Long time readers may have noticed ZNF contributor and TiVo fan Davis Freeberg has gone silent. Well, I’m stoked to share that he’s been putting his free time to better use in launching a Bay Area startup… and unlike so many others, we’re not talking Web 2.0 and Ruby — Davis is taking on the real world with what I like to refer to as the Netflix of Arcade Games. No, not Xbox One or PS4, rather classic gaming cabinets (as you might have gathered from the photograph above). For $75/month, All You Can Arcade offers:
- Keep your games as long as you want or pick a different one each month.
- No delivery or pick up fees
- Unlimited gaming without breaking your piggy bank. All of our arcade games are set to free play.
- No late fees or long term commitments, cancel your membership at any time.
- Wide selection of adventure, racing, sports, shooters and RPG games to choose from.
While I have to admit I had some doubts early on, Davis seems to be having the adventure of the lifetime (although the shipping container in the backyard filled with game components, along with every room of the house, is a little out of control). And the coverage (AP, SF Chronicle) has been overwhelmingly positive. We wish Davis all the best and although we miss his TiVo and Netflix coverage, he’s resumed blogging… about arcade games, without the pen name, over at All You Can Arcade.
If I were in the Bay Area and didn’t think my wife would bring up that I have no money to be renting arcade machines, I’d definitely want Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… Definitely.
Stargate. Marble Madness. Qixx. Graviton.
“Unlimited gaming without breaking your piggy bank. All of our arcade games are set to free play.”
Now, y’see that destroys my entire incentive.
I want a 1st gen Asteroids machine, so I can play for six hours a day for a dollar. (Pro-tip: learn to hunt the li’l saucers…)
Also, Davis is missing the lucrative sideline.
I’d genuinely pay $200/month for All You Can Pinball.
Those ’80’s/early ’90’s Williams designers were like Kubrick, Hitchcock, and Welles.
“Stargate. Marble Madness. Qixx. Graviton.”
Joust. Tempest. Asteroids. Battlezone. Defender. Xaxon. Joust.
(Something about them vector graphics always appealed to me. But the Sound FX and excellent both one and two player gameplay in Joust trumped all that.)
I’m so glad to hear about this! Davis clued me in to it a while ago, but I was worried since I had not heard anything. Totally great idea, totally great guy doing it. I’m going to check now to see if they have my all-time favorite, Tempest.
I second Qixx, Joust and Tempest, agree Joust audio was top notch. Would also go for the more modern Arkanoid and what was that game with two analog controllers where you kill robots or something at a very fast pace? (Edit: Remembered it… Robotron).
You guys are great, Zatz has a great community. I miss duking.it out over tivo with you. We picked up a defender today in fresno with a bad flyback. It will take 3 hours, but I Hope to have a working game by morning. No joust but asteroids tempest and tmnt all make an appearance in our portfolio. We own over 200 games at this point.
We haven’t forgotten about pins and our currently beta testing at different price points. We’re not really sure how to charge a deposit on $3000 – $5000 value games without making it so prohibitive that people won’t have enough cash to rent the game.
Awesome idea Davis! I second the pinball idea as well.
“Would also go for the more modern Arkanoid”
Yeah. That was oddly good, wasn’t it? I have a vivid memory of being snowed in with a friend as the airplanes were grounded, and spending far too many hours in a hotel bar getting drunk and playing a table console of Arkanoid. We were TRAPPED IN SPACE WARPED BY SOMEONE…
(Table consoles. What a concept.)
“and what was that game with two analog controllers where you kill robots or something at a very fast pace? (Edit: Remembered it… Robotron).”
It’s weird. I never officially “liked” Robotron, but I sure did dump a whole lot of quarters in that machine. Hypnotic.
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“We haven’t forgotten about pins and our currently beta testing at different price points.”
Woo-hoo!
Our greatest national art form. (Cinema doesn’t count, since the Euros played a big part there. But Chicago is all ours.) Fiorello La Guardia may have a wonderful mayor in many, many ways, but I’ll never forgive him for his bizarrely misguided anti-pin campaign.
And do I love Attack from Mars so deeply because it was the greatest machine of all time, or simply just because it was the last great machine? Probably the latter, but I can never really tell for sure.
High Speed, (the Citizen Kane of the art form). Taxi. Earthshaker. Whirlwind. Fun House.
ah — I thought he was doing what I had seen somewhere on line — put a dedicated PC in an old cabinet – give it the software so it can emulate various video games and then hook the controllers to an interface so it plays original style.
That would make business sense because then with an internet connection folks can switch up games (within limitations of the cabinet) without pickup/delivery costs against the bottom line
but then Frreberg is smnart enough to think of this so………
I imagine there are complex, and possibly, inaccessible licensing considerations associated with that approach…
yep, could be right. Does Freeberg deal with games on the East Coast? I know someone who had some of the old console games?
“I imagine there are complex, and possibly, inaccessible licensing considerations associated with that approach…”
Yup. My thought exactly. Not to mention that emulating all the different antique silicon wouldn’t be trivial.
And that’s not even touching on the fact that pretty much every single console had unique physical controllers.
However, a slightly more practical e-solution would be downloading the consoles to your 3D printer ;)
I figured licensing would be the kicker but lets be fair — you can emulate just about any old arcade game very closely on standard Desktop PCs so that part is actually done(they just are not exactly legal)
and I already noted the limitation of the cabinet and its controllers – so you simply will not get Mortal Combat on that Pacman console.but that would just simply be keeping lists of what games would be available on which console cabinet.
I wonder if any of the licesning has expired on these games??
We set up our site, so that anyone who owns an arcade game can take a photo, input the maximum numbers of miles they want to drive and we can find customers that are local to them, so we’ll be on the East coast in short order. By crowdsourcing the rentals, it allows us to do this on a national scale even though we’re only operating in the bay area right now.
We think about half of all arcade games have been converted from their dedicated cabinets into MAMEs at this point, Since we have to use original hardware on our games to ensure compliance with the licensing issues, we have a big incentive to get those games legal again.
I’ve had to learn how to get pretty handy with a soldering iron to keep them running and to deconvert MAMEs, but there’s a certain elegance to 1980s electronics that add to the appeal of working on them. In order to utilize MAMEs, we only really need to license a single game because the hardware isn’t illegal, as much as the unauthorized games that it plays. Whether we support indie developers who want to turn their new games into rentable arcade cabinets or are able to convince a major publisher to let us pay them money for access to their games, we think that we can use the bootleg MAMEs and multipboards eco-system of games to create a way a revenue stream for publishers who haven’t been compensated by the bootlegs. Our dream arcade would be to get the license for the next Civilization game and create a 2 – 4 player cocktail for it, where you can play global nuclear war games with your friends. Who knows if we can get Take Two to let us do it, but it would be pretty cool to be able to start creating new arcade games again.
“We think about half of all arcade games have been converted from their dedicated cabinets into MAMEs at this point”
Wow. Who’da thunk it? Not me.
“I’ve had to learn how to get pretty handy with a soldering iron to keep them running and to deconvert MAMEs, but there’s a certain elegance to 1980s electronics that add to the appeal of working on them.”
Kudos, dear sir.
There is a terroir thing going on here. You can emulate, but it’s going to be subtly different in deleterious ways. Gameplay will suffer. The entire UX will suffer. Be an artisan to make your business succeed.
I can make my pasta gravy with peanut oil instead of olive oil, but would you feed quarters into that meal?
I’m targeting you for All You Can Pinball in NYC in 12 to 18 months. Don’t let me down. (As far as deposits go, couldn’t you go with the whole ‘Screw with the games, you’re banned from the Arcade/Bar’ idea? No? Well, then, just charge a deposit, be fair about normal wear and tear, and the junkies will pay the deposit.)
Ha, I had no idea that was Davis, looks good!