California Extreme 2010 this weekend

California Extreme takes place this weekend in Santa Clara, CA. Let me explain why this is the most important thing in the entire world.

The 1st commercial coin-op, Computer Space. It was a flop.

I practically grew up in video arcades. I certainly had my most powerful and important gaming experiences in arcades — and pizza parlors, and shopping malls, and diners, and train stations, and basically anywhere you could fit a 3x3x6 plywood cabinet. Other people my age grew up idolizing Simon LeBon and Billy Idol; my heroes were Kevin Flynn and Alex Rogan.

So when people ask “What’s your favorite game machine of all time,” I know they want me to say Atari 2600 or Vectrex or Genesis or PlayStation, but I generally reply “Anything that weighs 400 pounds and plays only one game.” The truth is that experiences offered by coin-ops like Tempest and Robotron 2084 can be ported and translated and even emulated but they are never properly duplicated. You need an analog spinner and a vector monitor. You need two big knobby red ball-top joysticks. Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby.

Multiplayer gaming, yo. This is the eight-player version of Tank.

California Extreme is the real thing. Held in the southern part of the Bay Area every year, CAX is a chance for local pinball and coin-op collectors to bring their games out of storage, put a few hundred of them in one big room, and make a weekend of it. One price gets you in the door — everything is on free play. And you will play things you’ve never seen before, never knew existed. There are always several prototypes of unproduced games; past years have seen Beavis & Butthead, Sparkz, and Air Drivin’, as well as rare oddities like Varkon and Bradley Trainer. In terms of quality of games and quality of people, you will not find a better show.

My second-favorite pinball machine of all time.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Panels include everything from pinball tutorials to movie screenings to technical advice to trivia contests. This year includes a talk by pinball designer Steve Ritchie, one of the guys who created Ms. Pac-Man (which started as an unauthorized hack that went legit), and multiple movie screenings. And of course, there’s a bit of shopping — collectibles, spare parts, and whole machines change hands every year.

I will be there. I’m driving six hours to be there. That’s nothing — my friend Jude from Palette-Swap Ninja is flying in from Boston. It’s that good. If you are anywhere near Santa Clara this weekend, come join me and the other arcade rats at the Hyatt Regency. You won’t regret it.