Summary
- The Strong Museum of Play is a testament to gaming history with hundreds of games for visitors to play.
- It also makes a concerted effort to repair and reserve much of its library, so they remain playable.
- We delved into the process with Martin Reinhardt, an arcade technician with years of experience.
Last year, I dove into a very important topic that I felt was overlooked in the discussion about video game preservation: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:arcade games.
Arcade titles are by far the hardest games to😼 preserve. They wear down more quickly, emulation can’t quite match the original experience, unlike their console counterparts, a🍒nd other factors, such as a lack of port to home consoles and localisation outside their home countries, may further complicate preservation. Last month, I had an opportunity to speak with Martin Reinhardt, an arcade technician for the .
An accredited museum operating out of Rochester, New York, The Strong houses over 300 arcade games and pinball tables. After speaking with Reinhardt, it’s clear that a big community exists for preserving arcade titles that I didn’t know about before. While some parts of our conversation remind me why arcade games are so hard to preserve, it’s great to see that there are people who are passi🐷onate about preserving them despite the hardship it often involves.
Fo𝐆r his entire life, Reinhardt was a very “take it apart; fix it kind of person.”
“There was a shop next to me called the Restoration Depot,” Reinhardt tells me “They restored jukeboxes, coke machines, arcade games and pinbal♏l machines. I let him know that I [Reinhardt’s shop] was going out of business🍸… so I started working with him. Took my skills of restoring things to his shop and that’s where I really got introduced to the hands-on internals of fixing and restoring arcade games and pinball.”
How Is The Strong Preserving Its Hundreds Of Games?
Once the sh🔯op was about to close down, he saw an ope💦n position at The Strong, and got the job.
The Strong is an accredited museum and that colors its approach to preservation. “Everything we do is reversible,” Reinhardt says. “Similarly, like how you wouldn’t sand the gold off King Tut🌠’s mꦗask and spray paint it with gold paint.”
He uses cabinet-side artwork as an example. “If we have to touch up artwork on the side of a game, we don’t just sand off the old artwork and put a new sticker on the side,” Reinhardt says. “We have a conserva🔥tor who applies a barrier layer…we’ll do our touch-up work, and that’s recorded, and the reason why is, let’s say 50 years from now, we find out that the paint we used to do that touch-up actually can cause dam🔴age to the artifact, because of that barrier layer we can remove that paint and then the next conservator can re-touch it up again.”
That’s what makes The Strong different from other arcade establishments - it keeps these games preserved for as long as possible. Another big aspect of preserving games at The Strong is 3D printing. “With this new 3D printing initiative, we have been able to save several games that otherwise would not be playable by guests,” Reinhardt sa🎀ys. “We have one out on the floor 𓄧right now of Bally Hill Climb and some extensive 3D printing work for this motorcycle.”
For those unaware, Bally 🍷Hill Climb is an early 70s game in which you guide a small physical motorcycle along the hillside. It’s an old electro-mechanical game, and those tend to have weak plastic parts. That’s where the 3D printing initiative really shines, reproducing th🏅ese old plastics to keep these 60s and 70s games playable.
How Long Will These Processes Last, And What Can We Do To Help?
The work and effort that goes into preserving games at The Strong is truly remarkable, but there are nuggets that remind me why arcade game preservation is le💯aps and bounds above others. A very interesting point here came about when discussing old rear-projection light gun games.
Reinhardt adds: “We’re trying to run original hardware as often as possible. That is one of our main goals, so we haven’t had to resort to ✨LCD conversions and games. We don’t do that here. That’s a conversation that will have to happen at some point, but right now, I hoard monitors, and we’re constantly repairing monitors.”
For certain games, there almost seems to be an inevitability. Sure, you can swap out parts or components, but eventually, those will run dry, and re𒁏production will slowly grow into t🦩he only option available. Yes, that’ll be decades from now, but thinking ahead is what video game preservation is all about.
This even goes for perhaps the most famous game at The Strong,ꦆ Tetris Giant, in which you use two behemoth-sized arcade sticks to play. I discussed Tetris Giant with Reinhardt, and it appeared the game’s future was quite uncertain. “That game scares the heck out of me for one reason: I have looked for ten years for parts for that and I have yet to find parts for that. Ours is still going. I don’t know how…I’m always looking for parts for that unit, so you should get out here and play it.”
Once upon a time, it seemed𒁏 all doom and gloom for arcade game lovers, but the reality is, at least in the United States, there’s probably a place like The Strong near you.
