Galloping Ghost - The World's Largest Arcade

[Applause] yes if you can [Music] [Music] i'm the owner of galloping ghost productions galloping goes gamma galloping goes reproductions and the galloping ghost arcade which is the largest arcade in the world [Music] [Music] [Music] the first arcade game that i ever played i was super young but i just saw this glow walking up to it just seeing the glow from that monitor i remember it to this day and i remember rolling in that first quarter and it was just very special it sticks and i think about it constantly i was very fortunate growing up there was a bunch of arcades around us every restaurant had an arcade game in it the cool thing about it was that the arcades were so different from one another the lighting of would all be different the games that they had and just like the general atmosphere to the arcades to me that's so satisfying because when i do think back of all the arcades that i i had growing up most of them have closed or don't have traditional arcade games anymore okay guys really quick we have 630 arcade games in here it's all unlimited free play until we close it two in the morning if the game is ever asking for a coin or a credit there's gonna be a red button next to the coin door that looks like that press it and the game will start right up i pretty much inhabited the arcades most of my uh late 70s early 80s so a lot of this stuff in here is nostalgia definitely nostalgia i mean you grew up playing these games you could only play them in the arcade they were better than the consoles i know i grew up these games so it's pretty exciting because you don't usually see these kind of things anymore so i mean like sometimes like you know you just find like maybe some like little arcade machines like maybe at some store but never anything like actually like in our arcade basically before you know [Music] the decline of the arcades some people claim it happened at different times uh in all honesty it's always been there you'll get classic players that say that 84 was the end of it and then you'll get people that say like nah really kind of died in like 91 and really what was happening is it's just changing generationally it's you've got the classic games after that in the 90s that's when the fighting games took over so then there's this huge stretch of fighting games and then after that people say yeah it really ended around then 98 99 that's when like a lot of the shmup games and the shooters came into play and after that it was the dancing games and the rhythm games and it's always been there i honestly think to this day the industry does a lot of things that's very detrimental uh it's there's things that the scene the companies could be doing to bring it back in full force but for whatever reason they just don't the demand is there when people think okay they think of everything being primitive like why am i gonna go to an arcade when i can play something on a home console that's a totally different experience with a home console you don't appreciate the artwork that's on the bezel or the control panel or the side artwork or the camaraderie that you have you know actually seeing other players that have the same interest in the game that you do yeah playing in arcade gives you the original feeling of like what games are really about because nowadays you you can get a game from anywhere and you can just play on like a console at home but like when you come to an arcade you're getting the original feeling to like know what it's like to be in the atmosphere of just games [Music] that's the good stuff see i don't consider this a collection this is a finished collection maybe one more this was uh with the movie coming out you can see it's signed by jeff naumann and dedicated to me and it is all the original source code to rampage and lists all the cities and the days that are listed in the game to see how it all fit together and how complicated games used to be to make where you had to type in everything and if a hyphen was in the wrong spot the game wouldn't run at all uh that's just unbelievable yeah it's just so much code part of history i had always wanted to work in the video game scene i was collecting and playing video games super early on and when the 16-bit era hit i got just entrenched in it and just collected literally every single genesis game that ever came out my passion for video games just grew i was a huge mortal kombat fan and back in the day i met ed boone when i was working at the golf mill babbages he's very quiet myself i had all sorts of social problems i was super shy i couldn't stand talking to people it really bothered me but it was ed boone and i was like i've got to talk to this guy because who's i never thought i would ever meet the man he was buying something and i was like oh you're ed boone and he'd probably gotten it a million times before i was like i really want to get into the video game industry and i i can do this and this and this and he is just kind of like that's good keep trying good luck after the meeting was like wow ed boon didn't want to hear anything that i had to say it was like okay i'm gonna go open my own company and really do this a month or so ago ed stopped out here and he's walking down the street we've talked a handful of times but he's like what got you into game design and i was kind of like in all honesty it was like you like you you were a cornerstone of uh what pushed me into it because he was just being totally honest it's it's tough to get in the scene so it was uh very beneficial and uh definitely owe him a debt of gratitude for how that went down it just seemed apparent that the easiest way to get in the industry was to open my own company [Music] the galloping ghost company as a whole started out as the as galloping goes productions which was a company that was designed to create arcade video games what would become the galloping ghost arcade was actually not even supposed to be my arcade 2009 one of our actors had just sold his business and he knew that i had several business models that i had written one being for the arcade and he was like oh can i can i use that business model i'm like yeah whatever go like by all means and he's like would you want to partner up on this i'm sure like why not in 2010 we opened up the galloping ghost arcade which was a way to not only help us get arcades back out on the map and get people to uh get re-interested in them and help revitalize the industry uh but it would also be a place for us to to put our arcade games that where we're coming out when doc hit us up like hey we're going to open up an arcade it's like okay so another new project now we started driving all over illinois and wisconsin looking for venues that had arcades most of the arcades if you heard about them they were closing there were so many places that they would have machines but none of them would work like i couldn't even find a working mortal kombat 2. we went we went to 80 venues and there was not a working mortal kombat 2 in chicago and that greatly bothered me that was really the catalyst of what started the the business model of like yeah we got to make an arcade that's really on top of things and you can go play all these old games i found a batch of games out in iowa and it was 114 machines for five thousand dollars it was like 40 bucks a machine this kind of like barn find barn finds are a huge thing in like the car scene you know get like some ridiculously old sl mercedes and it's been sitting there forever and then you you get it and it's like you could see what it could become and in some cases like it's got rust on it and there's like a bird living in the air intake it's got no tires and you pull it out you take it to your garage and you kind of sweat all over it and bring it back to life and it's kind of like the same thing with arcade cabinets we took all our production guys and we got we rented six or seven trucks and drove out to iowa loaded them up with arcade games and drove them all back it was a 26-hour day for me i remember having a five hour energy drink and pretty much hallucinating when on the on the drive back when we acquired those those original games we had to learn basically everything of the original 114 only eight of those turned on it was months and months of just restoration uh everything got new power supplies tons of monitors to fix all new controls on stuff so as far as fixing an arcade cabinet you're talking about after 1980 something they're all standardized so they're all the same inside a wire harness a power supply the board the monitor and then you just have your controls so we just finished turning on all the machines here this morning next thing we do is kind of go around and see what's down right now narc one of my favorite games is actually off so we'll get that back up later today we have to basically go through all the games and there's about anywhere between 40 and 60 daily machines that we have to do something to to make sure that they play properly for everybody throughout the day and basically we just go through and see if there's anything new that's down and then spend the rest of the day trying to fix it and talking with people that are coming to play all this stuff fixing a game just fixing anything in general uh just starts with like all right what's what's going on here you look at it you get a new to us machine that's been sitting around in some guy's garage for 20 years plug it in does it turn on it's just like oh my car's not running what's the deal here and then you just troubleshoot it it is like oh we got this crazy old car let's restore the body and then guess what there's this ridiculously old 8-liter v8 engine you have to put in here that nobody has parts for anymore and you have to make stuff for it and you turn it on and it's go go go go go go go go and you're like come on and like the screen might have some graphical errors but it works for the better and you're like wow without any further ado let's unveil today's monday mystery game it's just one it's armchamps 2 from jelico the return 1992. and it's like taking your car out of the car show it's like man look at this crazy old car that i restored i've never even seen one of these things and yeah that's that's just like that it's like man these things are hidden and you kind of come across and find them and then you bring them back up it's like wow you'll never see anything this cool again we've had so many people fight against this game so many people love this game so by the time we had set our opening date on august 13th uh we had a 130 machines up and running we had asked around to a few different towns and honestly nobody wanted an arcade to open in their town there was very little information as to what an arcade would bring to it most places look back at oh yeah i remember arcades and there's crime and mafia and gangs when doc was trying to open the place a bunch of cities didn't want to have us there was a few places that were like oh no that leads to gangs that leads to violence next thing you know you know we're going to have a gun problem there was this stereotype that gamers were going to be up to no good and that certainly wasn't the case they were just there to play games [Music] oh [Music] everybody thought the arcade wasn't going to work industry people uh were saying that yeah this is going to be a few months and it's an arcade in 2010 it's like how could this work nobody's heard of this like you're not charging quarters like that doesn't work like you get who's going to pay 15 to go play arcade games since we opened we've always had an entry fee to the arcade whereas obviously most arcades have always been quarter driven the psychology behind what we wanted to give the players was very different and the games were made to take recorders we wanted people to be there all day with us and get into these games and really we wanted to build a community behind the place it wasn't russia get people in get those quarters on them get them out so the next people person could come in and play it was come check out all these crazy games you probably never played before if they don't like a game it's like yeah this one isn't for me it's not that okay well i've i've invested something in it it's i can walk away with from it and i can try a hundred games in one day if i wanted to so it didn't take long for people to be very much on board to see the value in it you take away all the negativities of people running out of money it's just like come spend the day everybody was asking how many redemption games we were going to have like ticket games uh i'd tell them zero like we'll never have one of those in here and people are like that's gonna be 75 80 percent of your business people are asking if we were going to have alcohol absolutely not i just wanted arcade games most places when they open they're they're either looking for new stuff or classic stuff they they put themselves in the genre the arcade is it's a little more personal and on the selfish side there because the the game lineup is in all honestly it's just stuff i want to play it's the evolution of gaming you've got stuff here that was here from the 70s and almost up to present day just the the whole industry that's what i'm jealous about with the younger kids that come here is that they didn't have to wait for the sequel to mortal kombat 1 or street fighter one everything's here for them already and you could see stuff from the most primitive graphics to the most advanced graphics and go by game by game aisle by aisle to basically have a history lesson on how everything progressed the other side of the collection to me beyond the games the guy the games are this tangible thing but collecting the history and the back story and all this stuff if people knew half of what i've gotten to see and hear and learn about the games that i love so much and i know everybody loves them so much it's like i don't know you just want to share it all it's hard to explain it's it's something that i'm the luckiest man in the world to be able to do what i do it went from just getting games to dock looking for rare games i mean he's had games donated to him that were one of a kind so that those people don't want something sitting in the basement it should be allowed for everybody to play to me that's that's probably the biggest compliment that anybody can can give doc or over the arcade is that here i have something that somebody would pay a ton of money for but you can have it for you know a low price or for free or whatever and it's evolved to what it is now where you have one-of-a-kind games out on the floor it's amazing to have a one-of-a-kind arcade game we've been very fortunate in being able to collect the ones that we've got we've got a lot of prototype games a lot of one-of-one games some of them have come direct from personal collections of the actual people that designed brian colen for example who created games like rampage and xenophobe and archrivals he saw the arcade as just a great place to connect back with people that enjoy his games as a show of support to us he had a game called international team laser which uh they made one prototype cabinet for he donated that to us along with another game called rc squared and was pretty much he was like i want to donate these to the arcade and if you can get them working people can enjoy them again and we had this huge launch party event for him uh we were already running a tournament and we put these games out that people had never seen before it was just absolutely amazing the continued response to those games is just unbelievable because it's something that people weren't even sure that if it even really existed same thing with games like primal rage 2. we managed to fix the board and it was just unbelievable like i was so excited that we actually had it so we we made a video for it and now we are very fortunate enough to uh give everybody the opportunity to play primal rage 2 which did not actually come out this is uh the prototype everything just went absolutely crazy we were doing this live stream we're about to go on a live stream one of the creators of the game called me up and this guy called me up his name was chris tang who is a well-known game designer and he did all the a lot of the animations on primal rage and just started talking he's like i can't be at home to watch the stream tonight he's like but this is very important to me and i need to talk to you tomorrow about this next day he calls me up and we did like an eight and a half hour stream and he's like i got home at about two in the morning i watched the entire stream from start to finish and he's like it was bringing tears to my eyes he had worked on this game for atari and midway bought atari and basically closed all the atari projects one being primal rage two and it was like the one game that chris had worked on that people said was just a bad game and he's like i heard your guys playing the game at a professional level and enjoying it hearing them react to seeing stuff for the first time and finding finishing moves fatality we got a new one it meant so much to him to have that happen this game that everybody said was just this trash game for really high-end players to be like wow this is something really special the game was supposed to come out like 97. so 13 14 years of people saying this game doesn't exist anymore and it's terrible if it did it's all been wrong it's so amazing to be able to take this game put it back on the floor have people traveling from everywhere we had a couple travel in from oregon they hitchhiked to get here just to play primal rage too like i can go on and on and on about most of our prototypes have come in very special ways arcade games resonate with people on so many different levels it's not just the timing of when they came out for everybody just brings with it such a unique social aspect to it and a lot of games they do mean so much to so many people while the prototypes mean a lot because the developers finally get to see what a game would mean to somebody had it ever come out watching the players come in and see a game that they haven't seen in forever we we had one guy that came in you can always see he had never been there before you can see the the people that come in they're kind of like what's going on why is all this here this guy was given that kind of vibe so i'm like hey how's it going your first time here and he's like yeah are you selling all these and i'm like no we're a functioning arcade and he's like can can i look around and i'm like yeah let's take a take a look around so he walked in and he he turns the corner and he goes up an aisle and he turns and he just stops and i'm kind of looking at just starts crying and i go over to him like you all right man like everything okay and he looked down the aisle and he saw nba jam and i was like i'm being jam i love the game great game but it's it's common it's like you see him all over the place back in the day of some all over the place he starts telling me the story about how he he and his brother used to play that game every day after school he would go there's like a hamburger place that had it his mom wouldn't get home until late him and his brother would just pump quarters in this thing non-stop and he's like my brother passed away and he's like it just hit me with everything every time we had played together and it it just made him react [Music] i spent so much time in the arcade i went with my dad all the time and my brother i went with my friends i see all that and i relive it all every time i see like a parent and their kid playing rampage or cuber and it's like man you just see the connection initially when we opened my my business partner was like he would put football on the tvs and stuff you would come in on the weekends and it was like he'd be standing there and there'd be eight guys watching tv and their kids are running off that's terrible they should be enjoying these games not doing two things in different places the focus has to be on getting people to enjoy this stuff and you see it every single day it's hard for me to not be in there and i'll see three people playing rampage take a picture and send it to brian cullen be like look that game came out 32 years ago and there's still people enjoying that the games have stood the test of time and it's something that most of the games now they come out a month later you don't hear about them again but these games there's just some weird connection to them i think galloping goes offers the unique experience with the nostalgia factor for parents and being able to bring their kids somewhere to hey i used to play that game when i was your age or we can play this together and it's also neat seeing a parent being able to beat their child in in the game rather than being vice versa you know at the console at home you know a lot of a lot of parents i know have an issue with how many buttons are on the [Music] controller everybody can pick up on the old games i don't want to say they're not as involved or advanced as the stuff for the consoles not because there is a lot of strategy involved for a lot of the old games figuring out patterns what to do on what specific stage or whatever there is uh logic to it but the thing is that as far as just being able to go to machine and being able to figure out what to do within the within the first you know five minutes i mean every game that i bought for a current console has some sort of tutorial to it the classic games are just unbelievably well designed at the time there wasn't a bunch of sequels like everything now it's so much safer to make a a new sequel to a game than to create an entirely new ip so they just keep doing that and that's kind of in a way stunted some of the innovation but if you look in the arcade there's just so many games it was like hey let's try this and there's still nothing else like that game to this day and it's like to see kids play stuff like that and get into it it it's going to perpetuate arcades forever and half of it is like it's the great games half of it is a social element and it's like so many different things just compiled to make it just in something that you can't emulate anywhere else after about eight months of us being open everything changed the towns that had rejected us were coming to us asking open the arcade let's move over to their town the arcade now drives everything else it's like the guys that have the world's largest arcade are making their own fighting game guess what those guys they're opening a gym that's going to be awesome the mk guys are teaching over there that's really cool toru iwatani who is the creator of pac-man and he came to the arcade he had heard about our place out in japan and had to come he's taken pictures of like every machine because he hasn't seen half these games it's all original arcade hardware like we don't allow any emulation or anything it was never the intent to be the largest arcade in the world we just wanted to do what we were doing very well i'm an obsessive compulsive collector back in my psychogenesis days it i would buy literally every commercially released game it didn't matter what it was if it was a terrible game i would spend 60 bucks on it just because i wanted to have all of them the experience that happened in the 80s it's it's slightly different than what it is now in in a sense there were new games coming out but in in a lot of ways you do kind of experience exactly how it was and much more to me when i had to leave the arcade it was that was the end of my fun time it was the day is over that's been taken out of it now it's just literally come hang out all day it means so much to me when i'm able to put a new arcade game on the floor that's been out for 30 years that these guys have never even heard of it's so satisfying to watch them step up to it for the first time watching them squint their face up of like i've never heard that game before like what is this to me that's how i used to be when i would walk around the arcade i would walk past the game and be like oh this wasn't here last week what is this do i want to play this that's what made the arcade so cool back in the day was finding all those new games and it all still happens i've talked to so many people that have traveled in they tell me about their experiences back in the 80s and my goal was to make it better than our any arcade i ever went to and i i can't think of any arcade that i have had more fun at than ours [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i mean i know this is like an impossible question but is that your favorite game or do you not have a favorite game it is excessively difficult for me to say my absolute favorite uh i used to never give a solid answer for that but uh hydro thunder is probably one of the like if there was just line of games and hydro thunder is there i'd probably sit down and play hydro thunder two of my favorite games but two games that i hate the most donkey kong and centipede i usually go back to either contra or super contra i'm a huge fan of the contra games probably off-road i'm a big fan of that one very quiet it's cheap street fighter of course it might still be narc is that was the first game i bought [Music] you

Channel: Nice Pants

Views: 11,570

Rating: 4.9521914 out of 5

Keywords: Galloping Ghost Arcade, Arcade, World Largest Arcade, Largest Arcade, gaming, video games, Illinois, Brookfield, Doc Mack, Galloping Ghost, documentary, short-film, film, doc, video game documentary, video game short film, vide games

Id: fwN0yQbDDVs

Length: 33min 1sec (1981 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/skrydly]

When I made A Tribute to Sleepycabin everyone in this community (including some folks at Sleepycabin) were super supportive of it. The positive response to that video motivated me to continue working in the video production field, and now I just finished my first "independent" "professional" documentary, linked above!

I'm so thankful everyone in this community was so supportive of my content, it really meant a lot, and I definitely wouldn't have been half as motivated to make my own work without that initial support. Cheers to the Sleepycabin fans.

[u/PayCheckOrDeath]

Dude this arcade is awesome!! I went there with my friends for my Birthday a few years ago!!

[u/[deleted]]

Yoo I love galloping ghost!

[u/DonkeyOateee]

Just finished it, that was great! Love the music and the heart that went into this doc, it really shone through.