29: Coin Ops & Sweat Shops

All right! Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Grumpy Old Geeks episode 29. This week with a special guest and a studio audience. And a late start and we're all in the booze again, apparently. Hell yeah! No, dude, I drove from Pennsylvania to Chicago today. I'm allowed to have a beer six.

Oh, fuck. It's finally like five o'clock here, so I've already had a beer and a half, maybe two. And also, I don't know if you follow Grumpy Old Geeks on, say, Facebook or Twitter, you would have saw in the photo of the Jameson banana that I've been working on.

And I took a little taste today, not going to lie. Is it ready? Is it good to go? No, it needs to sit for another day or two, but it's already beautiful. This is going to be an amazing thing. Or the death of you, one of the two. Or the death of me. I'm just going to have to make sure that I only make it like once every six months.

So that's going to become a seasonal drink. Because it's going to make you very seasoned very quick. So, since I said I was driving to Chicago today, so I am coming to you live from Combustion Manor, home of Mike Vinacore and the Punk Rock Vault and Game Mecca.

I'm very excited about this. How was your drive, Jason? Is everything good? I'm fucking jealous that you're in Chicago. Amazing. Well, I'm not actually in Chicago. I'm in the suburbs, so that doesn't really count. Eh, well, close enough. The drive is boring as shit, man.

Have you ever driven across Ohio and Indiana? No. The one time I did the cross-country drive, I went straight across the southeast. So, I did like the two and a half days through Texas. But I've never done the north. Did you get a pot-belly sub yet?

Nope. On the list. On the list. Okay. Although my pot-belly companion has given up on pot-belly, so I have to go by myself. What are you going to do? No, it was a fine drive. It was flattered than a 12-year-old girl. What are you going to do? Just nothing to see.

Same problem. But I made it here. We're good to go. All right. So, what's going on with you? Come on. Tell me something. I've had a super stupid busy week. I would love to tell you stuff, but I can't because I'll probably get fired.

So, yeah. Good times. Okay. Okay. Got any follow-up from last week? Because I do. Oh, well, you launch into it. I have a couple things. Okay. Remember when I talked about Chrome auto-updating? And doing all that stupid shit? Yes. Well, it came up with a new update this week that put a notifications icon in my menu bar.

Well, we don't like that. And there's no way to turn it off. I had to go hack Chrome to figure out how to turn it off. So, if you have a Mac or a PC, I think they probably did this on the PC, too, with these stupid notifications. Right. Go to your URL or your browser bar, you know, your location.

Type in Chrome, colon, slash, slash, slash, flags, and then do a search for notification, or just notif. Notif will get you there. Right. And turn that shit off. Restart it, and you're good to go. Excellent. There were, like, hundreds of people pissing and moaning about it on the Chrome boards.

So, because these auto-updates are, they're non-optional now. They do it regardless. See, and again, like I said last week, I'm still using Firefox until it doesn't work, and then I have to switch to some other browser. But I don't really feel like switching to Chrome anymore.

Chrome is starting to scare the hell out of me. It's still faster. It's still better. It's still safer. Right. So, it's just these, you know, Google pushing this shit on us for no good reason is getting annoying. Yeah. So. Well, I found a bit of a link on Huffington Post that was actually useful to me, which is shocking.

And it didn't involve tits. No side boob? No. No side boob whatsoever. I found a little article called The Very Best Hidden iOS 7 Features. And I didn't know a lot of this stuff. Fantastic. Really good stuff. We'll have the entire link in our show notes, but my favorite one, make your iPhone vibrate however you want.

You can actually set the vibration pattern now. Yeah, you didn't know that? No, I had no idea. I just found this out. Okay, do you have it open? Can you list them down, and I'll say yay or nay if I already knew them? Yeah. We'll play a game. We'll play a little game. Number one, make your iPhone vibrate however you want.

Yeah, I already sold that one. Okay, well, that's fantastic to me. I've already done it. Okay. Two, undo the email delete with the shake. Yep. You can undo anything. Undo Command Z or Control Z. That's shake the phone. I've actually never done that before. It's been in iOS for years.

Okay, next. Number three is super lame. Control your device by moving your head. What? Now you can control your iPad or iPhone with your head. Not your brain, yet, but your head. iOS 7 can use your front-facing camera to detect head movements.

Okay, that's new. I didn't know that. It's under accessibility switch control. Oh. So you can fuck around with that. I like going into other people's phones when they're not looking or taking a dump. And you go into accessibility and invert the colors. And when they come back, everything's black. Black and orange.

Right. It's like Halloween. Hey, it's a good trick for Halloween. All right. Next. Number four. Use your flashlight for alerts. Yep. Seen that. Okay. Number five. Never miss a link your friends tweeted out. How so? Safari now syncs up with your Twitter feed to show you all the tweets in your stream with links in them.

When you're in Safari, you go to the bottom of the window, hit the bookmarks button, and then press the at symbol to see all of your Twitter feed's recent links. How fucking lame is that? Yeah, it's kind of lame. I didn't like that one either. And then they said that there were seven, and the article cuts off after five.

Hey, Huffington Post. Way to cut corners. Hey, Huffington Post. Okay. Way to fuck up a listicle. Anyways, I was just happy about creating the vibration pattern. I love that one. That's amazing. Yeah. Don't you do like tap it? Do like a little tap pad, like a little drum pad? Tap, tap, tap, tap, and then you can record custom vibrations.

Awesome. There you go. So when my mom calls, I'll just have to type SOS, SOS, SOS. Exactly. So remember when I was talking before about never browse from an admin account? Like you set up your computer so you've got like a browse account and then your straight up admin account?

Yeah. There's a new XKCD comic that – it's pretty funny, but it's completely wrong. And somebody sent this to me. It's like, okay, so on my user account, you can get to my Dropbox, my photos, Facebook, Gmail, PayPal, and my bank.

Oh, but you can't install drivers because it's not an admin account, which, yeah, it's cute. It's funny, but it completely defeats the purpose of the whole point where you can just delete that user account if somebody hacks it instead of having your whole machine owned and having it sent off to repair, you know, and to some little nerd with zits on his ass trying to figure out how to get the malware off of there.

That's the point of it. So if you've seen that one, what the hell? Did you just drop something? Drop a deuce? I dropped my glass on the table. Sorry. Stay away from the Jameson, man. Stay away. I know.

The banana Jameson is already getting crazy. Yeah, the XKCD stuff is good. I mean, we put up, I think, a far better one throughout the day, though, or throughout the week on the Grumpy Old Geeks page, the security one. Yeah, I sent you that one. Yeah, you sent me that one.

It's, you know, how people look at security and your data and your information being out there. And I have come across to the side of the sage, which you have always been on the side of, which is basically... Yeah, I've been sitting there for a long time.

Yeah, it's basically, screw it. Nobody cares. It's just data. It's not real. But my burrito is real. Yes, the burrito is real, Jason. So it was a fun one. We'll link it in the show notes, just in case you don't follow us on Facebook, which you should. But that's about it for the news this week.

I mean, besides the government not working and everything else. Yeah, we're still in government shutdown and it doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon and nobody seems to care. Yeah, that's about where we're at. Everything else is kind of boring. We've been recording for like 12 minutes and Mike hasn't shit on me yet.

I'm waiting. Well, you guys, I was planning to be introduced. I didn't know I was supposed to be part of this first segment. I was waiting to introduce him, but Brian kept talking. I was waiting to drop off a fucking. Well, that is my gimmick name for you, Brian, is the fucking.

Well, by all means, let's introduce before we cut out. Okay. So I'm sitting here with Mike Vinicor, old friend and game designer and photographer and writer and record mogul, label producer, everything. I mean, this guy's been around for doing shit forever.

Yeah, and it's weird because I have... Oh, hello, everybody. It's weird because like all these things I do, they all kind of like intertwined upon each other and one kept leading to the next thing, which is like I fell into this career literally by accident because I was at a punk rock show. So have Jason and I, apparently.

Oh, yeah. That's the way a lot of this worked. Yeah, I got into the video game industry in like 1994 because I was a huge video game geek growing up. And one day I was at a, ironically, I was at a Bull Weevil show, which is the band that Jason and I are going to see tomorrow. And I saw some dude there wearing a Mortal Kombat shirt.

And I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan. Like, it's all I cared about. And that's the game that has the ice guy, right? He could like shoot. Yeah, I remember that one. I played that for a while and I always played that guy. I was hardcore into that thing. So I ran up to this dude and I'm like, hey, where did you get that shirt? I want it. And he's like, oh, I work for Midway and I just like completely floored.

I'm like, no way. So I talked his ear off and I said, hey, I'm really good at games. If you ever need a game tester, I would love to come in and work there. And he said, actually, I'm working on a game that's going to need one in a month or so. He's like, give me your number and I'll give you a call. And he actually did call me.

And it turned out Jason already knew the dude. This guy's name was Bill Dozer. And they knew each other from like some punk rock underdog thing. Yeah, underdog records. Yeah. So it's like the small little world of like, you know, the six degrees of separation or whatever. And he brought me in there and Jason and I started there as game testers.

And then when that game we're working on that you guys talked about last week was done, like they brought me back along with this other guy that worked on the first two Mortal Kombat games. And we were basically the first full time testers they had. That's crazy. And we were making serious money. Yeah, they paid really good money.

Play games. Just to play games. They paid really good money and they would feed us. So we were making like, what, $10 an hour? $15 an hour. It was $15. Okay, $15. And $15 an hour in 1994, that's like, you know, that's like CEO money to a guy in his early 20s. Yeah, that's true.

And the really cool part was because we had to get to the video game part, you had to walk through the pinball assembly line. And we'd see all these old Mexican ladies putting together Star Trek pinball machines, which was like the coolest pinball machine in the world at that point. Yeah, so they...

That wasn't the Aerosmith pinball? No, it was the Aerosmith video game was... They never did a pinball one with Aerosmith, but that game Revolution X, that was the... Oh, I'm sorry. It was Kiss Pinball. Yeah, there was a Kiss Pinball. And so, like, after that game was done, then they brought me back with this other dude, because we were like the two best Mortal Kombat players anywhere, to like test the next Mortal Kombat game.

And then I just kept lobbying for them to make us into full-time employees, and I basically started their QA department. It was just two guys, me and this guy named Eddie. And then from there, like, I worked that until I got burnt out, then I changed positions where I ran their field test program.

And then when they shut down and stopped making coin-operated games, then I moved over to another company and started doing design for, like, on the console side, like for Xbox and PlayStation games. Right. So what was the first game you did on the Xbox? The first game I did was for the original Xbox, not the 360, and it was called Tao Fang, and it was a fighting game.

And the company was started by some guys that worked at Midway with us that worked on the Mortal Kombat games, and they had quit and started their own studio. So as John Tobias was the president of that company, he was one of the two creators of Mortal Kombat. He was the art guy. Yeah, he came up with all the characters and invented all the story and everything.

And the logo, the infamous logo. Yes, yes. And what did I used to call him? He used to think he was a pimp because he looked like a pimp. He had this little tiny mustache. You think of an artist in San Francisco working on websites, you know, hipster type.

This dude looked like he should have been out back running his bitches. So, yeah, that's pretty much. Mike and I met way back in the punk rock days, so Mr. Video Game Guy. And like I said, if you want to talk about pinball, he's got, what, 17 in the basement? 18 pinball machines.

Soon to be 19 because my dad has one that he no longer wants, and I'm going to have to find a way to get up to Michigan and haul it down here. And I'm surrounded by 8,000, literally 8,000 records right now. Well, yeah, that's something we're going to have to get into. We're going to have to talk about these records for sure. Oh, it's taking over the house.

It's like we're sitting in my living room, which has records in it because the room attached to it is overflowing with them. I have to ask, are you married? No, but. Okay, that's why you're allowed to have that many records. Well, I'm actually, I've been with the same girl now for about six years, and I'm getting ready to buy her a ring.

We've talked about getting married, and she's already said, you know, you're going to have to move those things into another room. Yeah, yeah, you're going to have to. It's a trade-off, man. Yeah, if she wants, she's like that. She's like, your record room is really the dining room, and that's what it's going to be when I move in there. We're going to dine on music.

Yeah. So I'll have to squeeze all these things into one of the bedrooms upstairs. Okay, yeah, we'll talk a little bit more when we get back. It's that, I know you've got to refill your Jameson, and I have to get rid of my last beer, so time to go.

All right, a little breaky. All right. All right, who's this asshole? All right, so now we're actually going to do the guest segment with Mr. Vinicore here. So you said you moved into game design, and are you still doing game design?

I am not. It's kind of a long, involved story how I got to where I am now, which is, you know, the bottom of the ladder again. But I've sort of regressed back to entry-level business because, well, the gaming industry is extremely volatile, so I've worked at almost every game studio in the Chicagoland area in the last, basically from the year 2000 until 2009.

Right. And then because the gaming industry is so volatile, and I'm no longer- Who were some of the big players over there? I worked at Williams Valley Midway, then I worked for Studio Gigante, and then I worked for High Voltage Software, and then I worked for Robomoto. Oh, okay.

And then- Robomoto did the Tony- Yeah, Robomoto did the Tony Hawk ride game. That was the one that came with the skateboard controller that you stood on. You know, that was during the time when all the rock band stuff was huge, and so peripherals were in. Yeah. And it was a good-looking game, but it was not a good-playing game.

And I'm not ashamed to admit that some of the games I worked on didn't turn out to be as fun as they could have been. But it wasn't my fault. Anyway, because I'm an old man now and kind of jaded, like I'm a grumpy old geek on the gaming side, basically.

I was unwilling to relocate for a video game job that if I was lucky, I would keep for two years. So I wasn't about to uproot my life, and my free time was far more important to me. So I've kind of spent the last couple of years bouncing between contract gigs of varying degrees and unemployment.

Welcome to the club. Welcome to the club. But now, ironically, I do have a full-time job doing tech support for an arcade game company. So my gaming career has kind of gone full circle because now I'm back in CoinOp, which is a nearly extinct business model.

Yeah, I was about to ask, what does exactly that mean, tech support for? Okay, I work for a company called Play Mechanics, and their big flagship title is the Big Buck Hunter Games. Perhaps you've spent a lot of time at bars, Brian. Yeah, that's when you grab the fake shotgun and you shoot some deer.

Exactly, yeah. And I don't understand any of that at all whatsoever, having grown up in Southern California. It's a huge thing, especially in the Midwest. That's actually a very popular and big-selling and big-earning game, especially out here in the Midwest. Yeah, I know you haven't seen a deer, Brian, but think of him as a big, friendly Doberman that's tasty.

Okay, yeah. With horns on its head. No, I've actually, that game is at Sonny McLean's, which is the Boston bar over here in Santa Monica. So, I've played that game before. Yeah, so that game, like the current model, which is Big Buck HD, it's an online game.

And so, a lot of these operator guys are far older than us, you know, and so they need help getting their games online. And, you know, I basically just have to answer questions and sometimes, you know, run some scripts and stuff to fix their games or fix things in the database for them. Or just talk them through setting up their game and connecting it.

So, anyway, the full circle part was I'm back in coin-op, which is now a fraction of what it was in the 90s. And then, my boss, who was the owner of the company, was the guy that was the lead programmer on that Aerosmith game that Jason and I tested in 1994.

Nice. So, my original boss, in a way, is now my boss again. Talk about, talk about. Nineteen years later. Talk about sideways mobility. Yeah, so, I have fallen all the way back, reached the top, and I've worked on some A-list game, and then I've fallen all the way back to the beginning.

Oh, man. But the upside is, because I'm old and my free time is more valuable to me than living at a place I work at, it's nice because I work, you know, a standard straight 40 hours, the exact same five days a week, like clockwork, and it's only a 15-minute commute.

So, the good far outweighs the bad. Because, yeah, that was the problem with the game industry back then. It was a sweatshop. Yeah, the video game industry, especially on the console end, it's really a white-collar sweatshop. Like, they don't advertise that, you know, when they're trying to talk you into joining the industry.

But it really is, if any kind of industry besides pro wrestling needed a union, it's the video game business because employees are treated horribly, and then it's such a volatile thing that you work your ass off for two years and your reward is being unemployed. Yeah.

Yeah, because, I mean, if a game doesn't get re-upped or, you know, get a sequel, then it's a one-and-done type of thing. Totally, and I've had the unfortunate luck to work at two studios where, basically, they cut people or went out of business because the publisher decided, for whatever reason, not to keep us on for a sequel.

Or, like, we fucked up the schedule too bad and we're too late, and they're just like, we're done with you guys. We're going to give this to somebody else. Well, that's a really interesting thing about, I mean, a lot of these new industries that have come out is there's no support, there's no job security.

I mean, a really good friend of mine from high school who never did shit but was really good at doing art ended up starting doing video game stuff. He worked for Activision. He worked for fucking all those guys. But it was always like he had to actually move companies to move ahead, and if anything was cut off, he was cut off, no job anymore.

So he always had to fucking move sideways. And it's kind of a weird thing about the world that we live in now, especially, you know, all of us. We're skilled. We know what we're doing, but there's no support for us. Yeah, it's a very nomadic lifestyle.

It is. Yeah. It is. I had a friend that worked with me at Studio Hagontai. That was where we did that fighting game. He, when that place closed, he moved to one place in, like, in another state for two years, lost that job. Then he packed up and moved to New York, and he got this job, rented an apartment.

He was there for six days, and then the project got canceled, and he was out in the streets. And they're like, sorry. So he had to, like, break his lease. He lost all this money moving. And then he had to go scramble to find another job, and now he's up in Canada working. And he has kids that live in Florida, and he gets to see a couple times a year.

He basically has a Skype relationship with his children because, you know, he's divorced, but he still is young enough where he thinks he still wants to work in the game industry. And somehow it's worth it to him, even though he is basically a full continent away from his own children. Well, I actually find this fascinating because people throw out the gaming industry as being, like, the true industry that is actually making crazy money and will survive through the new industry.

Movies are down. Music is down. Books are down. Gaming is doing great. And you're telling me gaming is not doing great. Well, it's not that it's not doing great. It is volatile, but they are still making a lot of money. But it's kind of like the real world where just a small percentage are the ones that are really enjoying those riches.

And that small percentage is the CEOs of the big publishers like your Activisions. The guys like me who work for smaller studios that are employed by an Activision to make these games, we're living, you know, we're the one making the games. And it's in, like, almost sweatshop-like conditions.

And then we don't reap the benefits. We just get a straight salary. And maybe if you're lucky, they'll actually give you a copy of your game that you worked on when it's over. But not if they let you go as soon as it's done, because then they just forget to give you your game. Oh, I sense a little. Yeah. So I still don't have a copy of the Tony Hawk game I worked on, even though I worked on it from start to finish.

Well, see, Jason, it's, again, it's more siren servers. It's the money goes straight up top, even in this new media model where everybody's supposed to be doing great. We aren't. Well, this is not new. I mean, I just, I was. No, it's not here. But no, I was riding around Pennsylvania with my mom the other day.

Yes, I know. And we were looking at all these big houses. Like you do. Yeah. Big houses overlooking the river. And we're talking about robber barons, because Pennsylvania is like where Carnegie's from, you know, some of the original iron and coal robber barons. And it's the same damn thing.

It's just a new face on it. So this is nothing new. People making money off the labor of others is what capitalism is all about. The industry is flawed by design in the way that, you know, these smaller studios like I've worked at for, you know, 10 plus years, they all compete for these big publishers' money to say, hey, sign us up to make your game for you.

So they will basically overpromise what they can deliver in an unrealistic amount of time. And instead of being honest and saying, okay, well, with 45 people, this is how much time we need to make the game correctly or to get it done. Instead, they'll be like, oh, sure, we could do that in a year and a half, and we'll even write our own engine.

And that's just totally unrealistic. And instead of trying to redo the schedule realistically, you know, everybody's too scared to speak honestly to the publisher because they don't want to get dropped. So they expect the employees to just, like, live at work. Like, hey, you work 12 hours a day, six days a week for two years to get this done because that's what we got to do to get this done.

And it's bullshit because you don't get paid over time. It's, you know, it's that exempt thing that the tech industry gets where they don't have to pay salaried employees over time if they work over 40 hours a week. And they don't even have to give you comp time, and they usually don't. Maybe you get, like, three days off when your project's done, but that's after over a year and a half to two years of giving up your entire personal life for this stupid game.

Yeah. And if the game does well, do you get a bonus? No. It depends on how. Well, aren't you generally let go at the end of the game? Well, it depends. See, in the earlier years, like in the 90s, there was, like, in coin-op, there was royalties for everybody that worked on a project.

In fact, I, as a game tester, got a couple of royalty checks for games that did excessively well at Midway. And it wasn't a giant amount of money. But, you know, for a guy in his 20s, getting a few extra grand in a paycheck, you know, as a bonus check was awesome. But in the. No, no, no.

I mean, you can't look at it that way. You actually have to go. I worked really hard on this project. Even as a guy in my 30s and 40s, why am I not getting a piece of the pie? Oh, I totally agree. And so will everybody. But unfortunately, like, the smaller studios don't have the kind of leverage to get that kind of deal.

Like, they're basically saying, you know, we just want to make a project to keep this company going. And then the only people that see extra money is not the people that made it. It's the publisher gets all those, reaps those rewards. Right. Because basically every studio pitches to, you know, you get a bunch of people to get.

It's like making a TV show. You have a production company. And then you've got the studio. Yep. Yeah, so the studio gets their money, you know, like, they get, like, at every milestone that the publisher cuts us a check for whatever this agreed upon deal was. And that's how they used to pay our paychecks, pay for our insurance, buy our equipment, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And if the game sold a million or 10 million copies, we didn't see an extra dime. Maybe that means they give us a sequel. So the one thing that gets me now is since everybody is like, you know, yeah, there's still the console business, you know, you've got your PS3 and your Xbox and the new versions are coming out of those.

There's a huge growth in mobile now, like, you know, iPhone games, iPad games. I'm not even going to say Android because nobody buys that shit. But do you have friends who are working on those types of games? I mean, because it doesn't seem like it takes that big of a machine to make an iPhone game as it does to make a console game.

I know somebody, I wasn't super friendly with them, but, you know, one of my fellow co-workers from Robomoto, I just got through his Facebook, sent me a little link to this. He just did a mobile game for children and he did it on, like, a really small little team with just a couple of guys. So the overhead is definitely smaller to making these apps.

And some of them could be hugely successful, but it's already at the point where the market is so saturated that it's really, like, hitting the lottery if you've got, like, a hit game or a hit app. Because, you know, there's thousands of apps coming out every day. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. How do you actually get attention anymore?

It's so crazy. Well, I mean, quality still bubbles to the top. If you look at a game like Tiny Wings, which is literally, like, one guy who sat around and made it and made a couple million dollars off of it. You know, it's definitely when you – because I play a lot – obviously, I play a lot of games on my phone, unlike Mr. One-Hit-Wonder Plants vs. Zombies over there.

Yeah, see, I'm the wrong person to be talking about this because I played Spy Hunter as a console game or coin-op game. And then I played Plants vs. Zombies about 20 years later. And that's about it for me for games. So, he totally distracted me because now I'm thinking of Spy Hunter.

Mike and I also used to – Great game, right? It was a very good game. Yeah, Mike and I used to work in an arcade, a coin-op arcade together, and there was a Spy Hunter there. So, it kind of threw me off. Actually, I really want to hear Mike talk about the coin-op industry because, like, apparently, it still exists, which is amazing.

It does. It's very small. Like, I spent basically my entire life around video games even before they were invented because I'm a little bit older than you guys by a couple years. And my dad used to take me to this arcade at the end of the street, which Jason and I both ended up working at when we were in our early 20s.

And when I first went there, it was all pinball, and I got to see, like, you know, Pong in these first video games, and I was just completely fascinated by them growing up. And I spent almost every day after school and all day Saturday over at that arcade growing up, especially from about sixth grade on.

And a funny little story is, there used to be a test site for the different coin-op companies, and one time I was a representative from Gottlieb Cave, and she was asking me all kinds of questions about their test games. And I'm, like, 13 years old at this point, and I'm telling her everything I liked and didn't like about the game, and I really knew a lot about their games because I played for free all day because my cousin worked there.

And she said, just as an assistant, she goes, you know, when you get a few years older, you should totally come to work, like, at a video game company. You'd be good at it. And the 13-year-old, and you just get these big eyes, like, wow, that would be so neat. And it was never anything I pursued, and it was just really odd that, you know, about 10 years later, I just happened to fall into that by accident.

Right. So, but there is still a coin-op industry. It is very, very small, and it really amazes me that anybody can make money in it on an operator end because, you know, these guys that buy these machines and put them in the bars, they split the cash box with the location.

And for what they cost, it takes months to get a return on your investment before you actually start turning a profit out of these things. Right. Do any companies still actually make coin-op games, like, new ones? Yeah, the one I work for, which is Play Mechanics. They're owned by Raw Thrills, which was started and owned, and it's currently still owned by the guy that made Defender and Robotron.

Oh, I love Defender. Yeah, so his name is Eugene Jarvis. He's basically the grandfather of video games. The guy's a genius when it comes to game design. Even still, you know, 30-some-odd years later, the guy, he just has it. He knows what's fun, and, you know, he's an amazing designer.

He's the parent company for the one I work for. They make, they're basically the two largest coin-op manufacturers still left in the world. There's a couple other ones on a little smaller scale, but these are basically the two most successful. And it's a very small market compared to how it was about 20 years ago when I got in it.

Right. And it's certainly infinitely smaller than it was in the 80s. Oh, definitely. I mean, I used to hang out at Disneyland, and my favorite place to go was they had an entire fucking arcade. Like, there were 300 to 400 different games there, and I would go there every day and just, like, draw coins in and play.

It was amazing. Yeah, I mean, you stuff used to come out, like, you know, weekly back in those days. And now, basically, the coin-op market is, it's very limited in the type of games that will make money. Because you basically have to make something that they can't easily do at home.

So that's driving games, and that's shooting games, and then that's those ticket games, you know, the redemption things, which is basically kiddie gambling. Skee-ball. Like, ski-ball. But it's, like, they got nicer ones than that, but games that dispense tickets that people can use to buy really expensive, you know, trinkets.

But isn't that what the whole, like, what was that Microsoft thing that came out? The Kinect. Yeah, the Kinect. Wasn't that supposed to take care of that? Because it's a total motion sensor. You don't even need to have a fake shotgun. You can just place your hands up. I'm doing it right now. You can't see.

And there you go. You're done. Thank God. Right? Yeah, but that's fun. I look good, Jason. Shut up. It doesn't really replace the physicalness, you know, the physicality of holding an actual replica gun in your hand. Yeah, you want the tactile sensation, the feedback, you know.

Yeah, the tactile feedback of holding the steering wheel. Right, the kickback. Yeah, the vibration and, like, the kickback of the gun or holding that, sitting down and steering wheel. Pressing a pedal, yeah. Yeah, so that's why, basically, all they pretty much make are shooting games and driving games for the coin operator. What about dancing games? Do they still do the dance dance revolution stuff?

I think they still make those, but it's not as big as a boss. Only in Japan? Yeah, pretty much only in Japan. Yeah, that seemed to kind of go away. It's, like, a Japanese thing. I mean, the only thing that I can actually see anymore for that kind of market is, like, a Buster's or whatever. Oh, Dave and Buster's, yeah. Yeah, Dave and Buster's kind of thing where you just, like, you go out with your friends and you get drunk and you play video games.

That's pretty much exactly it. There's not, the classic arcade is almost completely extinct. There's a few here and there, but it's not like it was. It's pretty rare to find an old school style arcade. But the Dave and Buster's and the game work still thrive because they're restaurants and bars that happen to have a lot of games and that those two things seem to go well together.

Now, on the Dave and Buster's, can you just buy a pass and just go and play, or do you have to still put coins in them? No, they have those swipe cards now. Oh, okay. And the catch with those is, like, there's not a one-to-one ratio of credits to dollars or credits to coins. So, really, like, you're paying about two and a half bucks a game on a game that's a dollar.

Holy shit. Because you don't really know what a point is. It's like, no. That is one thing I noticed is, like, arcade games are incredibly expensive now. All of the games for the companies I work for, they all, you know, remember games used to be a quarter when we were kids. Yeah. They come out of the box set at a dollar a play.

Wow. Or those golf games are, like, $5 for nine holes or 18 holes or something like that. My dad sells art to the guy that invented that. Oh, yeah. They're out in, they're about a half hour north of me. Yeah. That guy has, like, million-dollar apartments in every city in the world. That guy's so loaded.

In the mid to late, the mid-90s to, like, early 2000, that was the Pac-Man of that decade. And that thing sold, like, gangbusters. It was the number one game for, like, 10 years. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Oh, wow. So, but there is, like, these, like, barcades are becoming a thing in major cities now.

They're going to open one up in L.A., I heard, that they're building right now. Oh, really? Yeah. So, they're basically bars that have, like, a selection of classic arcade games and some pinball machines. And, you know, some of them put them on free play, and you basically can play for free while you buy expensive beers.

That's what I was thinking. I thought that would be a great idea. Just get an arcade and just set everything for free and have a price of admission. Here in Chicago, we have three barcades. I haven't been to any of them yet, but I have friends that have been there. And one of them, everything's only a quarter, even brand new games, because the beers are kind of pricey.

Yeah. But they also have a nice selection of beers. So, if you're a beer connoisseur, that's a place to go hang out, because they've got this massive beer menu. And then you can play these games right there. And another one, everything's on free play, and they just make the money off the drinks. Yeah, that was my go-to idea, but apparently I'm late and slow.

Yeah, it was a couple of years too late, but it's because of the thing. You're not that late, because you can actually open that up in other places. But, I mean, that's a genius idea. You have all the games basically cheap, and then you do the craft beer thing, and you do the bullshit like vapor smoke instead, because that's a huge thing right now.

And then you just let kids in, and you have a fucking couple, like, I would sit and play a Galaga machine for fucking hours with good craft beers. Oh, yeah, and that's what they're doing here. And I just read an article just this week. Somebody linked it to me through my Facebook page, where they're building one in Los Angeles.

So, now, Brian, you'll be able to go check that out. Yeah, let me know about that one. I'll definitely go. Speaking of coin-op and beer, remember Duds and Suds? No. Oh, yeah. It was one over in Lyle. It was a half laundromat, half bar.

I do remember that. Yeah, so you could go do your laundry and get drunk at the same time, and then drive home with clean clothes and get a DUI. In college, I thought that was my genius idea that nobody would have come up with before, but, of course, existed. But, yeah, when I was drunk all the time in college, I was like, we need to open up a laundry machine that serves beer.

The only other arcade business model that seems to work, there's one about 15 minutes east of me. It's about halfway between my house and actual Chicago. There's this place called Galloping Ghost. And instead of you paying for your games, you just pay for a day's admission.

It's 15 bucks for the day. You can come and go all you want. And every game is set to free play. And they've got 300-something games in this. It's a huge space. So, instead of making their money, you know, a quarter of a time, they're just making enough people paying the admission. And they seem to be doing really well. So, do they have a limit, though?

That's what I was wondering about. Like, if I want to go and just play Mortal Kombat all day, you know, because in the old days, you used to put your quarter up. So, that was next game. How does that work when it's, like, all free play and you just want to go monopolize a game? Do they have, like, some kind of system to kick people out? No, it's really just, like, you could have a guy or a kid that just will keep it and start over and over again and completely oblivious to you standing behind and waiting for a turn.

And then you turn off the power and then the guy pulls a gun on you and you have to get a game. So, it's really, like, you just have to leave it up to people that have good etiquette that look behind them and say, oh, you're waiting to play? Okay, here, now it's your turn. And just a little back story. Jason needs food now. No, no, no. Does anybody get that reference?

Yeah, from Gauntlet. Warriors need food badly. Sweet. I will actually say things like that while I'm hungry because I'm that much of a game nerd. Oh, jeez. Totally blew my story, but that's okay.

Sorry, man. I was so happy that I actually had a game reference. When Mike and I worked at the arcade one time, there was this dude who kept, like, hitting start over and over again. And at the time, my girlfriend, we taught her where the power button was, and she just nonchalantly, as they say, recycled the power on the machine.

And he fucking hit her. Was I there that day? I don't remember this at all. Oh, no, we called the cops. Okay, boys. Reel it back in. So, where were we? We were talking about video games and the history of the coin-op and all that shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about the punk rock collection. Yeah, that's what I'm getting to here because Mike and I met at punk rock shows. He was always the cool guy in the back because he was older than me, and I never got to talk to him because he was into skinny puppy, and I thought he was scary. Skinny puppy is awesome.

So, I never talked to him. That is my favorite band in the entire world. By the way, I totally relate to what Jason was saying because I'm not quite as old as you are, perhaps. And when I was hanging out of Disneyland, and I had my Robert Smith or my Depeche Mode crazy little background on my leather jacket, and I saw the kids with the skinny puppy leather jacket.

They were a little bit older. I was scared of them, but I love skinny puppy. That's the greatest band in the entire world, at least in my mind. It's fucking great stuff, man. You and I totally agree on that. I love skinny puppy. It was years and years and years later because I'd never really listened to skinny puppy, but we actually went to a skinny puppy.

Mike took me to a skinny puppy show in L.A. Oh, that's right. At the Peter Fonda. I was at that show. You were? I went to every show in L.A. Yeah. Yeah, we were there. When worlds collide. Yeah. And then I took Bob to see Bob and Stacey, and I went to go see him two nights later in Anaheim on that same tour.

Yes, and Bob would be. I also went to the Anaheim show. Oh, jeez. Oh, you guys could date now. I don't know if you ever saw skinny puppy in the 90s, Brian, like when they toured for Last Rites, but I have some of those stage props. I have some of those stage props from that tour in my house.

Many of them. Awesome, man. It's like Tim used to make all their stuff for their stage show. Is that one? Yeah, there's one. We're staring at one right now. Yeah, Tim Gore, who is a master special effects guy, or what do you call prosthetics, puppetry, whatever. Yeah, he's like special effects artists.

Let me drop in really quickly. He made the spikes for Buffy, which was, I've got to say, awesome. All right. Let me just drop in for a second, because I do this in our podcast. If you don't know what Skinny Puppy is, it was an industrial band, and they were very well known for doing very crazy special effects stuff for all their videos.

Very gory, whatever. You know, but great music, amazing band, and you've got to check them out. Okay. Okay. So, it's just me and you right now, because apparently the dog has to go pee. So, it's just me and you right now, Brian.

Okay. Well, we can talk some. You want to stick some tech stuff in here really quick? Well, here, real quick. Tell me about, you got to read David and Goliath finally, right? I'm 99% through. I didn't get to finish, because we obviously are doing the podcast a little bit earlier.

I liked it, but I thought this is the weakest of his books, and I think there's some bullshit going on. Really? Why? Well, I love the historical story. I love how he ran through how David was actually not the underdog, and Goliath actually was.

Right, that's what I said in our last episode, that he kind of debunked the whole David and Goliath story. Exactly, and as soon as I read that, I was like, oh my god, this is the best thing I've ever read. This is fantastic. When he got to the chapter about how people who are dyslexic may have an advantage, he started to lose me.

Really? Why? Because that's bullshit. I don't think so, at all. They don't have that much of an advantage. The entire point is, these are people that actually are forced to pay more attention. Yeah, it's how a handicap can become an asset.

I mean, it's flipping power on its head. Yeah, but go ahead. So these people have a handicap, which most people think is a handicap, but they turn it on its head and make it an advantage in how they can be better at their business. I don't see how that's different from... But that's .00000005% of people that are able to do that.

Right, well, this isn't like a self-help book. This is a storybook. Well, I know, but I felt a little bit weird about that entire chapper when he was going off about... Chapper? Chap. Chapter. Chapter? What the hell's a chapper? A chapter. You got assless chappers? It just, it didn't sit right with me.

And I don't think that this book is as well-researched, as well-documented, as well-straightforward as the rest of them. Okay. I still, I don't dislike it. That's your opinion. Yeah, yeah. Wrong, but that's okay. No, it's fine.

You can tell me. I always tell you your opinion's wrong. You there? Yeah. Would you turn that damn thing off already? So, I believe you guys have somebody in common. Mr. Billy Corgan from the Smooshy Pumpkins. Yeah, I work with him.

And I work with him currently, because I work for his wrestling company. He has a wrestling company now. Yeah, see, this is the weird thing of how all my interests growing up have intertwined. I worked once, well, I work as, one of my part-time gigs, I'm a photographer, I shoot a lot of concerts.

He's my student. Yeah, actually, Jason was the one that got me going in photography, and it's all his fault that now I do what I do. But from shooting concerts, that got me good at taking pictures. And then I worked on a WWE wrestling game.

That's one of the games I designed. And I had a friend in the business who worked for the WWE. So, when Billy Corgan started his wrestling federation, he hooked me up with Billy and the two brothers that started this company and told them, hey, you should have him be your photographer.

Right. And so, that's what they did. They brought me in, and now I'm their in-ring photographer. So, I've worked with him now for just, we're just about to reach our two-year anniversary next month. Holy shit. Wow. Wow. That's pretty awesome. It's been a lot of fun. And it's kind of funny, because, you know, it's like in the early 80s, remember the rock and wrestling connection with Cyndi Lauper and the WWF?

Oh, yeah. And now it's kind of like I'm working for the modern rock and wrestling connection, because Billy Corgan is the creative director of this company, you know, and we do a wrestling show every month in the Chicago area. That's pretty crazy, man. I mean, I got next to nothing, because I have no interest in wrestling whatsoever.

But it's crazy that Billy Corgan does. You know, he was a huge wrestling fan growing up, just like I was. And the few times I've actually got to sit down and talk to him at these shows when he's not running around doing a million things, like, we share, we kind of share the same interest of, like, we grew up on the exact same era of wrestling.

So, the dude loves the business, and, you know, he comes up with all the angles for this wrestling company, and, you know, he's really, he's actually really good at it. He's got a good mind for the business. So, you could tell, like, that he truly loves what he's doing. And, you know, nobody's getting rich off of, like, indie wrestling.

I was going to say, he's apparently not hurting. It's a small company that we're trying to grow, but it's really a lot of fun, and he's actually very good at it. So, he's giving up music for wrestling. No, no, he's still the Smashing Company. No, no, no. He's still there.

No, no, okay. Yeah, because he'll miss shows because he's on tour. Oh, okay. Otherwise, he's at every single one of our shows, and if not, he, you know, he emails in the stuff, and he, well, because he's out on tour. Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. That's cool that he has a different, he has hobbies.

Yeah, I mean, it's really, you know, it's kind of a hobby for him. He's not making any money off this thing yet, you know. Yeah. Does anybody make money off wrestling anymore? Well, Vince McMahon. Well, I didn't even know if he would anymore. Yeah, they still somehow make money, you know. They sell the toys and the pay-per-views and all that, the merchandise.

The big names in wrestling make as much money as the big names in music, and everybody else gets fucked. That's the way it works. Pretty much, yeah. They're very similar businesses, you know. It's just two different forms of entertainment. Yeah, it's entertainment. So, end of the day.

I mean, the only, I have one good story about that, which is, I remember sitting around, and this is ages ago. There's got to be, I mean, this is before Smashing Pumpkins ever broke up, and they were still the original band.

I was sitting around with Alanis' manager, Alanis Morissette, and we were sitting there, and we were looking at the Smashing Pumpkins' new website, and she was like, yeah, I don't want to do what he's doing, but he's always going to be in there somewhere, and he still is.

So, he's found a way to find wrestling. Alanis has found a way to find whatever the fuck she's doing now, which is apparently, like, you know, life coach. So, she's no longer a client? No, no, I still work with Alanis. Okay. Wasn't she on Weeds, too?

She was great on Weeds. She did a good job on Weeds. She was great on Weeds. Yeah, yeah. She's doing acting now, and she's trying to be, like, a basically, like, you know, life guru thing. I think that's where she's heading next, which is great, because, you know, I can totally work that on the web stuff.

It's fun. Okay, well, I deal with some pickup guys on the web. They're some of my clients, so maybe we can do a deal, because it's all, you know, it's all kind of intertwined in the selling of services. Yeah. It's a crazy world, all of us at our age, with everything that we've seen, you know.

I think we're a bit jaded, but we also kind of get it. I mean, we've all been there. Like, we've all gone through all of this. We've seen these people rise and fall and rise again. It's a weird thing. Real quick, I do want to bring in one final news story, because we didn't get to really news.

Oh, yeah, we talked no news at all this time. Okay, so the article that came out about the foundation of Twitter, the founding story of Twitter, did you read this article? It was seven pages, and I read through it all, yes. Yeah, it was, talk about a fucking barn burner.

That was, I mean, Jack Dorsey needs to, I mean, I'm sure he's really not very happy with this. It paints Jack Dorsey, who has been going out on, I think I saw him on 60 Minutes. He did a whole series on 60 Minutes about how he created Twitter and what the impetus was and how, and this, you know, oh, I love to watch ambulances and figure out where people were going and all this.

And it all turns out to be complete and utter bullshit. Yeah, it's all bullshit. I could not believe it. And now this book that's coming out, it's called Hatching Twitter. Because, I mean, I've known Evan Williams, the other co-founder of Twitter.

I knew him when he was doing Odeo, and I knew him before that when he was in Blogger. And, you know, his part of it rings perfectly true. You know, he doesn't, he's not a quick mover and all this stuff, but then to hear this old Jack Dorsey, like, angle.

And, I mean, tell me the guy just doesn't look shady to begin with. You've seen pictures of him, right? I have not. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. This dude, he's a skinny little dude. Apparently, he was a little punk when he came there. He had lip piercing and punky, spiky hair, which is, you know, whatever.

But this is the best article I've read in a long time. Jason, turn over and look at Mike. Tell me how he looks. He's got spiky hair. He looks a little shady. I just don't have the facial piercings. I just have the spiky hair. And, Jason, what do I look like?

You have spiky hair and are pretty fucking shady, too. So, you know, Brian and I should be suspect of you because you don't have the spiky hair. It's because I don't have any fucking hair. I'm old and fat and I got no hair. I'm just saying, man, that you shouldn't base things on that.

Okay. On the subject of Twitter, and since you guys are the grumpy old geeks and you know way more than me, do you find, I suspect that my Twitter feed on my iPhone is not showing me all the tweets of the people I follow. Have you guys noticed that? Well, I don't follow Twitter on my phone. I find Twitter to be so much noise, it doesn't even matter.

Like, I barely follow anybody anyways, but the people that I follow tweet incessantly. It's a fucking waste of time. It is a fucking waste of time. For the number of people I follow, like, if I don't check that thing for, like, two days, I'll have maybe three dozen tweets total.

And for the amount of people I'm following, there's no way it's showing up. No, I will tell you why. If I don't check it every 20 minutes, I'm not fucking seeing everything. Well, here's the deal. I'm going to tell you exactly why that's happening. I don't check it every 20 minutes. Shut up, damn it. I'm going to tell you why it's broken. Why is it broken?

Because there are API limits. And every client that you use to check Twitter uses the API. And there's only 200 requests per hour. So if you go back X amount of time, you can only go back so far before it segments. And then you have to wait another hour to get more juice. I'm just using the Twitter app for the iPhone.

Does that fall by the same rules? Probably does. See, that's bullshit. To me, it's giving me the same effect as, like, if I leave Facebook on the default, like, what it thinks I want to see and not the most recent. That's what I feel I'm getting with my Twitter experience on the iPhone. I know that they're not showing me everything.

Well, it very well could be because everybody wants to show you what they want you to see. Yeah. Yeah, here's the deal. You're not missing anything because nothing that happens on Twitter is important. I guess that's true. It's not anymore. Twitter is dead. I mean, there was the whole, like, fucking belief that for a while that Twitter was, like, fucking starting revolutions in countries.

Twitter is fucking useless. Well, it's a communication medium. No, it's a communication medium for people. I mean, that's what it was good for. In Austin, the year that it broke, it was good for figuring out where the party was. That's what it's good for. If you're having a revolution, it's good for figuring out where the bombing is, you know, where not to go.

Who's who's who's we're going to storm the palace, you know, you got to figure out what palace to storm. It's good for communication between a group in real time in 140 characters or less. It's not prose, it's not poetry, it's bullshit for everything besides little bits of shit that you need to tell a bunch of people that they don't need to know for the most part.

I mostly just use it, like, when I update my website. Like, I post a thing on there with a link to the new story I wrote or the new photos I posted. Okay, well, that's one of the most useless and annoying uses of Twitter. Yeah, exactly. Because as soon as you start to follow over, say, 200 people, that's it.

It's lost. It's gone. Nobody will ever see it. And, well, we talked about this, like, 10 episodes ago. Twitter, Google+, they're all broadcast mediums. They're not consumption mediums. Everybody's talking, but nobody's listening. I haven't used that Google+, since, like, a month after it came out.

It's completely useless to me. I check it, I've got 10,000 followers on there. And you know what? I put something out, nobody reads it. And Facebook's the same way now with the fucking news feed. Nobody reads anything I post. So, you know what? I'm just going to go sit in a corner and rub one out and then at least get some fucking engagement out of it.

The most action I get on my Facebook stuff is when I post pictures of my dog. Like, anything else I write doesn't get nearly the amount of likes or comments as when I post a picture of the dog. Yeah. And this is why I'm starting to be more, more, and more about real-world interaction.

And speaking of which, I have to go pick up my wife and have some real-world interaction. When you kept saying that you had to, like, hang out with your wife, I thought you meant that she was in the room and she was nagging you. I didn't know you had to go get her from somewhere.

No, no, she's sitting at Universal Music right now waiting for me. So, Brian needs to actually go have some interaction or he won't get any interaction. Exactly. Yeah, and she'll be really pissed off. And he'll be just like me in the corner rubbing one out by himself. You know, Twitter never really gets mad at you.

Real-life wives, yeah, they do. Okay. Go pick up your woman. Okay. Get some, and we'll talk to you next week. Really nice. Really. Wait, real quick. Real quick. Nice to talk to you, Mike. Nice talking to you, too, Brian. Thanks for having me on, you guys. Before we sign off, where can people find more about you, Mr. Vinacore?

You can find me at my website at punkvinyl.com. And on the subject of Twitter, I'm ThePunkVault. You know, or at ThePunkVault, however the kids describe their Twitter handles at this point. But www.punkvinyl.com, that's where you can find all my stuff.

I sold him that domain, by the way. Jason drank that domain. I paid him for it, and he drank the proceeds in one night at a mile marker show at The Empty Bottle. I really should have hung out with you guys more often. Amazing. All right, man. Talk to you next week.

All right. Next week, back to a regular episode. Thank you for listening to all of us. Mike, awesome to fucking talk with you. It was a good time. Thanks for having me. Yeah. From now on, when you shit on me, I'll take it with more of a grain of salt, because I actually like you. Excellent. Take it easy, brother.

Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com, slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Have a good week.

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