Arcade Cabinet Get!
If there be any of you who still doubt my awesomeness, let ye now be silenced. I was walking home tonight from Freeverse HQ, and at one point look up, and staring right back at me was this beauty. Me and Mr. Bruce Morrison have been kicking around setting up a game cabinet, and I thought this would be perfect. Really, the majority of the work goes into sawing the wood, putting it together, and making it look cool and/or authentic. And if Bruce’s woodworking skills are anything like mine, that would have ended in tears.
So with a little planning with Bruce, a handtruck loaned no charge from the nearby 24-hour Rite Aid (the only thing that’s open), two passers-by, who I will call Dude One and Dude Two, who helped me navigate some tricky gates, and finally a lovely local gal by the name of Jenna, who steadied this beast while I handtrucked it all the way back to my building, up the stair, through the door, up the elevator and into my apartment. It was a night of heroics that will not soon be forgotten.
That aside.
The cabinet is an interesting creature. It was originally a Mortal Kombat II machine, but has since been altered: if you look close, there are two light guns bolted to the front of it. (The guns themselves are in the cabinet here.) And since then, it’s been gutted. Which makes it perfect for us. What’s crazy is that this machine was going to be trashed. Cabinets are endangered enough as it is. I’m hoping we can give this baby a little love, bring it back to life, and it will preserve the classics as it rightly deserves.
Finally, while I was hauling this fucker around, sweat stinging my eyes, I was thinking how awesome it would be to make a coin-op game. It’s such a tiny niche that it would probably not be profitable (if you’re going for the old stand-in-front-of-cabinet-with-a-joystick-and-buttons approach) but I’ve always wanted to do it. When I was a kid, arcades were the height of gaming. You had your NES, but the arcade was where all the heavy shit went down. That’s where you went when you needed your mind blown.
Anyway, I’ve been kicking around a coin-op version of Kill Monty. It’s a perfect match for coin-op: quick games, killer difficulty, lots of smoke and eye candy. I would just need to turn all the menus into a looping attract mode, throw in my supremely awesome joystick code from the FicEngine, and tie it to some X-Arcade sticks. I’d also love to play around with my beat-em-up prototype more, drop it down to two players, and make it a new game for our cabinet. I would love like a Golden Axe type game, or maybe Narc. But first thing’s first! Now I just need to get this thing out of my place and into Freeverse HQ. That said, it does look kind of awesome just sitting in my apartment. I’ll miss it for sure!
Fic out.
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