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News List  Retro arcade offers a 'Flashback'

Retro arcade offers a 'Flashback'

A din of beeps and boops sounded out this week in a downtown shop as its owners prepared a time warp into the early days of the gamer, when high scores were won with skill, stamina and a pocket full of quarters.
 
“It’s almost like stepping back in time,” Flashback Games video arcade co-owner Roger Ozbolt Jr. said while surrounded by the flashing screens of cars racing down roads in graphics ranging from the 30-year-old Sega Turbo to the more modern, at least relative to the rest of the store, scenes of 3D cars tearing down winding roads in San Francisco Rush The Rock: Alcatraz Edition.
 
“Back then, these were state of the art,” he said of the games to be made available to patrons starting today in the arcade at 162 W. Clayton St.
 
Now, though, the games’ appeal isn’t the shine of graphics, especially as so many carry in their pockets computers with hundreds of times more power than the 250-pound arcade machines; it’s the nostalgia and simplicity of it.
 
Ozbolt and his partner, William Geiger, officially open the retro arcade today, giving many a chance to relive their 8-bit digital glory days behind the joystick of Street Fighter II or Centipede while hopefully introducing the machines to a new generation of gamers.
 
“We wanted to make a fun, simple place that people can come enjoy,” Geiger said.
 
Part of that, they said, was ditching the need for quarters in favor of $8 day passes. But they tried to capture the spirit of it by rigging buttons that act in their stead, giving users the full experience of hearing the in-game jingle of when a new credit is added.
 
“We wanted to preserve the age,” Geiger said.
 
While they want to capture the spirit of the arcade era, it’s also somewhat of a museum, they said. A stroll through the main floor has an old air hockey table and classics like Asteroid; a middle room has one of the display cases from the original Nintendo Entertainment System, where game makers would release the games to try out before consumers could buy them for their home system. They also have old-school pinball machines ready for action. Ozbolt said that, in some circles, pinball machines can be likened to classic cars, with moving parts that can be fixed and a history to be preserved.
 
“They can be pieces of junk that people can spend a year restoring,” he said.
 
They also note the signs of age on some of the cabinets, like the band name U2 being scrawled into one cabinet.
 
Ozbolt and Geiger said they plan to eventually host gaming tournaments and are considering offering monthly passes. But for now, they’re focusing on getting off the ground.
 
• Follow government and business reporter Nick Coltrain at twitter.com/ncoltrain or on Facebook at facebook.com/NickColtrainABH.
 

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