So, last Sunday I ended up going to that local DK tournament that Marky discovered via FB. To cut to the chase, only two other people showed up and I won $10 quite easily. I mostly spent the time giving them DK lessons as I was playing a short game to beat them
. More importantly, however, my hunch was correct and the location (which is called "33rd Realm", and is a hip-hop club) is in the previous location of the arcade I had heard of but had yet to visit called "Hidden Treasures" arcade. After talking with the owner of the club (he was one of the only two people who showed up for the tournament -really cool guy), I found out that he had only been renting the place since the beginning of December and that the previous owner (and owner of a lot of arcade machines -most of which he apparently puts in the 3 or 4 movie theaters he owns) decided to do a 50/50 profit deal with him and leave some of his cabs in the club and see how they did. Well, it turns out that people just love to play the CAGs while listening to the music, so their first month was great. At the time, they had DK, DK Jr., Ms Pacman (cabaret), Pacman (cabaret), Pole Position 2, Punchout, Street Fighter 2, Paperboy, and Mortal Kombat 3, but I sat down with the owner after the tournament and shared some of my knowledge with him as to what games he could maybe get that would do well in his location. He said the same guy that supplied the other games had a lot more he'd be able to choose from and that he wanted to add a few more. I was hoping to contribute my R-Type and Cruis'n USA to his set (to make a little residual income off them), but I just checked FB and it looks like he just added 6 more games yesterday(!), so I'll have to re-check and see if he would still like any additional cabs in his place. The games he added were Asteroids, Guerrilla, Moon Patrol, Tron, Popeye, and Dig Dug (You can see his lineup here:
https://www.facebook.com/33rdRealm/posts/1075280385822182).
Other than that, he also got me pretty excited to get back into frequenting a public location with CAGs. Maybe 2015 will be more like 2012-13 in terms of my gaming projects! I'd also like to dip my toes in the water of hip-hop music and see if it is something I like. I'm pretty open to adding another little hobby to my life if it means gaining a whole bunch of friends. We'll see how it goes.
Lastly, while I was at his place, I bought a sweet Megaman necklace that looks something like this (not a pic of the exact thing I got, but very similar):
http://goo.gl/iWld2R I also struck up a deal with him to be able to sell some prints of the DK manual at his place for a 50/50 cut, since he has a merch table where lots of other local artist and writers have him sell their stuff. I also had a sweet idea that since much/most of what is in the manual was highly dependent upon other people teaching me the ropes of the game, maybe, if it is OK with Jeff and the DK community, a certain percentage of the proceeds could also go towards hosting the DKF site as well as bounties in future DK tournaments... what do you guys think?
