Greetings, Starfighter! A Weekend At Funspot

Some of you might be wondering why we have been so silent over the events of the New York Comic Con, which has just finished up and featured news including the return of Stephanie Brown to the DC Universe proper.

Well, the reason is that we checked our bank balance after returning from the San Diego Comic-Con, determined that we didn’t have the cash or the cachet to attend another giant-assed comic convention three months after the Big Show, and therefore decided to spend the weekend doing something geeky, but geeky within our budget.

And that means video games. And being from Boston, that means that the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office exists about 100 miles from Funspot, the home of the American Classic Arcade Museum.

Now the whole “museum” tag might make the whole experience sound boring, but what it really means is that the third floor of one of the biggest arcades in the world is (minus the only indoor miniature golf course I have ever seen) completely loaded with original and working arcade cabinet games (the real machines, not that MAME stuff that your creepy uncle misguidedly uses to try to lure young-looking girls into his basement game room) that you can actually play with a simple token from an old-school token machine.

And, since Funspot is the arcade featured in The King of Kong, you can, for the low-low price of 25 cents, play the actual Donkey Kong machine that Steve Wiebe went head-to-head with against Billy Mitchell for the world record. Or, if you’re me, you can use that legendary machine to learn that you were never any good at Donkey Kong, whether you use the cross-handed grip you saw Mitchell use in that movie or not.

And not only did I learn that I am not good enough to fondle the joystick that Wiebe and Mitchell used to make history, but I learned that, when you are a 42-year-old man, spending eight hours a day playing as many video games as you want is more physically exhausting that you would have thought when you were 12 years old and never had more than five bucks to spend at any given arcade at any given time.

Meaning that I am physically crippled, and functioning only through the glee that, 22 years after it was released, I finally got through the second level of Tron. Combine that with Amanda’s excitement over holding the Pole Position II high score for the entire weekend, and we are collectively running on fumes here.

So while we recover, please enjoy these photos of a place that exists in this world 20 minutes off of Route 93 in New Hampshire, where any person with a quarter can play as Flynn against Sark (in not only Tron, but Discs of Tron), or as Pac Man before he had eyes and a Saturday morning cartoon, or even as Mario when he was still known as Jumpman and was just fighting against a giant monkey.

It is more fun than you could think you could have, and some proof is available after the jump.

(These are big pictures, straight from the digital camera. So if clicking the pick leads to a cropped image, click it again to see it full sized)