526: Galloping Ghost: The Story of America’s Biggest Arcade - The Retro Hour EP526

a lot of core memories of that. So I remember at a pizza hut, there was an Indiana Jones machine that you know, it's like I would go to that constantly or I mean, a big thing. And this is sort of tying a lot of threads together, because this I think is very foundational for Doc's game and his own inspiration was Mortal Kombat. There was a video rental store, a corner shop, mom and pop type of shop that when MK first came out, they had the Mortal Kombat machine and to a 10 year old, that was the most insane…

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... You have to call me to know when it started. But when Doc was in his teenage years, he largely inspired by Mortal Kombat thought he would try his hand at doing a digitized much like Mortal Kombat digitized fighting game. And I found out about this. So the spoiler alert, he's still working on the game over 30 years later, right? He hasn't stopped working on the game. And the game has been the genesis of so much of this, I think just through relationships, he's forged and people he's met.

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prototypes. There's so many outrageously rare games and one of ones. And it's one of those things that really bring people into the arcade. The Primal Rage 2 was kind of like the complete package of everything happening all at once where we had a professional Mortal Kombat team, team GGA, that went out and we sponsored them. We paid for all their hotels and airfare and tournament fees. And we had seven guys on the team. They had to train several days throughout the week. Like they do eight hour training…

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But that alone is not what Doc does. He also is a games developer. And the film that we're talking about in the documentary is actually a game called Dark Presence, which he's worked on for, what is it? Three years? 30 years. Yeah. So this is in like a Mortal Kombat style, wasn't it? Digitised. So we get the whole history of that. And that's what the documentaries about this kind of game that's eventually going to get released. So we've got a lot of chat here, you know, about the arcade, but then also about this…

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very important figures in the arcade scene that maybe haven't been given the sort of attention they should be. And at this point now being associated with him and working on the film, I've spent significant amount of time with pretty much all the Mortal Kombat actors. I was just two weeks ago, I was helping the creator of Rampage should kickstart a video for his new game that he's trying to crowdfund, you know, and all of these people are also part of the story of the film, because they're part of the story of…

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... But it was that time capsule that got open and it's like, you couldn't do this any other way. And we've seen Mortal Kombat and NRS try to do a digitized version of MK right now. And for whatever reason, they were like, no, we're not, we can't, we shouldn't, we won't, we aren't. ...

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it out there is games were canceled because it's like, let's put this game out against moral combat. Like, okay, good idea. So like great games just got shelved because they had to compete against Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or NBA Jam. I think what's great as well is like you said, the fact that people can play them then, you know, people have obviously heard rumors about them and maybe read about them in magazines, you know, 30 years ago, but people can actually get their hands on it. I mean, there's…

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... And it failed once they stopped taking care of their machines. And I would I would go and I'd put money in and it's like I, I wouldn't have kicks on either either player side of Mortal Kombat. So it's like, I'd still play it. But it wasn't the full game. It wasn't as fun as I the experience. ...

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