Ryan Harvey has been playing arcade games his entire life. As a Japanese major at UT, he became a regular at Einstein’s Arcade, and like most of its customers, he was devastated when it shut down.
But his love of gaming was not to be stymied, and he set out to create his own vision of what a true arcade should be, birthing Arcade UFO. Now, armed with an expanding clientele and the goal of reviving arcading throughout the Southwest, he’s playing to win.
My very first video game was an arcade game when I was one year old. It was “Vs. Super Mario Bros.,” and I played in a convenience store in Mount Pleasant. We stacked up milk cartons, and [my parents] stood me on top of them to play.
Without question, “Street Fighter 2” was the most influential game of my childhood. It was the game I played the most at arcades. Anyone that wasn’t playing “Street Fighter 2” in arcades when it was new missed out on a huge part of American society and revolution.
There was one time I went to Six Flags with a bunch of friends. I checked out the arcade and they had just gotten “NBA Jam.” I started playing it and that’s all I did all day. I didn’t ride any rides, I just played “NBA Jam” the whole time.
I did a direct exchange program to a suburb of Tokyo and lived in Japan for a year. That spawned my interest in Japanese arcades. Japanese arcades have a different style; the game cabinets are different, the control panels are different.
When Einstein’s closed, it hit all of us, the regulars, really hard. Within about three days we discovered they’d be auctioning off a lot of their arcade games to whoever was the highest bidder. A friend of mine and I got together and decided that we should purchase a few of the games and set them up in a location temporarily while loftily thinking of a place to put more.
I purchased six machines from Einstein’s. We put those games in a LAN center up north. There was one other person that bought two games that we wanted to buy also. I met the other person because I was thinking, “What loony person would have bought these games?” I spoke with her, and she is now the co-owner of Arcade UFO.
We’re doing a promotion with Stride Gum called Save the Arcades. They created a flash game for savethearcades.com called “Zapatar.” It appears to be an old-school, horizontal, side-scrolling shooting game. You play and earn points, and after the game is over, you have the option of donating those points to one of the four arcades, of which we are one.
The promotion goes until Oct. 6, and whichever arcade has the most points will win a $25,000 cash prize. We call it the “Stride Stimulus” if we win.
Does arcading have a place in today’s society? Absolutely.
Arcades are still thriving in every country except for the United States, including Canada. There was a massive failure in the way arcades were handled in the United States in the 1990s. You had a trend towards redemption games, the games where you receive tickets. Distributors recommended to all their buyers that redemption is the way of the future. In the late ‘90s, these places turned into kiddie joints that gave you tickets, took your money and gave you a temporary feeling of fun.
A true video arcade game is like a battle between the player and the game because the game wants another 50 cents and the player is trying to survive past that, and it propels people to do crazy things, which makes it fun to watch and be a part of.
Arcade UFO is a real arcade. Our games are fun, and they have replay value, which redemption can’t offer.
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