The Eclectic Arcade
One of my many hobbies on Second Life is running a quaint little arcade. A friend of mine had expressed an interest in recreating the same sort of experience of going to an old style arcade of her youth. Having myself grown up in the heyday of the video game craze, I rather missed the old arcades of my youth. Most of the time arcades were offshoots of other businesses, such as miniature golf. Others were grandiose affairs, such as the arcade named '2001' at a nearby mall: all stainless steel and glass, with two levels, and automated doors. Definitely would be cliche' now, but in the mid 80's it was rather impressive.
Anyway, I digress.
I figured that Second Life gave me the opportunity to recreate one of the simple joys of my youth (such as an arcade), without all of the detriments (such as the kids running around screaming about their birthday pizza party and occasionally begging strangers for quarters). So I set about trying to get the required equipment set up. First up, of course, was finding the games to put into the arcade. I had plenty of skyboxes and other buildings on hand to put the game into. But without the games, an arcade is simply a empty building. Unfortunately, most of the games available on SL at the time when I started the project were rather LI heavy (you are only given a certain amount of LI to work with on a parcel, and each object takes up some amount of that LI), and most of them actually didn't work. I decided to build a simple arcade game shell that should be able to look halfway decent without being too heavy on the LI. I didn't know a way to make them active, but with my designs only taking up 1 LI per device (actually less, but who's counting?), it was more prim effective than paying someone for a non-functional machine that takes up between 3-7 LI per machine. Later on I found a way to make them actually function, at which point it was arcade time!
the Eclectic Arcade has been through several permutations. The current iteration is in a skybox on my dwelling here. The arcade consists of two floors. First floor is pretty much wall to wall arcade games:
Second floor has some video games as well, not to mention a few other items, including two tables with four seats ach, a bar, a heart shaped dance ball and a claw machine.
The Claw machine is a 3 prim freebie game. Just click on the device and it will occasionally give you a random idem from its inventory.
On the first floor, there's a couple of old style change machines. The one on the right is a landmark and rules giver, as well as a tipping jar. The one on the left will dispense a randomly functional video game when you pay it $6. Between the two, there's a teleporter that takes you to ground level.
When you reach ground level, I'll usually have some sort of seasonal vista set up for people to enjoy. Today, it's set to a winter landscape, to celebrate the season. I have a small ice house set up, a couple Christmas trees, a pile of presents that doubles as a tipjar and landmark dispenser, and there's a candy cane and a snowman that doubles as a dance machine. I'll swap out the scenery with something different in a few weeks, most likely. But for now, it's fun, so enjoy.
No matter which place you want to visit, feel free to stop by and enjoy. Cheers!
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