Recreating ‘90s Arcade Nostalgia with Will Ogles

This was going to be like an arcade coworking space, and then the games kept growing and growing, and the desks got fewer and fewer. So now it's just games.

This is 5 to 9, the podcast where we discover the hidden passions and hobbies that engineering, product, and technology leaders obsess over when the workday ends. Hello everybody, this is Andrew Lau here, um, kicking off another exciting episode of 5 to 9. Today I'm actually super lucky to have Will Ogles here with me. But Will, can you give a brief intro around who you are, where you are, and then I'll tell us what we're actually covering today?

Love it. Hello everyone, I'm Will Ogles. I'm the Chief Product Officer at OcuCell Inc., uh, based out of Cincinnati, but I'm here in lovely Athens, Alabama.

He's in Athens, Alabama, and if you all could see here Will is actually in what looks to be an '80s arcade. And what game is behind your right shoulder there?

Uh, this one right here is Smash TV.

Okay. It's an arcade with 4, like, controllers on this thing. So please orient me and everybody else. Like, why are you in an arcade? And I thought we were talking about the hours 5 to 9. So what's going on here?

This is my hobby. Outside of work, this is what I do. I've always been a lifelong gamer. And I've always had a weird, like, draw to designing spaces. So it made a lot of sense that I would design an arcade, and then put games in it. Some of my two favorite things, really. So I'm in my arcade that's in the back of my wife's art studio here in our little downtown area in Alabama. She runs an art business. and we bought this studio a couple years ago, and she said, you can have the back room to do whatever you want with it. I knew exactly what that meant. So here we are.

All right, so just to help people, because I, I can see a little bit, but I just to orient everybody, like, what does this mean, this an arcade? Like, how physically big is this thing? Is it on a main street? Is it back street? How do you get in there? Like, what are the games in here? Like, is there any— can you Cause I see some brick, I see some arcade games, I see some fluorescent green paint, but like help paint a picture for folks. Like what's going on here?

In the back of my wife's art studio, it's, we're in like a Main Street style space and this is a very long building. It's 1,800 square foot, but it's only 14 foot wide. So it's just a very long and narrow building and there's different segments to the building and when you get towards the back of the art studio, there's a kitchen right here. And obviously there's a restroom to the side of it. And then we have a Coke machine. I got a 1976 Coke machine. It looks really cool. That's actually the door to the backmost space, which is this arcade.

Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So, so, so if I go in your, your, your wife's art studio, it's like a regular art studio, go to the bathroom and there's a strange 1976 Coke machine. And I open it?

Yeah, then you— it's, it's more like a speakeasy arcade, I, I guess. Yeah, you walk through the Coke machine to get back here.

And how big is that space back there? You said 14 feet wide, but how long is that bad boy?

14 foot by— I don't know, how about this, it can hold 25 normal size arcade games. So however big that is, big enough for 25 arcade games.

And this is where you hang. So it's a speakeasy arcade. So this is Well Ogle's has a speakeasy arcade here. That's his 5 to 9. Who gets to go back there? Are you back there often?

Sometimes I work back here. Originally we had a couple of games and a lot of desks. This was going to be like an arcade coworking space. And then the games kept growing and growing and the desks got fewer and fewer. So now it's just games. Occasionally I'll come back here and prop up my laptop on Time Crisis over here and work standing up. But no, a lot of times I sit at my desk in the other part of the space.

How cool. Okay, so I get this. So now we— let's wind the clock back. How does one end up here doing this, right? Because last I checked, I don't have one, uh, in the back of my office, but maybe I should open the soda machine. But like, this isn't an everyday thing that I know lots of people do. Like, so this is a cool hobby of yours. How'd you get here?

Obviously lifelong interest in video games and growing up going to arcades as a kid. I was brought up in the late '80s, early '90s. So I wasn't there for the Pac-Man days, like the golden age of arcade, but I hit it on the second go-around in the early '90s. And all my fun times were at arcades, birthday parties, you name it. And that's— so I've always had the love for arcades. A couple of years ago, I was managing an engineering team and I wanted to do something really fun for them. Uh, and I told, you know, we could do like a dinner or an outing and spend $1,000 that way. But instead, uh, I asked my CEO at the time if I could just redesign the conference room that was right near the engineering wing of our building. He's like, yeah, if you want. So I did. And I turned it into a like 1980s grandma's basement. I put up, well, we had beautiful, you know, drywall painted walls with modern paintings. I took all that down and I put up like boards and made it like really wood panels. There you go. I put up wood paneling and made it look like a 1980s basement. We went and got a shag carpet rug and an old school couch and a real 1980s Zenith cabinet TV. And the engineers all brought in NES games that they had in their collections and somebody brought in a couple of VHS tapes. So I got a VCR player and we designed a 1980s basement, basically right there at the back of our, uh, in the conference room behind our engineering area. That's when I got really interested in space, uh, design. I'm an engineering by trade and a product manager now. I've never done interior design, but getting to nerd out on, uh, designing spaces that are like really period appropriate. Oh man, that's a fun hobby. Yeah. So I did that once. Uh, I built that in the space. And then I had another coworking space when I was at another job and I did it again. That was my second one. And when I was designing that second coworking space, like another version of Grandma's basement, I thought, man, if I could do this, it'd be really cool to like go fully into it and do an arcade, like a real arcade. And here we are. When we first bought this space, I knew that I wanted to make it like a real '90s arcade. So '80s arcades are a little different. '90s arcades.

Yeah, bring it around. Like, what's the difference? Yeah, how do I, like, what are the signals of knowing which kind of arcade you're in?

Well, really a '90s arcade, first of all, you're gonna know about a lot of the games. It's not just '80s, early '80s games. So that's one. Two, a lot of '90s arcades and some '80s as well were mall arcades, which means they're dark. There's not a lot of windows. You lose track of time. You don't know where you're at. And that's exactly what I did in this space. This space used to be beautifully lit, a lot of good windows, a lot of good daylight. I blocked it all in. So when you're in this space intentionally, you don't know what's going on outside. It could be 3:00 AM, it could be 9:00 PM. You have no idea. And that was by design.

This reminds me of Tron. I was watching that recently and that kind of going back in there before the laser hits you and gets sucked in and the whole thing.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Oh, Flynn's Arcade. Yeah, a lot of cool elements like that. And then there's other things that I've taken just from arcades that I've loved growing up, and even some Dave Buster's things. Dave Buster's takes a lot out of the casino playbook, if that doesn't sound too weird. What that means is they're really concerned with how it smells when you walk into their arcade. So I did some research and figured out the exact scent that Dave Buster's uses and how they get that— what is it— into their space. It is— there is a company that makes, I would say, like corporate aroma type stuff, and it's called Asian Garden. So yeah, my arcade smells like Dave Buster's. That's Asian Garden.

You went and bought Asian— like, and then how do you actually get those smells? Like a— is it like an aerosol spray, or do you have like a thing that pumps it and you jam it extra oxygen in there?

I got a little pump and fan system that does it. Dave Buster's has the, the industrial solution. Mine's a smaller space, so I just have a fan. But imagine like a giant Glade plug-in basically that plugs in and they let you buy it.

It's not like patented, like you can't have it kind of thing.

No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, they sell, they sell all the scents online and they sell to me just like they would Dave Buster's.

Oh, that's hilarious. I'm, I'm thinking like years ago I read that like, you know, the jewelry store Tiffany, that color green-blue they have, you can't have it. Like that's their patented color. And so I could see David Buster's going after your sense on that, but sounds like they, they let everybody— it's open sense, everyone can have it.

For now. I might need to stock up on it. Maybe they're going to take it away.

So after this podcast, who knows? Who knows? Okay. You said '90s games different than '80s games. And I'm going to own, I don't know my games, but like, if you're going to say, what are your stereotypical '90s games that you know, like, okay, this guy's coding '90s arcade. Like what, what are the headliners here?

Let's talk early '90s for a minute. Things that people would recognize, Mortal Kombat.

Okay, I know this. Yeah.

Street Fighter. Street Fighter Tournament Edition. Yeah. These are some of the early '90s games we grew up with when the fighting games got really, really popular. Those are my big ones. There's a lot of different ones too, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, some of those beat 'em up style games. Those are your early '90s.

Turns out I know some of these things.

Yeah, those are the real popular ones. Smash TV back here was my personal favorite. It was not as popular. It's a little bit more rare. Uh, but those, that was a '90s game as well. So that's, that's typically the kind I look for. Our arcade, me and another buddy of mine, we run this and a lot of these are his. He's got a lot of '80s games. So I say '90s stuff. You can see Smash TV and Street Fighter over here beside it. Uh, but then we've got. All your Pac-Mans, Galaga, Galaga 3, which was called Gapless.

Oh, those are '80s. These are '80s games.

Yeah, yeah, we've got a lot of '80s games in here too. That's right.

I dig it. Okay, so now I'm actually just like looking at arcade and I'm just trying to think about how you live it. So questions: one, are all the games on all the time? Is your power bill like bonkers? Do you still take quarters? Like, how does this all work?

Couple things about the way we set this up. One, a lot of these games, a lot of the Midway cabinets and stuff like that, the turn-on button, the on-off switch is either in the back, you know, or on top. And I've got these games kind of packed in here, so it's not easy to get to them. And I thought it would be a little bit not as cool to have just a, just like a switch on the wall to do it. So I actually got power strips that hook up with Amazon Echo. Like Alexa, the Alexa home system. So we created some voice commands to turn everything on in the arcade. I can turn on individual games, can turn the lights on and off. It's all controlled.

So if I— oh, you're wearing headphones, but if I were just to yell, uh, Alexa, turn on Smash TV, it would flip on?

Yeah, yeah. If you just said Alexa, Smash TV, it would turn on. Except Alexa is not the keyword I use, so I was able to say that.

Very cool. Okay. So then you turn them on, on the fly. How about quarters? No quarters? Like what, what, what do they do now?

They do take quarters. A lot of these are on free play. Sometimes you can select that on the board and they work with free play. You can still put quarters in the mechanisms.

That's, that still works. I'm gonna nerd for you. Did you like flip a jumper or something like that? Or is there like a switch or a—

Yeah, basically they, they have a, they have a switch inside of them. That's right. Some of the arcades you go to will have like a little wire that comes out and it looks like a little quarter and you can say, coin up, and that essentially just triggers, uh, the little signal as if a quarter was put in. We would like to go to that. There's a few games in here that are not on free play. You actually have to open them up and, and press the, the quarter drop mechanism, and I'm worried about a kid getting shocked, so we're probably going to stop that. Okay.

All right, so then now I'm curious, are these all original cabinets? Because I, I've been to places before where they have these like kind of mods that they're like modern computers where they kind of like make it appear like the same thing, or are these the original boards and all that jazz?

Yeah, most of these that are in here are the original boards. They are all original monitors, like CRT monitors, except for that Smash TV right there. That's an LCD. And the only ones we have like multi-systems in or, uh, maybe emulation in, there's maybe 3 of these in here that do that. It's because the board is typically very expensive to repair. And it breaks often. I mean, a lot of these boards are nearly 40 years old, so they don't work like they used to. But some of them, Galaga, Pac-Man, it's all the real deal. It's the real monitor. It's the real cabinet. All the cabinets in here, like the actual wood hardware, it's all original. All the original artwork. Some of it's been touched up. Some of it's had new vinyl put on it, but it's the original cabinet. Yeah.

And don't the CRTs, like the TV parts, don't they burn out over time and like stuff like that?

They do. They do. You have to replace the capacitors. Like if you're in the arcade space, you'll hear, you'll hear people say like, hey, I had to install a new cap kit, which basically means you refresh the capacitors on the monitor. You can get new life out of these things. What's a little difficult is not even finding them, just finding people with the skill to still do that.

And you don't do it. You, you, you like find like, you haven't gotten into the board soldering yourself and stuff like that.

So repairing an arcade machine is a lot like repairing a car. You can know some things really deeply and not know other things. Okay. So I can do a lot of cosmetic repair. If a board, if a cabinet is chipped and breaking, the wood's not in good shape, I can restore it 100%. I can do some of the monitor work. I can do a little bit of the power supply work. The board stuff? No. That's for the experts. The way the board stuff works is, you know a guy. So if Pac-Man breaks, I know the person you need to send it to. You send your board to me.

There's like one person left in the country?

Like that's doing it? Wow. Yeah, at least in our area, that's exactly right. But the arcade community, they're pretty close.

It's not just the boards are wearing out, like the expertise to fix them is starting to wear out, right?

Exactly, exactly.

Okay, so that you got them here. So I can already see the joy in your actually, the actual, you know, setting them up and doing that stuff. How often do you play these things? Like, you know, to you, like on a practical matter, and when do you play them?

I don't play all of them all the time. I mean, much like a regular video game you'd play on a home console, you have your favorites. Smash TV is a favorite. Street Fighter is a favorite. And then we have Robotron 2084 over here off camera. And that's the one I play maybe weekly. I love that one. I love to challenge myself.

Do you bang it between Zoom meetings or do you actually play on the weekends or like, where's it, when's your time?

Sometimes, usually on the weekends or if we're up here in the evening.

Yeah.

We'll play that. Yeah. But it's, there's a couple in here I play frequently.

Got it. And the other side of it, now playing them, where the hell do you get them from? Like, how do you get them? Like, I don't even know where to start. Like maybe eBay, but like, where do you go? And then do you like a big truck and like, you know, what do you do?

I had the same question. When I built this arcade, I had to learn. I had to learn like how to find good arcade games. Arcade carpet. Like, how can I have galaxy carpet? Where do you go for that? How do you get neon on the wall?

What is galaxy carpet?

It's carpet that looks like a space. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Got it. Exactly. I can show that. I don't know if that's out here. Let's zoom down for just a second. There you go.

Oh, wow. Okay. It's like, just for other folks, it's like carpet that like the planets and stars are like neon colored and it's like purple. Nebula looking things. It's, uh, it's got the whole vibe. Got it. Where does one get carpet and where does one get the, you know, these cabinets?

So the carpet I found online, there's a company called Joy Carpets that makes what they call entertainment grade carpet stuff for bowling alleys and movie theaters and all that. And they had this line and I had it delivered and installed. The cabinets was the kind of the hardest thing to learn. And you'd be shocked to find like there's not really any like really awesome way to find a cabinet. You're basically just in Facebook groups for arcade buy, sell, and trade, and you're on Facebook Marketplace. That's it. Everything in this place.

And somebody knows somebody because the ones that are left are in someone's basement, probably, right?

It's exactly right. That's exactly right. But I've— everything I've ever sourced has been on a Facebook arcade group or just Facebook Marketplace. That's it. It's all Facebook.

Is there a game that you're like on the lookout for that you're like, this is— if this shows up, I'm like I'm putting all the chips in on this one.

Yeah, yeah, there's a couple. One is, uh, one is Tapper, the little, the little guy that like slings beers or root beers down. There's that one.

Oh, oh, I know that one. You know, that was good. Yeah, okay, old school one. Yeah, yeah, that's your white whale. That's the one you're going after. I like that one.

Yeah, I really want that one. There's a couple of way more rare ones, uh, that, you know, you can't find many of them nowadays, and I would love to have them, but You know, I'm just going to see them on Facebook Marketplace.

What's an example? Give me one. Yeah.

Ooh, okay. Midway's The Grid. There you go. The Grid was like a 2 to 3 player game where it's like a first person shooter. It's kind of a third person shooter actually. And you're in like this TV game where you have to battle other people. When I say it was a third, 3 player game, it's actually a cabinet per player. So when you see The Grid set up places, it's like 3, 3 cabinets beside one another and there's a big old marquee that says The Grid. If I could have any of them, it's networking before networking, right?

Like, this is—

yeah, there you go.

That's right. Yeah, that's like, that's a multiplayer game before the multiplayer games. Like, okay, so when someone comes in, you said you fix it. So like, you're spray painting cabinets, all that stuff, or you're bringing in someone to fix a board. Like, I'm looking at the size of this place, what you said. Like, are you— do you just do it there? You're breaking this all down and like Actually, this relates to how you even got it. Like, do you have a truck? Do you take it to workshop? Do they ship to you from across the country? Like, how do you get this stuff and work on it?

Most of these I try to get within driving distance. So I'm in North Alabama, which means I have access to maybe not Indiana. I don't know if I would go that far, but definitely Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia. It, you know, really in the Southeast in those places, I can get to them pretty quickly. And you Usually you're getting about one machine at a time, two if you're lucky. So I just stick them in the back of my SUV. There's only been one time that I've actually—

Oh, you have a bigger SUV. Oh, in my head, they're much bigger than that.

Yeah, I can fit one in my SUV.

You'll lie it down sideways or something like that?

That's exactly right. Exactly.

You must have like an Escalade, something big, right? A Suburban kind of thing?

No, it's not that big. It's a Chevy Traverse. It's close. It's close.

I did not think that would fit, but I guess it does. Okay, so then you haul it down, you get it home, and it's kind of like, you know, dinged up, it doesn't work. Do you slide it right in or do you take it to your garage and do it at home or what do you do?

Me and my buddy that own this, we do our work in our garages because it can be, especially if you're doing body work, I mean, you're going to have sanding and dust and wood chips and paint and everything. So you do that there. We consider the arcade like the show floor, if you will. A game doesn't make it here until it's ready to go. Now, if we need to do a monitor swap, basically like taking a monitor out, putting it back in, plugging it up, fixing a busted fuse, we'll do that right here. But anything bigger than that, we usually take to where we have all of our parts and tools and all that.

Basically, there's like two secondary arcades, I bet. So your garage and his garage is like a pre-run shop, right? Like you probably— That's exactly right. Like, are there any of that right now? Like a couple games in there?

He at his house right now, he's got a Golden Tee, the original Gauntlet.

Ooh, Gauntlet.

He's got a, okay. He just got a Q*bert.

Uh, I don't know if you're familiar with Q*bert. Yeah, these are goodies. I'm down with that. Right?

Yeah. I've got a, I've got a Ninja Turtles that was converted into a Golden Tee and needs a full restoration.

Okay. What does that even mean? Like, I don't, in my head, I'm like, how do you convert one to the other? Yeah.

That was something arcade owners did back in the day. Like, imagine you've got a Pac-Man machine. and people just aren't putting quarters into it anymore. They're bored of Pac-Man. Well, you can just get a different board and take the Pac-Man board out and maybe change the control panel and convert it to some other game. So now your Pac-Man is, I don't know, some type of space shooter.

Okay, so you just like, you basically rip out the whole CPU board, which like back then is integrated, the CPU and the actual game. You yank that bad boy out. So really what you're doing is the cabinet, lot of controllers, buttons are all the same, and you— and then you got, you got to repaint it, you got to do it, etc., etc., right?

Yeah. And sometimes they, you know, arcade owners or, or people that had these games at a pizza shop or wherever else, they wouldn't fully rebrand the whole thing. They would take the marquee off the top, put the new marquee in, and it may still look like Ms. Pac-Man on the side, but it may be a different game that it shows on the marquee and plays. But hybrid, that was a— exactly. You know, that, that was a cheap way to get people to start putting in quarters into a game again without having to buy a whole new cabinet.

All right. So you're converting a Teenage Mutant or Golden Tee into Teenage Mutant Turtles or vice versa, but they have different controllers.

They do. So it was originally Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They converted it to a Golden Tee. I don't even know what version, maybe '97, which had a completely different control panel with the rolly ball. And now I'm converting it back to what it originally was. And what's interesting is they spray painted the sides black, but you can use some different chemicals and get that off very carefully. You can actually see the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles artwork beneath that. So sometimes restoration is removing paint and stuff and taking it back to what it was.

How did you know what was underneath there? Was that part of the thing you bought, or did you like ding it and figure it out?

When you're in the arcade space, you start to recognize cabinets. You know, every company and version has their own cabinets. But there, there's a telltale sign for Ninja Turtles. It's a very wide playboard, right? So you can have 4 people at it at once. So, you know, these wide playboards like Ninja Turtles and Simpsons, you recognize those. And on the Ninja Turtles game originally, where you put in your 4 quarters, there's 4 colors with numbers pointing down to the quarter slots to let you know this is player 1 and that's Leonardo 2. And they still left that on there. So we were in an old warehouse here in our town in Alabama and I mean, this place just had a lot of junk in it. And I saw what looked like an arcade cabinet, went over and saw those little colorful numbers above the quarter slots. And I was like, this is an original Ninja Turtle cabinet. I got it for a whole $50.

Sounds like a steal.

It, it is, but it's gonna take hundreds of work to get back into it.

Well, how, how much is a new Turtles board and how much is actually like a control panel for Turtles?

I, I estimate it'll be about a grand. To get it back to where it was. The board itself is pretty expensive.

Uh, yeah, because that's like the, that's the heart of the thing, right?

It is. But you know, here's the thing. If you've got an original monitor, you can buy something called Pandora Box or something like that that has the Turtle game on it. And that's $100 instead of buying the original board. So sometimes, you know, you have to determine if you're going to make shortcuts. If people come in here and play Ninja Turtles, are they going to ask if it's the original board and then not have a good time if it isn't? Right. Right. Probably not.

So the controllers is the hard part you're navigating right now.

Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. Then just aesthetically getting it back to, uh, to where it looks. A lot of these, a lot of these, uh, cabinets are not made with the strongest wood. It's particle board and that kind of stuff. And if they've ever, like this Turtle one in particular has been moved a lot. So the bottom of it's chipped to pieces. I love games that function in the arcade, but they have to look good too. Like they have to be a representation of what they were back in the day. Uh, so cosmetically is where my mind is at right now. Then I'll get to the control panel and then we'll figure out how it plays.

I mean, this felt like the way you're talking about it makes you feel like this car restoration, like how, how long is it going to be from end to end of fixing this Ninja Turtles, you think?

Easily, it'll be 6 months to a year just finding time to, to work on it.

Well, speaking of time, and actually it feels— I thought you're actually, when you talk to hobby, I thought I was like, oh, you're a gamer. But I actually think you're more of a restorer. You just happen to be restoring games on this thing. And yeah, you'll play the games, but your time is actually in the restoring part of it.

Yeah, for sure.

How do you fit it in?

Yeah, there's lulls in the whole restoration process. And, you know, I usually find time on weekends and evenings, maybe after the family's gone to bed, an hour here or there. A lot of the cosmetic stuff is very loud. So it's not like staying up late to play a video game where you're not bothering anybody. Like I'm hammering, I'm sanding, you know, so I, I can't really do that stuff late at night. So some of the restoration part, those are weekend projects. And once you get it cosmetically looking good, it's like, well, then I got to find a board. So I found myself, I, I'll go through basically iterations of I'm going to get prepped to do the cosmetic restore. I've done that. Now I've got to get prepped and find a board and I'll do that. And I've got to finish up the control panel and the monitor needs work and I'll do that. And I've got to get pieces for that. So. It's kind of cycles. And I would say I take a break in between each cycle, but when I'm in the middle of it, when I'm in the middle of a cosmetic restore, it's so much fun. You make time for it in the evenings and stuff. But then, then you'll kind of hit a milestone and take a break for a little bit, then hop back into it.

Does your family kind of not love the arcade? Because you're like kind of ogling other, like, that's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or, you know, like, you're in the, you're in the garage again doing this thing. Like, is it, or they, or do they work with you on it? Like, how do you, how How do you engage the family on this thing?

No, they, they love it. They think it's fun. Now, if you're asking, do we have an arcade budget that we try to stick to? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's very difficult too, because with the way Facebook Marketplace works, a deal's gonna come up whether you're ready for it or not, and you have to be on it. And so there's been a couple of things I've bought and then something I really wanted came up the next week and it's like, well, I've already kind of spent my, my quarterly arcade budget on that, so I'm gonna have to let that one go.

I want some good balance there, right?

It's a good balance.

Where do you take this? Like, are you gonna charge admission soon? Is this like, how do you, you know, how do you incorporate this into your future life?

Me and my buddy will definitely open a real arcade at some point. This was, you know, in software I would call this the equivalent of a prototype. We proved that this could be done, that we could source the things.

This is the MVP.

Yep, you got it. Or, or this is, this is the alpha or the, yeah, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, like this is us proving that we can do it. So the next phase would be picking out a space here in the next few years and properly opening a real arcade. And of course the, the one question I get, we have a video game arcade. Anytime I talk to people about opening an arcade, they're like, well, what pinball machines are you gonna have? And so we're, oh yeah, like trying to figure that out.

Pinball, skee-ball, claw, are those allowed in there?

Yeah. I don't really like the, the claw stuff cuz I mean, unless they're, a lot of that stuff is done to like, take people's money away. So I wouldn't mind having a claw machine. I would just change the torque on the claw to make sure it paid out every time because I don't— I hate going into arcades and seeing kids put their money into stuff and they leave empty-handed and they didn't even have a good time. There's a spicy arcade opinion for you. If you've got a lot of claw machines and not a lot of games, you're doing an arcade wrong. There's a guy who's well known in the arcade industry and he'll tell you there's a difference between being an arcade collector and somebody that wants to run an arcade. And he says, you'll know, yes, when a little kid comes up and just starts smashing one of your machines and jamming the buttons and pulling all the control panels. And he's like, depending on your reaction, you're either— you either want to have arcades for your private home, or you want to run a real arcade that people can beat up on. Uh, so I don't know which we are yet.

Yeah, yeah, emotionally you won't know until it hits there, and then you're good. That's right, my thing. Or you're gonna be like, look at that kid, joy. How has this, uh, has this changed your vibe? Um, like at all, like how, you know, how does this, with Interleave, has this affected the way you actually work in your projects and teams? Like, you know, cause these are much longer pull than some software things we work on.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing I've taken away from this now being in the product space actually is just having a vision for something. And obviously, you know, good product management is really good research, but you gotta have that initial vision. You gotta have that thing you want and you've gotta be opinionated about it. The whole time and not take your hands off the wheel. And that's, you know, I really learned that by doing this, being very opinionated, having a vision early on. The day we bought this space, I got on eBay that night and bought a Coke machine because I knew I wanted a door where you had to walk through a Coke machine. I had that vision early on. And then, you know, you, I had a lot of potential snags building this. Like I had people that said, I can't order carpet because I'm not a carpet retailer, so they won't deliver me a roll of carpet. I have to go find somebody locally that's willing to accept a roll with a forklift. And it took me a while to do that because this is not a big money-making job. So a lot of people didn't want to work with me. So, you know, as weird as it sounds, overcoming adversity to have the arcade you want, that's part of it.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. You can have that vision and the grit to drive through it. That's good tips for all of us. Well, thank you for doing this, but if I, like, just for other folks out there, if someone wanted to jump into restoring arcades, how do they even get started?

Yeah, start small. My first purchase was a Street Fighter machine and I found it on Facebook Marketplace. It's a great game. I brought it here and then, you know, my second purchase was a Ms. Pac-Man machine. And then the Ms. Pac-Man machine had a problem, so I started looking at YouTube videos. There's so many good YouTube restoration channels, arcade restoration. There's people that have just poured, poured their time and attention into helping others keep these games in good shape. So I would say do that. But my biggest advice is start small. You don't start with an arcade immediately. Just go out and get one game and see what you think about it.

I love it. All right. That's a good life philosophy too. Just Take one step and then see where it takes you.

That's right. Yeah.

Well, hey, Will, thank you so much for doing this. It was a blast. I really do. I got to make it down that way and check that out. It looks super cool from back here.

Yeah, thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. Appreciate it.

Andrew Lau here. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Five to Nine. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode. Who knows what hidden talents and hobbies we'll discover in the next episode of Five to Nine.