Nostalgia arcade games hit the net

LESS THAN TEN minutes from Intel Folsom's campus is a tiny warehouse in a nondescript park. The building is crammed with the hottest games from two decades ago.

This is the home of an Internet company which focuses on shipping low cost, high quality video arcades for home use. Dream Arcades, which Michael Ware co-owns with his wife, Michelle, manufactures and sells big, bulky arcade games, think Asteroids, Centipede, Pac-man, Dragon's Lair.

They told their story of how the word spread about this guy building retro arcade games in his garage and, console by console, Dream Arcades grew. They have old tales of corporate downsizing which verge on the nearly awful. Michael survived five rounds of layoffs at Intel. Michelle endured three rounds as a regional representative for dethroned doughnut king Krispy Kreme.

Dream Arcades' target audience is anyone with nostalgia for all those after-school hours spent glued to the controls of the now-classic games from Atari, Capcom, Midway, and Namco.

"You have people coming into their own with disposable income (who) grew up in the '80s – the golden age of the video arcade," said Kevin Steele, editor and publisher of GameRoom Magazine, a Cleveland-based magazine that follows home gaming.

Dream Arcades offers these gen-X'ers two styles of arcade units. A table top version offers three variations: a side-by-side for playing against a wall, a head-to-head table with an authentic arcade feel , and a three-sided table which gives you the best of both styles

Their second style is an upright arcade game that offers all the features needed to have the ultimate gaming experience including lighted trackball, joy sticks, and buttons all over the place. All their arcade game models are available as an assemble-it-yourself kit. They also ship completely assembled systems with new or refurbished computer systems.

Dream Arcade has its own large CNC (computer numerical control) wood router table for cutting out all its cabinetry. The pieces are melamine-coated fiberboard which they assemble with lots of care and hard work.

Monday, in the middle of shipping their last batch of two dozen Christmas units, the INQ interviewed the owners Michael and Michelle. They took a brief break from their hard work on the assembly room floor to sit down and chat.

INQ: How did you two get started in the retro arcade game building world?

M & M: Michael here – I had worked for Intel in their network systems engineering areas. In 2002, Michelle asked for a tabletop Pac-Man arcade game, just like the ones she played as a teen. I decided to built it myself, I downloading the software from the original game publisher, installed an older PC to power the games, and built the tabletop.

INQ: Who buys your arcade games?

M & M: Our biggest local market is Silicon Valley where we have sold them to some of the big names in software and contemporary game development. They say they like to play the old games too.

Amazingly, professional people like doctors and dentists put them in their waiting rooms. We have quite a few in lunch rooms at large companies including Apple and Wells Fargo Bank. The military buys them for their recreation rooms in the states and overseas. We have sold them to trade show organizers for entertaining the public and the press.

We just shipped a Dreamcade model to HP for their booth at CES in Las Vegas in a few weeks.

INQ: What games do you get?

M & M: A customer gets from 100 console games to several thousand, depending on the model they purchase. We pay gaming publishers anywhere from 50 cents to $15 per game for their licensing rights.

INQ: What PC are you using?

M & M: Over the past five years our motherboards have gone from 600Hz class to 2.6MHz levels. We have a target BOM (bill of materials) cost and our suppliers keep shipping better and better parts for the same prices. Next year's units will have a faster CPU, better video display, more RAM, and our sale pricing will be relatively constant.

If you have a working computer and know how to use it, we can help you setup your favorite classic games. The software included with each of our tables is designed to be easy to setup and use.

We sell a lot of table top units to people who install an Xbox computer. The Mac owners are another big buying group. If you have a keyboard emulation driver our arcade gaming units will work – including most versions of Windows, DOS, Linux, UNIX, or FreeBSD to name a few.

INQ: Do you built custom units?

M & M: We often have customers who buy a special computer and have it drop shipped to our factory. These arcades are like an IPOD for video games. Instead of adding MP3 music files to your IPOD, you add ROM game files to your Dream Arcades machine.

INQ: Do you ship internationally?

M & M: We regularly ship our tables to the EU, Japan, and as far as Antarctica without any damage. Shipping costs to foreign countries start at $200 and top out about $600. Our freight forwarder handles the overseas shipments and customs duty stuff.

This one over here is ready to go to Canada.

INQ: Can I customise the keyboard layout for a new game?

M & M: Yes, we use the fully programmable Ultimarc mini-pac in all our tables. This controller is fully programmable via the included utility.

On Windows you would use MAME32 (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator for Win32 Platform) The main purpose of MAME32 is to be a reference to the inner workings of arcade machines. This is done for educational purposes and to preserve many historical video arcade games.

INQ: How do they add more games?

M & M: Dream Arcade Dreamcade includes over 100 games, like Centipede®, Pac-man®, Dragon's Lair®. Because it is PC based, you can add additional game packs. You can buy ROM's from companies such as StarRoms.com to use with MAME32. There are also other emulated and ported collections of games available that work great with our arcades.

INQ: Do you consider the business a success?

M & M: We have sold more than 1,000 units this year out of our tiny Folsom warehouse. Sales are mostly from the Internet and have grown 90 percent in the past two years. We are always looking for distributors, especially in EU, Japan, and Latin America.

INQ: What do they cost?

M & M: Prices range from $589 to $1,799. Our high-end product, the Dreamcade Vision 120 with a 120-inch projection screen, a library of 145 arcade games and more than 7,000 console games is priced at $3,999.

Here is a photo of our neighbour's kids using it for a birthday party.

INQ: Thank you both for taking time out of your busiest week to talk with us.

M & M: Actually January is even busier. Seems a lot of people get the urge for nostalgia arcade games in the coldest part of the winter.

As we pulled out of the industrial park the obvious thought was: wonder where we can put one of those big ones our my small office? µ