Ancient Web: Basement Arcade Remembered a Day at Videotopia in 2006

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A museum full of old arcade cabinets is already an attraction. A museum where the visitor can play the cabinets, photograph the repair bench, and go home to build a webpage is better still.

Visit A Day at Videotopia.

Mark E. Davidson's Basement Arcade photo page recounts a trip from New Jersey to the outskirts of Baltimore to visit Videotopia, a traveling exhibition devoted to coin-operated and console-game history. He names companions from the hobbyist arcade scene, including Al Warner and Jeff Kindler, and says Jeff Anderson arranged a private look behind the scenes.

The story is short; the image captions are where the history lives. Davidson records a Computer Space cabinet, a row of four Tempest games, several Atari vector displays, a Red Baron, and Sega vector machines Eliminator and Zektor. He admits that some of these games were machines he had never played before.

The workbench belongs in the museum too

The list also includes concept drawings for Williams' Blaster, unusual sit-down versions of Sinistar and Missile Command, and an Atari 'catbox' diagnostic device used for board repairs. One photograph is captioned as Jeff showing his workbench. Those are unusual things to preserve alongside pictures of players at games.

A working arcade exhibition requires much more than collecting attractive machines. Displays need repair, circuit boards age, and some cabinets will inevitably be down. Davidson's caption about a non-running Gun Fight notes the disappointment without pretending that everything at the event was perfect.

The homepage credits Davidson and bears a last-update date of January 1, 2006. The photographs are listed as direct JPEG links with their file sizes beside them. A remote counter from counter.digits.com occupies the footer—an authentic relic of an era when visitor totals were part of a page's furniture.

The article does not establish the exact date of the trip, only that the recollection had been published by the page's recorded update. Nor does it treat the exhibition as the inventor of arcade preservation. It captures one visitor's enthusiastic encounter with machines and caretakers who were already trying to save them.

Browse Davidson's original captioned photo list.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.