Cosmic Alien, and in the process, achieving a new world record:

You can read an interview with Petr here on Twin Galaxies.

And talking of world records, Bill Rosa broke the Tapper record just last week at Full Blast Arcade.

You can watch Bill’s performance on the recorded stream here. A nice write up was done by the local Chronicle.

And finally, back here in England, the Highways Agency have just launched an awareness campaign aimed at reminding drivers not to tailgate. What’s cool is they have licensed use of the Space Invaders franchise from Taito to make the point!

You can watch the ad below:

Remember kids, don’t be a Space Invader.

And that’s your lot for January’s Classic Arcade Gaming news.

If you have an arcade related story worthy of attention, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll feature it in next month’s news feed.

Thanks as always for reading this week – do feel free to share this article on your favourite social media platform!

See you next time.

Tony