Death of an Arcade – Vossens Arcade in Worms, Germany

 

Arcade-Worms-Pano-klein

Source & Copyright: http://tote-pixel.de/images/sigplus/Vossens%20Arcade/Arcade-Worms-Pano-klein.jpg

This post is based on an article from the german blog http://www.tote-pixel.de and is probably one of the saddest thing you´ll ever read if you love videogames. I won´t translate the whole article (Google Translator will give you a more or less readable version) but I´ll try at least to explain what happened there and what you can see in the pictures.

So how to start ? The place shown in the pictures was Vossens Arcade – the by far largest collection of arcade cabinets in Germany. And then things have gone wrong. The cabinets were stored in a rather large warehourse, the rent was raised, the collector couldn’t / didn’t want to pay the raise, the thing was brought to court, someone went bust, someone burgled in, the place was sold in a foreclosure auction and the new owner wanted to bulldoze everything.

But before doing that, the new owner opened up the place to the public so that everybody can take what he or she needs. Fair enough taking in consideration, that the place was already a mess when he became the new owner.

What happened then is hard to describe. Basically it´s a mixture of pure vandalism, commodity theft (metal, copper), lack of knowledge and stupidity. Everybody came and everybody took or destroyed stuff. Some smart guys ripped the metal from the cabinets because they can sell it for around 150 EUR per ton. Somebody should have told them, that they can sell a working cabinet for around 1.000 EUR.

Nice people from the german NGO For-Amusement-Only tried to rescue as much as possible but for most of the cabinets it was already too late…

Controller Mash-Up

4players did a big controller mash-up (the link at the bottom of the article leads to the picture gallery) and I found 2 interesting devices :

negconThis is the neGcon from Namco, originally made for Ride Racer on the PSX. I still remember the day when I first saw this controller. Schnee bought it (for a shitload of money) and I didn´t liked it in the beginning. But later I cherished its precise control in racing games and still today it´s small and innovative device. Much better than the analog sticks used for the xbox360 or the PS3.

brain_controlThis one is a brain controlled device. I saw something similar years ago at a hospital specialized in epilepsy therapy. The patients controlled a little spaceship in a left-to-right scrolling game and tried to avoid a collision with objects – only with their “thoughts”.

It should help them to recognize outbreaks of the epilepsy early and minimize the seizure.

Anyway – in this picture it shows a game controller. Until now it´s not very popular but I´m sure that this concept of controlling will become more important in the future.

(copyright of the pictures by 4players.de)

And there is more interesting and funny stuff at 4players (only in german – sorry) :