The Pac Man Video Game Cabinet Candy Tin!

A couple of weeks back, while my wife and I were shopping around Universal Citywalk, fresh from the Universal Studios theme park, with a stomach full of Pink's hot dogs and still a little shaky from the House of Horrors, I stumbled onto a little tin slice of awesomeness in the form of this beauty of a candy tin in the shape of a vintage Pac Man video game cabinet.

I had heard about these coming last summer and I tried to find one at Comic Con in San Diego with no luck. But now it looks like they're everywhere and I managed to find one at the giant candy shop in Universal Citywalk.

I just love the design of the tin itself. Just look at the graphics on the "screen"...

Even the side of the cabinet takes me back to the good ol' days when I would stand there longingly hoping that one of the legion of teenagers would run out of quarters so I could get a chance to play our local bowling alley's Pac Man machine, only to lose patience and end up plunking my quarters into Tempest or Centipede instead.

As I mentioned, this is a candy container, and even the candies inside are in little Pac Man shapes! Although, they should be little white power pellets, now that I think about it.

But I don't really care about the candy. I just wanted the cabinet for my action figures to have something to play Pac Man on. Sadly, it's just a little too small for the usual 3 3/4" figure, much less poor Chewbacca...

But, as it turns out, it's the perfect size for an Ewok...

Yub nub!

New Additions to the Nerdatorium Papercraft Arcade!

Just thought I'd post a quick update and show off my latest additions to my rapidly growing miniature papercraft video game arcade. My newest machines are Defender, Gauntlet and, a personal favorite, Tempest! Enjoy...

Welcome to the Nerdatorium Papercraft Video Arcade!

My recent resurgent fanaticism for old-school video games and pinball machines and my work-related crash-course in, and budding love, of papercraft models has collided when I found a couple of links to action-figure-sized, build-'em-yourself, vintage video game cabinets and other classic arcade ephemera, thus helping me begin to build my very own mini arcade...

The papercrafts themselves are beautifully designed and pretty easy to put together. As I learn more about the hobby of papercrafts, I'm figuring out that I should probably be using glossier paper and printing on the "photo" setting, but to save ink, I've just been doing a standard print on regular cardstock. Either way, it's just two tons of fun to slowly build my very own mini-arcade.

The only downside is that I keep making these on my lunch break when I should be working on my VROOOM! series. Gah! Gotta get focused!

Here's the machines that I've made so far, including Pac Man, Donky Kong, Galaga, Dragon's Lair and the Inidianan Jones and Medieval Madness pinball machines. I even found a template for some little stools!

 

I've already downlaoded all of the templates that they had available and will probably end up building them all, but I thought it'd be fun to share with you all now, and I'll keep you all updated as I ad machines.

Now I need to print and cut out a ton of really, really tiny quarters...

You can start your own mini papercraft video arcade by downloading the files from the links below:

Video Game Arcade Papercraft

Classic Pinball Papercraft

Enjoy!

Retro Gaming at Full Tilt!

Man, I've really been on a retro gaming kick lately. Ever since I went to the Seattle Pinball Museum and after listening to several Retroist podcasts about the the Atari 2600 and the orginal NES, I've been all about playing the silver ball or a rousing level or two of Pitfall on my Atari Flashback.

This all came to a head a couple of weekends back when my wife and I were out to dinner with a bunch of friends and we all decided to stop at this ice cream/arcade place here in Seattle called Full Tilt. I had been to this place once years ago, but we didn't stay long, but I remember making a note to come back and play some of their classic video games and pinball machines. Now, with my mind on retro gaming, everyone else happily ate ice-cream while I made a bee-line to the change machine and started plunking quarters into Ms. Pac Man.

I can't even fully express how much fun I had, gleefully feeding quarters into these classic machines. I made the rounds and played several of my old favorites; Ms. Pac Man, Black Knight pinball, Galaga, and even my wife had a blast on the Super Mario machine (which I never even knew existed, I always thought it was just a home console game).

I wanted to play Pac Man, but while we were there, this guy was busy racking up over 300,000 points and getting all the way up to the second to the last screen. I was blown away! I have never seen anyone get that far on Pac Man. All the food went away (no more cherries or pretzels) and the ghosts stopped turning blue. It was awesome.

But the most memorable part of the evening for me was stepping up to the classic Star Wars arcade cabinet, just like the one I had devoted so many hours and quarters to as a kid in a mall in Adrian, Michigan, for the first time in almost 30 years.

When I was 10 and 11 years old, this game was the be-all-end-all as far as I was concerned. They didn't have a Star Wars machine at my usual video game haunt (Rich Lanes, in Blissfield, Michigan), but whenever I took a trip to the mall in Adrian with my mom, she would load me up with quarters and knew I'd be there still playing whenever she finished shopping.

When I walked up to this machine and wrapped my hands around the controllers, it was like 30 year old muscle memory took over and my index fingers naturally coiled around the triggers and my thumbs innately rested on the proton torpedo buttons.

One of the best memories I had of this game was when it broke. Now, I know to most people that sounds like the beginning of a horrifying tale, but in this case, the game broke in the player's favor. You see, one day, I plunked my quarter in and due to some strange glitch in the system, it just kept restarting after my three lives were gone. It was amazing! I would get a little farther each time, lose my 3rd life, and then it would just start over, like I had plunked a quarter into it again.

I played that machine on Saturday afternoon for over 2 hours straight on a single quarter. It was epic.

Sadly, it wasn't the case this time, and I died rather quickly. But now I'm a grown up with a job and I can jolly well plunk as many quarters into video games as I want, which I did, and would have played until they closed if my wife and our friends hadn't pried me away from it.

On second thought, I may not be that grown up after all.

Thank god.