If you are curious about old arcade games and live around, or passing through Chicago, I highly recommend Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. Almost 900 arcade games going back to the 70s. They even have a coin-op Pong. All of the games are set to free play and it’s $25 to play all day long. They had every arcade game I could remember from my childhood at Aladdin’s Castle in Lincoln Mall. Even the really weird hologram Time Traveler game.
The MADE needs volunteers! Email info@themade.org to find out how to volunteer and help us restore old systems, teach kids to code, or just help people play games!
I just took my 9 year old to MADE while visiting SF and we had a great time. He loved trying out the older systems and we spent at least 5 hours there!
I used to live on that street, that's an awesome location. Lots of conferences come through the Marriott there and it's a nice little street that gets a good amount of foot traffic.
9th between Washington and Broadway is such a great little block. The only problem is I get so mad when I think about how that whole area was like that before 1960, when they bulldozed 9000 cute little buildings to put in the freeway.
I took a trip to San Francisco in March 2020, and this was on my list of places to visit. Kind of fell by the wayside as COVID more-or-less started in the US a couple days into the trip.
It was a really odd time, almost everything was still open, yet downtown SF very quickly became a ghost town. My wife and I joke now that the best time to visit a big city is at the start of a pandemic.
I’ll have to make it back to see the museum sometime.
Just visited it yesterday - and here it is on the HN front page. :)
I was surprised to find out how they rely on modded consoles and presumably pirated ROMs. This just shows how much the emulation/modding scene means for video game preservation and how short-sighted corporations like Nintendo are, litigating and trying to shut down these efforts.
>“We don't think that it's enough just to preserve the artifacts. We believe that the artifacts should be used for something, which is to inspire the next generation,”
Using hardware might mean it breaks faster and some will be hard or impossible te repair. I don't think using is bad, but the more rare thing should be protected.
Is a thing locked behind glass truly any better than a collection of photos, videos, and 3D scans? Is there even any difference between a working unit and a broken one when you can't touch either?
Besides, if you're using something and it stops working it's much easier to find and fix the one thing that's broken than it is to repair the unit when you only touch it again twenty years later and a dozen components have degraded.
https://www.gallopingghostarcade.com/