On November 15th and 16th, me and the founding Software Agent Chaz went to the Mariott Westchase on Briarpark Dr in Houston for some non-stop arcade action. With about 200 arcade cabs, over 100 pinball machines, dozens of consoles and computers, there were thousands of games to play and not enough time to play all of them.
Day 1
Chaz and I got there at just the right time. We did some filming in front of the hotel and claimed our passes. The arcade games and pinball machines were just about done being powered up, though a few needed maintenance. The first games I played and filmed were Journey by Bally-Midway, based on the band; and Polynesia a newer pinball game that is there to trick us; it looks like it was made with coconut technology but it just came out this year. There was also a Joust pinball in the entrance, a rarity: about 400 were ever made.
I said hi to my friend The Game Czar and went into the showroom where (almost) all of the arcade and pinball games were set-up. We had to get those filmed before the place got mobbed! Me and Chaz got a nice wide view of the set-up for Elvira's new pinball game: Elvira's House of Horrors by Stern; they had 3 beautiful tables sorted in a triangle for the general public to play. And play they did all through the weekend, House of Horrors was a hit! We had some interesting conversations about pinball, such as Chaz talking about how pinball scores inflated since the 1970s.
We checked out the Atari Games Corp. games all nicely lined up together. We filmed the Nintendo arcade games: the first few of which were lined up chronologically. One oddity that this line-up had was Heli-Fire, one of Nintendo's earliest games. This submarine Space Invaders-like game predates Donkey Kong by a good 2 years. I introduced Chaz to Vs. Hogans Alley, which he seemed to enjoy moderately. We competed for the high score... he won. We then moved to left to play some Arch-Rivals and then filmed the Rock-Ola games (Eyes and a multi with Nibbler and Fantasy installed on it), The Atari Trackball games, the Midway sports games, some Sega classics, Ice Cold Beer, a few Taito and SNK games.
Overwhelmed by the loud music that was playing, we retreated into the console and admissions room (one of the two rooms) and filmed the displays provided by Brian of The Guru Guys: he had a modded Dreamcast, a Dreamcast dedicated to Typing of the Dead, The Genesis with a 32X and Sega CD docked into it, a Sega Saturn with a gorgeous Bomberman paintjob, 3DO, two Vectrexes, an Atari Jaguar, a Phillips CD-i (it was taken down to make way for another vendor, sadly) a Super Nintendo inside a light-up kiosk and finally a VR set up! Lots of greatness and quirky oddities on one table! I spent a lot of time here! I then filmed their computers: they had Amiga, Commodore 64, Macs, Apple II and a PC-88.
Commodore 64
A gentleman by the name of Anton Gale who's shared some of his cool mods on Twitter had two displays up: CPS2 and Neo Geo darksoft thingamajigs. These run the arcade ROMs on the actual hardware. He made other modifications (such as HDMI output) to improve the experience. Chaz enjoyed the pinball machines from the 1970s, he did not care much for the ones from the 1990s.
I met up with one of my friends, filmed until my camera and cell phone died and then charged my camera as me and Chaz ate dinner. Chaz went to sleep and I spent the rest of the night filming and playing games. I also spoke with the people at Ultra Dolphin Revolution, Houston-based video game developer while they were settling down. I left the floor at 1 am, and stayed up until 4 in the morning editing footage.
Day 2
I got up at 8, had my breakfast and went to the show floor as soon as I could to film the arcade when it was quieter. After an hour of filming, I quickly left the showroom and returned to the console room.
Atari Games era machines.
There were several seminars throughout the weekend. I was interested in two but ultimately could only make time for one: Eugene Jarvis' panel. I saw Jarvis covertly examining the show floor checking out the Williams pinball machines and Stargate, one of the games he worked on. Jarvis was essentially the con's guest of honor; if you're not familiar with his work, he designed a lot of big games at Williams and Midway such as Defender, Stargate, Robotron 2084, Narc, and the Cruis’n series. Jarvis currently works for a development studio/publisher he co-founded: Raw Thrills which continues the Midway tradition of delivering an in-your-face arcade experience. They're known for making Target: Terror, The Fast and Furious arcade racing games, World's Largest Pac-Man and Space Invaders Frenzy.
Jarvis talked about his time at Atari, Williams and briefly touched upon his Midway days before taking questions for about 45 minutes. As an incentive to answer questions, audience members would get a random t-shirt from a bag. Everyone's hands shot up. I asked him about the development costs of Narc and what hardware was used. Jarvis explained that Narc was expensive to produce because it used a lot of custom hardware to make the high-resolution (for the time) graphics and high-quality sound possible and that the game "was meant to be played in an arcade". I won a Raw Thrills T-Shirt for my question.
Raw Thrills T-shirt I got!
I followed that up with many hours of filming, a great dinner, more filming, more playing games with my buddy and filming until my camera died and we finally got out of there at midnight.
Overall, Houston Arcade Expo 2019 had an outstanding collection of arcade, console and pinball games and was an extremely positive experience. I got to play some games I can only touch once in a blue moon, I briefly met an industry icon and caught up with some truly cool people. It was well worth the 13-month wait and I’m genuinely sad it’s over.
