Everyone remembers their first arcade. For me it was a ramshackle joint dragged around on the back of a van that used to roll into town for a week every September, when you’d see if anyone had managed to bump you off the Super Monaco GP leaderboard in the months between each visit. For Nosebleed Interactive’s Andreas Firinigl, it was somewhere a bit seedier than that.
“It was this really grotty one in the back of a dodgy video shop in Stamford,” he says over a lunchtime whiskey as we chat online. “It had four or five machines – Rolling Thunder, Robocop and this Japanese board that was untranslated so I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I was talking about it with a friend recently and he was like ‘oh I remember that place, it had a room for pornos’. It was a really grotty shop.”
Indeed. It’s that unsavoury kind of joint that you first take over in Arcade Paradise, Nosebleed Interactive’s forthcoming mash-up of management sim and mini-game collection.
“Basically you’re working in this dead end job in the laundrette,” he explains. “You’ve got a couple of arcade machines in the back where you’ve got you start off with like three cabinets in the back. It’s wallpaper-less concrete, these grim storage cabinets everywhere. In my head, that’s what that arcade in Stamford looked like. Anyway, the cabinets end up making more money than the laundrette machines, so you start building this arcade.”