Flashing lights and loud noises dominate your senses. Last quarter. This time you’ll get it for sure.
You pop it in and the screen comes to life. Dirk the Daring fearlessly gets to his heroic work. You use what you’ve learned all afternoon to navigate the treacherous path. It’s a perfect run so far. Just as you’re starting to get cocky, the Lizard King creeps out of nowhere. Game over.
Just one of many horrible fates that befell Dirk the Daring.
Totally defeated and having lost your last quarter, you start to slink away from the machine. Almost automatically you sweep the coin return with two fingers – A quarter! Maybe one last game of Ninja Gaiden instead of trying your luck at this one again.
The Golden Age of the Arcade
If you were born before the 90s, chances are this sounded pretty familiar to you. All those of us who grew up in the time when the arcade was king distinctly remember those last quarter feels, or the sensation of poking at the coin return in the hopes that some other kid forgot their last coin in it.
Yes, arcades are still a thing. My daughter is quite fond of them. It’s hard to take her to a half abandoned and dilapidated arcade though and not have my mind drift to those days where games meant more than just tickets. When the arcade was the spot to be all summer long.
Back then, the video games we could play at home were limited. Sure, depending on what decade we’re talking about there were Ataris, Commodores, NES and eventually even those late 90s persistent 300+ game shareware discs. The quality and quantity of games you could play from your couch, however, paled in comparison to wall to wall arcade cabinets and the sure chance of finding at least some of your friends at the arcade.
These were the days of no internet. The days of very limited multiplayer outside multi-joystick arcade games. The days when gaming culture was born… and that culture lived full-time at the arcade.
Dragon’s Lair, which I was referencing above, came out in 1983. Dragon’s Lair BLEW OUR MINDS! This was a time when most games were lines and dots on a screen, or at best they were made up of moving static images. Some of the highest tech out there had sprites for characters that had 2-3 poses at most.
Dragon’s Lair showed up with a Disney-quality, rotoscoped movie as its gameplay. They used the entirely new LaserDisc data format to encode a movie with multiple branching paths… one of the first examples of interactive media at this quality! It was impressive… so impressive, in fact, that sometimes you’d keep draining quarters into it even after you realized how punishing and impossible it was.
Not So Distant Beginnings
We’ve come a long way in a very short time with video game tech. The glory days of the arcade weren’t that long ago. Looking back, however, it’s really no wonder why we moved so fast. At the arcade, you could play 40+ new games in one day, talk about them with your friends, and watch hundreds of other kids playing (who were probably better than you) over their shoulder. We learned quick, which is why gaming learned quick.
Simple shapes and basic mechanics of games like Breakout gave way to slightly less simple shapes of games like Arkanoid. One by one, the kids pumping quarters in the games started to recognize genres and core mechanics. At first it was “Oh! It’s like Double Dragon”, but as our knowledge grew it quickly became “Oh! It’s a beat ’em up, co-op platformer”.
Arcades were education. In those early days of the 70s and 80s, there were great game designers and programmers working on games. That was nothing compared to the kids they were training up though. No one had ever absorbed so much of the previously non-existent media of video games.
Spoiler, some of us who put our time in at the local arcade ‘studying’ would go on to push gaming forward with this education. Soon the kids recognizing patterns in the games they pumped their quarters into grew into the young professionals propelling gaming into the next generation.
The Legacy of Arcades
Arcades may still exist, but they’re not always the bastion of culture they once were. That having been said, that culture is still very much alive. When my daughter used to lure three friends into her Minecraft world so they could run her newly created obstacle course, that felt very arcade. When I watch a Twitch stream and think my commentary actually adds to the group conversation, that feels a lot like crowding around the arcade champ’s shoulder while they’re taking challengers on in Killer Instinct.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find many who work in game dev today that don’t have fond memories of the arcade. This was the shared experience that helped raise us and led to the rapid progression of games through the past few decades. Whether you were setting your coins on deck for Space Invaders in the late 70s or trying to solo run The Simpsons Arcade Game in the early 90s, you helped create this industry.
There are cultures throughout the world where arcades still hold some of their former glory. Japan, notably, has sprawlingly huge arcades with an often ridiculous assortment of all kinds of games. Even those, however, are on the decline compared to their heights in previous decades.
Pictured: The Kabukicho pedestrian crossing in Tokyo, at the corner of Shinjuku Moa 2 Avenue and the Godzilla Road. Though arcades are statistically on the decline in Japan, there are still whole districts with entire buildings devoted to nothing but arcade games.
Luckily, one thing out there is preserving the classic arcade feel… And I’m not talking about a room full of machines that dispense tickets so you can buy worthless prizes. That great force working to save some piece of this culture is probably the same thing that made you read this far – nostalgia. Adults love games too, and over the past decades we’re seeing far more arcades formatted for grownups.
It’s really no surprise that these ‘barcades’ have risen so quickly. Adults do love to play just as much as everyone else. Billions of people out there all have this shared experience of the arcade… is it any wonder we’d want to relive a little of that? Also, compared to the price of some leisure activities out there… my wallet and wife would much prefer I play some Ms. PacMan with a cheap beer in my hand for an hour or two rather than some of the alternatives.
Fun is fun, and arcades are fun that everyone can enjoy together.
Arcade Culture Comes to GalaChain
This long, nostalgic ramble has finally brought me to the point. Those of you who have been around the Gala Community for a while may be aware of the Happy Valley Arcade Bar in Beacon, NY. The owners of this establishment have long been incredibly supportive and involved community icons across all things Gala… and they’re working on something absolutely amazing for all arcade fans.
They are currently building some of the world’s first web3 gaming cabinets. These arcade machines will connect to GalaChain and reward high scorers with $VALLEY. Eventually, these games may be playable on the PC, but the arcade cabinets is where the bulk of these tokens will come from.
Early footage from one of Happy Valley’s arcade games!
We here at a Gala are a bit on the outside looking in on this one, but I personally am VERY excited. Not only is it amazing to see people doing new and innovative things with GalaChain, but I really like the idea of a worldwide arcade high score battle.
Information will be coming out soon from the Happy Valley team. I hear they are planning to sell arcade cabinets with $VALLEY potential among other things.
You don’t have to take my word for it though… head on over to https://discord.gg/5zJ8WqNV to join their Discord server today!
Editor’s Note: We love spotlighting people building on GalaChain. The following article was written by Graham from the NFTD team, the top Judges’ Choice pick during March’s GALAthon. NFTD is a tower defence game being developed by several long-time Gala community members, who are currently working on integrating the game into GalaChain. The game itself offers multiple opportunities to utilize items from across the Gala ecosystem… we love some cross-utilization here at Gala!
Graham (who you may know as cryptograham on Discord) was gracious enough to write not only a description of NFTD and their work at the hackathon for us, but also gave some amazing insight into their process and design philosophy! Far be it from us to get in the middle here… so we’ll hand it off to Graham himself!
NFTD is an arcade style tower defence game with the goal of defending your fortress from endless waves of attacking enemies. You can mine resources in the game by placing resource extractors and use the proceeds of those extractions to buy and place towers to defend your base. There are a variety of towe rs you can place in the game; arrow towers, cannon towers, fire, ice, poison, etc.. all dependent on the NFTs you have in your connected wallets.
The towers in NFTD, are all representations of different NFT projects from various groups/companies throughout the web3 space. The Gala Games project Fortitude is the main source of inspiration, where holding a Fire Tower in your Ethereum or GalaChain wallet lets you place a similar themed fire tower in the game. Having one of the BT Orbs, which dropped about 2 years ago, lets you place an Orb inspired tower in the game with healing range effects on surrounding structures.
During the GalaChain Hackathon at GDC, we introduced A Snoop Dogg inspired “BeatBox” tower, where holders of the “Death Row Records – Gold Chain” NFT are able to place that tower in-game and holders of the “888 Inner Circle – Blue Realm” NFT can place the “Blue Realm Orb” tower.
Also at the hackathon, we introduced our own custom GalaChain contracts to create $HOPIA, our in-game minable token and “The Tower of Hopia”, a GalaChain NFT Tower purchasable in $HOPIA. $HOPIA is generated through mining activities performed by our in-game extractors. There is a small percentage chance of hitting a HOPIA Motherlode and being able to extract it. This provides players with another in-game task of protecting their extractors in addition to their fortresses, so they can stay alive longer and get their hands on more of the token.
As part of our custom GalaChain contracts we also introduced functionality for starting and ending games with various pieces of data that we can store for after game analytics. What’s really interesting about the way we did this is that when you start a game, the custom contract will lock the GalaChain NFTs you are using in-game.
So, when you start to play the game, you can’t immediately send your towers to someone else, that wouldn’t be fair. Once the game ends, your towers are unlocked, and you can trade as you please. This is really interesting functionality that I’ve only ever seen available to Galchain. It’s really neat!.
Image: Token lock snip
Caption: GalaChain is designed for utility and customization. This is just one benefit of permissioned contract functionality on GalaChain
As a bonus, during the hackathon, we had the opportunity to chat with Mark Skaggs, a legend in the RTS space and one of the key minds behind Farmville, Red Alert 2, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth, and numerous other successful titles. He played our game and was able to give us some excellent feedback on his experience and ways we could improve.
A wild Mark appeared!
This was invaluable information that we wouldn’t have received if we didn’t come in-person to the Hackathon. This moment alone was worth it for me. As an homage to him, we added a secret code in-game to unleash the Kirov Airship from Red Alert 2 in-game. I won’t tell you what the code is, but it’s in there.
The origin of the game
The idea for this sort of cross-chain interoperable game came from a conversation in the Gala Games Platinum Club discord, when forgedincrypto posted a picture of his Fortitude collection of NFTs sayings “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could actually play with these towers in game”, as the Fortitude game is still in development. I then responded, saying that I had built a tower-defence prototype a while ago, while learning some new game development coding concepts, and with a few changes, e.g.. adding in wallet lookups and putting in some specialty towers, we could put out a quick game for people to play while they wait for the real one to launch from the Fortitude developers.
I began working on the project to create the proof of concept, showed it to a few community members, which brought me in-contact with Timboslice (Tim) and Deadily (Drew), who were also excited by true interoperability in web3, so we partnered up, and they began working on a new art design direction.
In terms of how the three of us work on NFTD, Tim leads the design efforts, game art style, tower design, game lore, tokenomics and player economy management. Drew has built out the galachian blockchain integrations, custom contract code and the REST API layer to talk to GalaChain. I (Graham) do all the core game development work needed to play the game, taking the artwork and turning it into playable game objects, wave management systems, upgrades and game progression, scoring and leaderboards. I also do the web3 wallet and player authentication integrations too. There is a lot of stuff involved in making a game and we’re a pretty balanced team seeing it through.
A lot of existing projects out there build their own NFT collection for their own games. What brought us all into the space was the promise of taking NFTs from one project and being able to use them in different projects, or in different ways entirely, as we own our own assets.
As a kid growing up, I could take my Luke Skywalker (Star Wars) action figure and put him in my Ninja Turtles Party Wagon with Michelangelo (TMNT) and drive over to go all Cowabunga/Jedi on Shredder (TMNT) and his Cobra villain associates (G.I. Joe). That’s the level of true interoperability that the three of us are looking to build in the web3 space.
For me personally, over the past couple of years, I have been working on a few indie game projects taking NFTs from various projects and mashing them up into quick game prototypes. For example, one of my games, “Vox Battles: The Dead” (https://voxbattles.com/thedead) puts characters from the Vox Collectables: The Walking Dead project into a zombie runner style game, where you play as one of the human VOX characters, scavenging for resources, weapons, health boosts, and batteries for your flashlight, you run around avoiding or killing the Walker VOX characters. As you play the game, the eerie music that plays in the background is actually from one of my NFTs from the BT Orbs collection. All of the characters that I used in that game were provided by community members (with attribution in-game).
I have also been working on a multiplayer battle royale game called Vox Battles, which puts a group of Vox players into an arena, heavily inspired by the Hunger Games series, to battle it out until one person emerges victorious. You can wishlist it on steam now!
What I really love about working on NFTD, is that it really expands on the opportunity for interoperability, especially with the thematic design that Tim has created, where each NFT you own becomes a sort of chess piece available to use on your tower defence board, and depending on the board, you won’t be able to use them all at once, so you’ll have to be strategic with which pieces you bring into the match.
Future Plans
With NFTD we are just getting started. The 2D isometric version was our proof of concept, to see if there was appetite out there for a fast paced tower defence game bringing in NFTs from lots of different projects. Turns out, there is.
We’re committed to continue building out the experiences. Adding more NFT project integrations into the current version and working with Gala to bring NFTD to GalaChain, so you can generate $HOPIA and spend it… not just on the few select GalaChain Towers, like the Tower of Hopia, but also on a few other things.
Besides that, we are working on the competitive aspects of the game. The competition we held during the Hackathon saw about 100 players join in on the NFTD fun, but also showed a few platform vulnerabilities that we will need to work out.
We are moving towards an authoritative server architecture, and I’m taking that opportunity to re-work some core logic and add a third dimension to the game.
In the coming months, as we continue to iterate and fine-tune NFTD with the community, our goal is to truly embody what web3 interoperability and collaboration are all about. If our work with Gala proves successful, GalaChain will play a central role in this mission and we are very excited to be building on chain.
As an editorial, the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are those of individuals on the NFTD team and not of Gala.
Editor’s Note: The following article was written by Jared Dillenger, the Head of Influencer Marketing and KOLs here at Gala, who had a chance to organize this recent community and influencer event at the Coins.ph Philippines headquarters. We always enjoy opportunities to connect with some of our most valued supporters who share our excitement for the future of GalaChain.
Creating Connections
Our event brought together a diverse group of micro and macro influencers from across the Philippines for an exclusive meet-up at the Coins.ph headquarters in BGC, Taguig City. As the main organizer, it was truly inspiring to witness the energy and enthusiasm as influencers networked and connected with one another.
Engaging Experiences
The event was a delightful blend of entertainment and insightful discussions. We curated an engaging atmosphere with vibrant photo booths, delectable food, refreshing drinks, and lively music, setting the stage for meaningful interactions and opportunities.
Unveiling Opportunities
One of the highlights for me was having the opportunity to address the crowd and shed light on the content creator program and the myriad of opportunities available within our tight-knit exclusive community. I emphasized the potential for influencers to carve out a space in the crypto industry through the GalaChain.
Embracing Community
I also spoke about the sense of community we aim to create within the GalaChain. This collective of influencers is poised to establish a strong presence in the crypto space, acting as a unified entity capable of making crucial decisions regarding their content creating sites and potential partnerships.
The event was not only a platform for exchanging information but also a space for like-minded individuals to come together, share insights, and lay the groundwork for future collaborations. It was truly inspiring to witness the potential synergies and connections that were formed during this networking event.
Looking Ahead
As we reflect on the success of Crypto & Coins feat. Gala, I am thrilled about the prospects that lie ahead for the influencers within the GalaChain. The event was just the beginning of our journey to establish a firm footing in the crypto space, and we are committed to nurturing a community that empowers influencers to thrive in this dynamic industry.
The event was an incredible networking opportunity, and I am grateful for the support of all the influencers who attended. I look forward to witnessing the GalaChain community grow and flourish as we continue to explore the boundless opportunities in the crypto space.
Editor’s Note: The following article was written by RocketUnit, a content creator and long-time member of the Gala community, who served as a Gala ambassador at the 3rd Crypto Summit Del Sur. There he spoke to a sold out house about the Gala Ecosystem.
There are at least a few people on the Gala team that enjoy going to a conference now and then, but there’s an absolute ton of work to do and we can’t be everywhere and still get stuff done. We really appreciate the work RocketUnit put into this, and look forward to future opportunities to let our great community get out there and share their excitement about Gala more.
It all started when I found out we were going to have a crypto event here in Paraguay. I love networking in crypto communities and it’s been almost two years since I moved to Paraguay. These events don’t usually happen here.
It’s obvious that Gala is finally getting more and more attention, so I thought about how Gala could be included in this event too. I managed to persuade Gala management to send me as an official ambassador.
There was a lot that happened from start to finish. Everything took more time than I expected, but on February 20th I was in Ciudad Del Este near the Brazilian border and spoke about the Gala ecosystem at a sold-out event.
🚀 GALA GAMES AT CRYPTO SUMMIT DEL SUR 2024 in Paraguay! 🔥
My presentation wasn’t complicated. I wanted people to focus on what I was saying and get excited about GalaChain instead of staring at complex ecosystem data. In my opinion, I succeeded when after the presentation I was approached by people who talked to me about Gala and how it can work with their Web3 projects or games.
The 3rd Crypto Summit Del Sur was a great experience and I hope to have the opportunity to hold a separate event focused on Gala Entertainment in Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion, in March.
As an editorial, the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are those of RocketUnit and not of Gala.
Editor’s Note – The following article was written by Jared Dillenger, the Head of Influencer Marketing and KOLs here at Gala. Reporting back after his highly urgent mission to the Philippines, he details the insights and intel gained while immersed in the thick of innovation at GameDev Summit 2024 – the industry-exclusive main event for the gaming world of the Asian Pacific.
As the head of influencer marketing and KOLs at Gala, I recently had the privilege of attending the GameDev Summit 2024 at Boracay Island. Organized with the support of the Philippines Department of Trade and Industry, this landmark event proved to be a pivotal moment for Gala and the global gaming industry at large.
The GameDev Summit is a professionals-only B2B event that serves as a platform for strengthening the Asia Pacific industry’s position and partnerships within the global video game development community. This year’s summit featured the External Development Summit (XDS) Main Stage, boasting prominent speakers and panelists in collaboration with the Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP).
Focus on Industry Diversity
One of the key highlights of the summit was its acknowledgment of the two sides of the industry – external development and indie game development. This approach was reflected in the two tracks offered, addressing the distinct requirements and solutions for each space. The summit provided a comprehensive perspective on the possibilities available to studios, professionals, and advocates in the dynamic world of game development.
During my five-day stay at the summit, I had the opportunity to engage with a diverse array of Web 2 studios and companies connected to the gaming industry. The main purpose of the summit was to showcase the significant user base and the abundance of talented game developers in the Philippines. It effectively highlighted the potential for outsourced high-skilled game development in the country, from small gaming studios to multinational companies from across the globe.
Gala’s Presence and Impact
At the summit, I had the honor of representing Gala and promoting the adoption of GalaChain within the gaming industry. I engaged with numerous international gaming studios, introducing them to the funding opportunities available within the Gala ecosystem. This endeavor resulted in establishing 40-50 valuable contacts, significantly raising awareness of Gala and its diverse offerings, including entertainment, gaming, film, music, and GalaChain.
Furthermore, I had the privilege of being mentored by Jeff Espejo, the Vice President of Blockchain at Gala. His wealth of experience and guidance has provided me with invaluable insights into the intricacies of the crypto business world. Being around such an experienced person has been instrumental in my professional growth and understanding of the blockchain industry.
Content Creation and Future Endeavors
Throughout the summit, I actively documented my experiences and interactions, creating engaging content to share Gala’s mission and vision. The overwhelmingly positive reception further solidified my commitment to continue attending similar events worldwide, fostering valuable connections and amplifying the presence of Gala on a global scale.
My experience at the GameDev Summit 2024 was not only enriching but also instrumental in advancing Gala’s presence within the gaming industry. I look forward to leveraging the momentum gained at the summit to further the reach and impact of Gala in the dynamic world of gaming and entertainment.
As an editorial, the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article, awesome as they are, are those of Jared Dillenger and not of Gala.
