Tim did a great interview in which he talks Reclaim Arcade on the 80-Bit Podsmash podcast with Termite and Penguin. The podcast is about all things gaming, and it was cool to hear the co-hosts dig on the Reclaim Arcade collection of old school cabinets. In fact, they were able to experience the full glory of Reclaim Arcade in-person as Tim gave them a tour of the space prior to the show. It was cool to hear Star Castle get some love—a truly under appreciated vector masterpiece. And the fact that Termite and Penguin were so excited about the potential of the space was a much needed buoy for the project in these uncertain times. As I already mentioned on this blog, we’re still going forward with Reclaim Arcade, and we’ll open when we think the time is right, until then we are dialing in the details.
NEON?!
I think my favorite part of the podcast, and it’s chuck full of highlights, was listening to Tim recount the timeline of events leading up to our projected May 2020 opening of Reclaim Arcade. It was non-stop work on this project for Tim as early as November 2019 and by the time we got into late February the construction was already delayed and it looked like late June, early July was the absolute earliest we could open. We were not happy. At the same time, while I’m sitting here in Italy feeling useless I was watching the entire nation start locking-down and within 10 days I was already wondering if and when I’d ever get back for an opening (I was all set to move back to the US come late April). Well the rest is history, but it is a good reminder how insane the whole arcade project was getting as COVID start emerging as a broader global threat.
And while we got lucky that we had not committed to the construction when we put the brakes on the project in mid-March, the idea of walking away from what was a pretty amazing vision was deeply depressing. We put a moratorium on the whole thing for about 3 or 4 months (built Reclaim Cloud in the interim) and then reconvened on the Arcade front in early August and committed to a bit more modest project. It’s a crazy timeline, and hearing Tim talk it through on this podcast was surprisingly intense for me. It’s hard to fully understand the insanity of what we are living through because if we don’t try to normalize it in some way we would go crazy—but remembering the not so distant past and how quickly everything changed is sobering.
