California Extreme 2010 report

Kat and I drove up to NorCal for the weekend to attend the Calfiornia Extreme 2010 show — a gathering of coin-op and pinball collectors that I look forward to every year. I plugged CAX on Friday and I have blogged about it in years past on my personal site. But this year I’m doin’ it here.

This was, by far, the best year I’ve gone. One of the organizers said, by their count, there were well over 450 machines this year — all of which were set to free play. The show occupied an entire room of the Santa Clara Convention Center and included vendors, tournaments, speakers, and the annual trivia showdown — where, for the third time, I placed second. (In my defense, this year’s final round was Jeopardy-style, and I jokingly gave the correct answer/question before the question/answer was even revealed — I maintain that I am that good.) But describing the show doesn’t do it justice. Like the Matrix, you have to see it for yourself.

I helped out with security overnight, meaning I was in charge of watching over the games from 2am to around 8:30am. It would have fulfilled my childhood fantasy of being locked in an arcade overnight, except for the power being turned off. But I did take some photos of the eerily empty ultimate arcade, and they should give you some idea of the size and scope of CAX 2010.

And that was all I bothered to take, but Kat came back with many photos of better quality. There were more game than I’m showing in those shots. Many more. If you can remember a game, it was probably there.

Most interesting were the games that were there that you do not remember, because they never existed. Many of the people who bring games to CAX used to work at nearby Atari or know someone who did, so they have rescued prototypes and unproduced games from extinction. The photo below is entirely made up of prototype games — and there were more that I couldn’t fit into the frame.

Everything you see here is a prototype that was never produced

A proto also won my annual “I have never seen or played that before in my life” award. Nightmare — from the GCC team that created Ms. Pac-Man for Namco and later Quantum and Food Fight after they became part of Atari — tells a strange tale of a telekinetic scientist who is banished to the Vault of Chaos for his “trespassing in the world of nightmares.” He appears as just a face with a shield around it, blasting horrible creatures that assault him as he tries to break free of his imprisonment. It played a bit like Mad Planets and features Discs of Tron-style controls, with an analog spinner and flight-style joystick. Very weird and very very rare — it was practically an urban legend. But I got to play it.

The other major new-to-me game was Aztarac, an obscure color vector game that Centuri made in 1983. Another stick-and-spinner game, it’s an early take on base defense games. Your starbase is made up of four nodes, and waves of enemies are heading your way. But to see them, you have to press the radar button, which takes you out of combat — but doesn’t stop them. The center circle on the screen is a convex bubble, showing the range of your radar. Very cool. Sorry my photo sucks.

Color vector games are, in general, something special to me. The monitor technology is entirely different, so instead of drawing pixels, the games create everything by drawing lines. That’s cool enough to do with one color, the way Asteroids and Armor Attack pull it off, but when you get color — as with Tempest, Space Duel, Black Widow, and many other Atari hits — the game just takes on an extra sci-fi edge. There were four of Atari’s upright Star Wars games in a row, plus a fifth sit-down cockpit version — and that’s not counting the sixth upright machine that was in the raffle.

I love cocktail machines — the coin-ops built into tables, perfect for corners of bars in the 80s. Cocktails this year included Tempest, Tapper, Frogger, the rare Joust, and the ever-popular four-player Warlords. There were a few rare pinball cocktails too, as you can see in the photo.

There was only one Mortal Kombat machine this year — an MKII in a Capcom-style Dynamo cabinet — but there were six units for The Grid, allowing the game to reach its full deathmatch potential. The Grid is one of my favorite 90s arcade games, created by Ed Boon and his Midway team during a break from Mortal Kombat. Think about Smash TV as a third-person arena shooter, with a pistol-grip stick and a trackball for aiming. It is always in use during CAX and for good reason — it’s a blast to play, and no home version ever appeared.

If six players is fun, why not eight? This Sprint 8 got plenty of use throughout the show — including by one of its team members, Owen Rubin, who worked at Atari back in the day and told great stories about the culture there while he soundly kicked our asses on the track. (I was proud to have come in first against him once or twice, but those victories were rare.) There’s something to be said about an eight-player racer with just a wheel and a pedal — no questions need to be asked to enjoy this game. You just walk up and have fun.

Many people think arcade games were invented in the 80s, but there were electromechanical games way back in the 30s, filmstrip trivia quiz machines in the 50s, and even the granddaddy of pop-culture gaming — Space Invaders — came out in 1978. Midway’s Boot Hill came out a year before that and is significant in that I think this might have actually been the very first arcade game I played as a kid. Please note that the cowboy-vs-cowboy gunfight theme means I was playing shooters at age 6, but modern parents, take heart: I seem to have turned out okay. Except for the arcade addiction, of course.

For everyone who does not have kids but wants to believe that one day their spouse will understand their love of gaming, you too can take heart. This is Kat and I playing Lethal Enforcers. When she saw the game — which we played together back in NYC in the 90s — she made that ooh/squee noise that most women make when they see a pretty piece of jewelry or a cute baby. Kat makes it those times, but also when she sees technology that interests her. This can happen to you, I swear. Just keep looking for the right girl.

Every year there’s a major pinball tournament at CAX, and I found this particularly interesting: each tournament machine had a small camera mounted over its playfield, so the image could be projected on the wall, letting everyone watch without crowding the player. Note the huge trophies right in front of the projection on the wall.

You don’t even have to play pinball to appreciate some of the machines. It’s worth just walking around and checking out some of the bizarre and colorful backglass artwork, like this Gottleib Paul Bunyan pinball machine from 1968. There are five women on him, combing his hair with a rake and shaving his beard with an axe. And yes, one is apparently cleaning his crotch with a broom. Hey. It was 1968.

Oh, and in case you are wondering how all those 400-pound plywood machines get moved, that’s how. There’s a lot of people, a lot of physics, and a lot of refrigerator dollies. It takes a full day to set up and a full day to break down. There is a lot of labor behind this labor of love.

Next year’s California Extreme is already planned for July 9, 2011 at the same location in Santa Clara, CA. I will be there, if only to lose the trivia contest yet again. But I cannot say enough nice things about California Extreme, and you should absolutely go next year. It’s always amazing.