In the coming days retrogame fans that are also iPhone owners are in for a treat.  If you liked Peter’s rendition of Adventure, you’re gonna love this:

This is one of those posts i’ve wanted to do for a long time and finally got around to. If you had to put on paper your top ten retrogames what would they be? Harder to come up with than you’d think. First, I put some rules on it, I had to own the computer/console and it was pre super nintendo. The idea for me is not so much the best games or consoles in terms of gameplay, but more in terms of impact to my thinking about games. Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in a while a restoration comes along that has it all, a tremendous resurrection of an extremely rare machine designed by my favorite game designer..  In this case, SUNDANCE.  This is the story of an extremely rare Vectorbeam Sundance that a fellow collector purchased from Ebay. Apparently this machine sat out in a field under a tarp for years before hitting ebay. This has been my most extreme restoration attempt to date. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve not joined the community at Coinopspace.com now’s the time. There’s an interactive chat scheduled for feb 4, 2009 with none other than the creator of my Screw Loose game, Tim Skelly! Join the fun!

Through the years almost every classic gamer finds a particular game designer whose games they find universally enjoyable whether they realize it or not.   A few years into collecting I realized that many of my favorite games were really written by two designers (well 3).  Tim Skelly (Warrior, Star Castle, Reactor) and the team of Owen Rubin and Mark Czerny (Major Havoc and Marble Madness).  That short list of designers comprise 50% of my all time favorite games.  Through the course of collecting without even realizing that Tim Skelly wrote them, I managed to collect Warrior, Star Castle, Reactor, Starhawk and Rip Off.  I also did an extremely extensive restoration of a very very rare Sundance cabinet, a very little known Skelly creation.  Read the rest of this entry »

As promised, the front kickplate for Zookeeper has been scanned and vectored and sent to Rich for silkscreening. This completes the artistic effort, now it’s on to production!

Well, with great joy, sadness and confusion I completed my treatment at the UF proton therapy center on New Years’s eve. After a long year of doctor visits, tests, surgeries, certainties and uncertainties it all finally came to an end. Everything that can be done, has been. Now it’s up to nature and time to see if it all worked. The way it was explained to me, ’success’ is judged as no new growth from the tumor. It will take years for the now irradiated cancer cells to be absorbed by my body to effectively remove the tumor.

As my final radiation treatment was underway I expected that I would be jubilant and ready to leap from the gantry table and run home to resume my life as it was. Shocker to me, exactly the opposite feelings happened. An intense sadness and confusion has hit me pretty hard, I still don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know if it’s just a stage of recovery I didn’t read about or what but the urge right now to walk away from everything I know and start new is intense. I truly never expected this, right up to the very end.

On the positive side, I really can’t say enough about the team at the Proton Therapy center. The most caring and good hearted people one could ask for when going through something like this. If you or someone you know is diagnosed with cancer of the head, neck or brain you owe it to them to inform them about this type of treatment. For many people it could be a life saving but also quality of life saving treatment. In my case, it was the one and only option. Overall, despite the fears and sometimes pain of it all the last 12 months have been the most eye opening and sobering of my life. It’s been a hell of a fight so far and hopefully this is the end. It really has put everything in the world as I know it in perspective and I think a lot of unanticipated changes will be the net result as the task of mentally recovering from a physical issue progresses.

The next steps are really years of monitoring, an MRI and visit to the proton center 4 times a year pretty much indefinitely.

Thanks to everyone who sent their well wishes and supported me during this time, it means more than you realize. Happy New Year!

/brian

Had an NOS piece of this art sent to me by Jon Exidy so it was a quick vector task.. here’s the art, ready to print and contour cut.  I’ll get some of these done over my xmas break.

Something people were looking for on KLOV so I ran these real quick on the laser.. Plexiglas clear dust rings for Nintendo joysticks/panels and the ABS plastic ring that goes under the panel.. these are 2.25 a set shipped (first class mail) or 2.00 per set for orders of more than one set. Individual pieces, 1.00 each.

Here’s another project i’m working on.. Lots of people want custom buttons for their game but don’t necessarily want to paint them or apply stickers. To that end, I sourced a nifty chemical that allows me to mark nylon game buttons with a permanent black mark using the laser engraver. The first step was to order the chemical, the second was to create a jig that I can use to precisely position the button in the laser for engraving.. The pic above is the jig I made today. I have a bunch of white nylon short stem buttons so the first item i’ll be offering using this process will be Burgertime Pepper buttons. Once this process is proven, i’ll be able to make highly detailed buttons completely custom to your design!