Page 16 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #42 FREE Edition

hit turbo, or hit other cars. In Hard Mode, there are no on-screen icons to guide the player.
The turn out for this game was impressive. Gamers of all ages came out to see the newest game live. Special guests like Billy Mitchell, Walter Day and David Bishop also made the trip to the arcade. They would be there also to count every single machine on the floor to
make it official and submit it to the Guinness Book of World Records. This will be awarded to Doc as the largest arcade and most arcade games in the world.
Galloping Ghost Arcade opened on Friday, August 13, 2010, and Doc and his crew have helped over 50 arcades worldwide open up and help them with startup. Old School Gamer sat down with owner Doc Mack to discuss what it takes to run the largest arcade in the world.
OSG: How has the failure rate with today’s arcades compared to the earlier days?
DOC: In all honesty, the failure
rate has been high, but the understanding of it is to minimize the risks and people are just trying it and they have no idea what it's all about.
OSG: Would you have to have at least 50 machines to be a successful arcade?
Here’s Doc Mack hanging out with Pac-Man creator Toru Iwana!
DOC: If you have 50 machines you have the business model side. How you're doing pay-per-play, which
is to me so dated
at this point. If you are doing free play, the hard part is that you need people to keep coming back. I've seen people's lists of classics,
and you are not going to get enough players coming in to play Donkey Kong. Somebody had sent me a list of their top 20 games and I’m like, that's why it's not going to work.
OSG: What about pinball at an
arcade? Will that be a success?
DOC: Pinball is a different creature. You can have leagues; you can have tournaments do very well, because it's casual. Gamers will just go play, but pinball is very, very different. It’s casual but it's high-end players. They keep going back. It's very different for the video game side because everything is broken into subgroups. So, you've got like the fighting game players, the rhythm game players, and the golf players, the shooting gun players... It's
all fractured so differently, where pinball gets lumped into one big category.
OSG: I imagine the #1 item on starting an arcade is the ability to maintain the machines, correct?
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OLD SCHOOL GAMER MAGAZINE • ISSUE #42