Retro Games Party 5.5
They came, they saw, they played!
From all over the UK, 86 people descended upon Retro Games Party 5.5 on 31st August in Blackburn to play in total 48 video games, 4 pinballs, 1 Electro Mechanical gun game and relive an arcade experience never covered in the press any more.
Sure, we at Retro Games Party support public events like North East Retro Gaming, Revival and PlayExpo (2012) with the loan of machines but the media coverage has completely overlooked the arcade side of the retro gaming scene, instead concentrating all their sparse reviews on the pinball machines so our job is to re-raise the awareness of these classic bits of history.
We had worked very hard since our last party in April to expand the space available both for machines and visitors, fix machines that had presented problems following events, even rebuild new arrivals like Dig Dug and finally, in the last days leading up to this event, we were so happy that our Star Wars cockpit finally came to life.
Facebook has been lit up over the past few days following the party with feedback and, unlike the last few events, I managed to run around with my own camera and film what was going on.
This time we had more people from the pinball community due to our dedicated pinball room provided and maintained by Luke Wells of ArcadeUK as well as guests Melli, Bill and Matt Peakman who were winners of our competition run in conjunction with GamesYouLoved.
Chris Wilkins, RGP and Paul Hughes, 31/08/2013
Special Guests
Sometimes there’s a point comes up in doing these events that you’re really glad of a nice surprise and it’s nice when people bring people with them, Chris Wilkins of Revival Retro Events brought long time friend of his and equal retro enthusiast Paul Hughes (formerly of Ocean Software) who i’d been briefly in contact with a few years previous, having grown up with the Commodore 64 and most of Ocean’s games and then reading Paul’s site I can say it was an absolute pleasure to finally meet the man. Anyone who ever loaded an Ocean game on the C64 from tape will know the loader – this was the guy that wrote it. I’m not one for being a who-met-who but it’s nice to sometimes get a picture to remember things from.
Chris borrowed one of the rooms here at Retro Games Party HQ to perform an interview for a book he’s writing and I kind of barged in for a few minutes and got a bit of footage which is in the video.
Well behaved machines, well behaved players
I’m always constantly thankful that the machines live out the night, i’m not bothered if they fail the next day, at least everyone was able to play on them until they got switched off, this time fortunately everything behaved very well. Even the newly refurbished Star Wars cockpit survived 8 hours of service, it has a few niggles to iron out like an intermittently disappearing left speaker and the control yoke wants some work doing but those are minor compared to the utter sweat poured over the monitor, game board and power supply for nearly a year by our friend Nad Parvez (aka Equites), we owe this man a huge thanks in his own right.
The only machine that we couldn’t keep working was Battlezone, it seemed to be suffering with heat related issues, normally we can work around those quite easily but because of where we had placed the machine and the volume of people, sadly we had to turn it off after a couple of hours. It will go into the investigation pile as it had previously run for multiples of several hours.
Everyone who attends is always so pleasant to talk with, we have fans from older and younger generations who come and thankfully the old practice of slamming joysticks and control sticks about has ceased.
Below you’ll find the YouTube video but before you watch it, i’d like to say a huge thank you to the people that work behind the scenes with us to ensure the machines work and to help with the set-dressing side of it (moving the machines around, making sure we all have place to stand and talk, catering etc).
Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrBtk0DDL2g
