Amy Bartner

amy.bartner@indystar.com

The scene inside Tappers the Saturday night of Gen Con was exactly what you'd expect for a bar arcade during the biggest gaming convention in the country: more crowded than usual, but with a nerdier, more nostalgic rabble, largely made up of dudes in their late 20s to early-40s.

Every vintage arcade game inside the 5-month-old bar was occupied. Gamers with craft beers hovered and waited for their chance to play the likes of "Donkey Kong," "Galaga," "X-Men" and an unfamiliar game near the front of the barcade: "Skycurser."

Unlike those well-known arcade games of the '80s and '90s, "Skycurser" is only about two years old — but you wouldn’t have known by looking at it. The game has a slanted, all-caps block logo flanked by eyeballs with extraocular muscles and a red-eyed skull. The pixel-art, side-scrolling game features a protagonist on an alien-blasting jet.

"Skycurser" was far from out of place among its brethren at Tappers, and that’s how its three developers intended it to be.

"We wanted people to feel like in 2016 they had discovered a game that they had missed in the early ’90s," “Skycurser” technical director Brad Smith, 35, said. "That's what we wanted to really achieve."

"Skycurser" is more than a game to Smith, creative director Chris Cruz, 34, and producer Phil Golobish, 34. It's a representation of an effort to encourage other developers to make similar games. The trio want to spur an arcade revival and the social, in-person relationships arcades can create.

"It builds community in a way the home console can’t build community," Smith says.

In an arcade, you can’t avoid interacting with the people around you.

Cruz and Golobish met more than 15 years ago through mutual friends and a mutual love of gaming. They created their first, but unoriginal, arcade game that summer. In 2013, when the two were coworkers at a digital marketing firm, the idea for "Skycurser" emerged.

"We went for a run, and then all through the run we just kept talking about all the things we wanted to do in a video game," Golobish said. "We nailed down the whole concept almost two and a half years ago, and after we went for a run, we probably almost definitely came straight to this bar and started drinking."

By February 2014, the pair reached out to Smith, a co-worker, and storyboarding for a video game began. This game, this new video game, would feature 8-bit graphics, tube monitors and, yes, a joystick.

***

Cruz: Nobody ever gets the name right.

Golobish: "Man, I really love that new Sky Cruiser game!"

Cruz: I wanted it to feel like something you would name a sword or a car.

Golobish: First it was "Sky Burst" because you burst the enemy. We were on the second floor of a mansion that I used to be that caretaker of. And we were looking out on the lake, and Chris and I were just pacing back and forth.

Cruz: Seriously pacing, like stressed.

Golobish: Pacing back and forth, stressed about what to call this thing, mostly because we were like, we gotta make sure it works in every country. We were, like, the Japanese gotta love it, the Germans gotta love, everybody’s gotta love this name. And we blew it because nobody can remember it. [laughing]

Smith: No, we didn’t blow it. Because people have to go figure out what it’s actually called.

***

Each left that marketing firm that year. Golobish now runs his own logistics service company. Smith is a senior software engineer at Oracle. Cruz is digital marketer at Bluelock, a cloud-based data management company. But they continued working and plotting "Skycurser" after hours, mostly at their neighborhood bars such as Keystone Sports Review or the Pawn Shop Pub.

The trio released the game in stages to specific arcades to get feedback and to feel out interest online from arcade owners and players around the world.

"When we got to a point when we had just barely enough to make a game, and we said it's going to be an arcade game, it instantly got international coverage," Cruz says. "There was just a huge reaction to the fact that these guys seem like they’re somewhat serious and they are 100 percent focused on the arcade as the platform. The response that we got just from the fact that we were committing to this arcade platform was so overwhelming that we were like, we might be onto something."

In July 2015, they sold their first cabinet to an arcade in Chicago. Now, the game is in 20 spots around the world, including two in Indianapolis, one in Germany and two in France.

They were onto something, said Adam Pratt, who has a "Skycurser" game in the old-school mall arcade he owns in Salt Lake City called Game Grid.

"It does look like it came straight out of 1995," said Pratt, who also runs popular arcade website www.arcadeheroes.com. "Their art is really good in that regard. It's really just playing on the nostalgia of a lot of people who grew up in the '70s and '80s and '90s and just like that feel of the games."

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Pratt, who wrote "The Arcade Experience: A Look At Modern Arcades and Why They Still Matter," said old games will always have a draw, but it's the new ones that will keep customers.

"As I've learned through the retro craze is that while there's a lot of hype for the old games and for memories, what people end up playing are the new games," Pratt said.

The new games still have the same challenges the old games do. "That's what all those games in the ’80s had: They had to convince these players in a few seconds that it was worth their quarters."

***

Smith: We're basically trying to tell a story. Guy Griffin is the hero. He's the last human on Earth. Is that what we were saying?

[Golobish nods.]

Smith: He basically has, through a series of events, realized that mutants are trying to consume the Earth’s resources, and he’s gotta be the last person to stand in the way so these mutants from outer space don't take over another world.

Golobish: And what’s his main weapon that he uses to fight off mutants, Brad?

Smith: I mean, well, he uses lots of different weapons.

Cruz: The Skycurser! Smith: Yeah, yeah, Skycurser. It’s the name of the jet.

***

There's a simple explanation why so many people are into the retro feel they get from a joystick, pixel art and loud arcades, Golobish said: "It's 'cause kids are old now, man. Everybody who was a kid is old now. And back then, their parents were like, 'No more quarters.' Now you're like, I have infinite quarters, and I can drink beer and I have irresponsible adult credit card money."

Making the game itself fulfilled a lifelong goal, but it's also part of a larger, much more noble endeavor to bring back the community they had when they went to arcades as kids.

"We grew up in the arcade," Cruz said. "I always wanted to be in the arcade. Especially in the late '80s and early-'90s, the games in the arcade were still way superior to what was at home."

They would socialize there. They would cheer, shake hands, laugh and interact, face-to-face. They would make friends.

"The community aspect of it is way better than you could ever build," Smith said. "No matter how you could connect online with a console now, you’re still connecting face-to-face in the arcade."

Interaction thrives in an arcade environment, and they want to help bring that back.

"End goal is to have the arcade scene be vibrant again," Golobish said. "The arcade is still fun. Whenever you go to the arcade, do you ever see anybody having a bad time? I don't. I think end goal is the arcade as a viable platform for gaming. There’s no reason it can't be."

Bringing arcades back won’t be easy, and at-home consoles might still be a barrier, says arcade game collector Brian Ho, 41. The Noblesville resident started collecting in 2003 and has 16 games.

"Speaking to arcade machines and my collection of them, it's easy to see that arcades are downright scarce these days as compared to their heyday in the '80s and '90s," said Ho, a technical support specialist at DyKnow, a cloud-sharing company for educators. "I think this is largely driven by the fact that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the games in arcades were usually superior to what you could play at home because they had the advantage of the specialized hardware contained in the arcade cabinet. But now computers and game consoles have gotten so powerful that it is easy for them to deliver a graphic and sound experience equal to (often better than) what you can play in an arcade."

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Jeff Moulton, who co-owns Tappers, is banking on a revival. He says he often sees people crowd around any one of the 49 games in the bar, including “Skycurser,” and hears cheers as a player is doing well.

"They're amusement machines," Moulton said. "It's a part of our culture that we lost for a while."

***

Golobish: I’m going to go into some weird territory. Do we wanna do this? Are we gonna do this?

Cruz: Yeah, go for it.

Smith, shrugging: Why not.

Golobish: When we were growing up, when “Mortal Kombat” came out, it was like a political thing. They were like, “Oh no, we have to create this new rating system.” So you have this rating system that comes out to protect players against the game developers. So the game developers were like, “Oh, we’re going to make this really nasty, bloody thing.” And that’s really what it was. It was nasty and bloody. Arguably, and this is something that I don’t think people can really, there’s no way to plan this, but as soon as you started allowing players to interact via the internet on the same game where they were anonymous, the amount of bullying, name-calling, racism, bigotry, homophobia that becomes this new medium for players is, in my mind, I can’t even. How many times can you hear people say, like, truly nasty, truly horrific things to strangers via the internet. That is outrageous to me.

Cruz: I can go back to, like, times when you’d play “Street Fighter.” That was my game back in the day, and you’d wait in line and you’d play a guy and he’d beat you or you’d beat him and you’d literally shake hands because there was a level of mutual respect.

Golobish: Because it was like, oh, this person is standing next to me, am I going to say some weird, bigoted, homophobic racial things?

Cruz: Absolutely not.

Golobish: So bring back the physical.

***

The three knew that "Skycurser" alone can't bring back the face-to-face interaction afforded by arcades. They would have to create the hardware to allow other developers to make their own cabinet arcade games.

So they did.

"It was like, if we’re going to put the work in to make 'Skycurser' right, let’s do this the right way so that it can pave the way for other people to get involved," Smith said.

Golobish created a hardware "box" that can be shipped anywhere and fits into an arcade standard that allows most cabinets of the '80s and '90s to play it. It sells for $600, and it connects to Wi-Fi for updates and downloads. They'll build and sell the full cabinet, too, for $3,000.

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"We make the game, the actual code that runs the game itself. But then, mostly because we’re crazy, we make the hardware that runs the game, too," Golobish said. "I was trying to explain it in the simplest terms the other day, and if you think of it as not only do we make 'Super Mario Brothers,' we also make the Nintendo."

They use old tube TVs, too, called CRTs, which now are very rare, Golobish said.

"It's an art form that if the technology doesn’t exist anymore, will just die, and that’s just kind of a bummer," he said. "There's nothing else like it. Nobody's making an LCD and trying to make it look like an old TV."

***

Cruz: I'm going to brag because I grew up with Sony products around me. We actually were just invited to join Sony's developer network a year ago, and we just literally sat on the invitation. It was one of the most surreal experience of my life because we’re so used to having intense business conversations.

Golobish: Oh man, we crushed these conversations we were having. We were just like, "What’s the ROI gonna be?"

Cruz: Yeah, and so we had this conversation with Sony …

Golobish: 'Cap tables, what do the cap tables look like?

Cruz: And after we got off the phone, I was like, did we just like, I was just expecting him to be throwing all these really, like, hard questions at us that we couldn’t answer. And we were just so overprepared that I was like, “Did we just, like, outbusiness Sony just now?” But, so we sat on that invite because we didn’t know what we wanted to do with it.

Golobish: Because the game’s not done.

***

Yes, the "Skycurser" team has some pretty lofty save-the-arcades goals, but they're also realistic about their future. They went on a quest to develop an arcade game that would make their 12-year-old selves proud, and they know they’ve got plenty of audiences outside the cabinet-playing gamers to reach. With some minor tweaks, they could have the game available on other platforms such as Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox or the iPhone.

"I would want you to be able to play ‘Skycurser’ on your phone or on your computer or wherever and be like, 'This is a great game,'" Cruz said.

Just creating an app would have been easier, but with such saturation in smartphone games, they knew they would have less of a chance of standing out.

"It's not like that we don’t like the home experience or the mobile experience," he said. "It’s just everybody's already servicing the home and mobile experience."

For now, they have accomplished their top goal: to create a badass, bloody video game.

"It's cool to see people from our community making stuff like this that we normally associate people out West in California making stuff like this,” said Nate Gonzales, general manager of the Sinking Ship bar on 96th Street, which has one of the games.

The game doesn’t draw as many players as when it arrived in the spring. Still, customers often ask about the gory new-school, old-school arcade game on the side of the bar.

The brainchild of Cruz, Golobish and Smith is getting attention.

"They did exactly what they wanted to do," Gonzales said. "They made an '80s arcade game that's super fun to play."

Call IndyStar reporter Amy Bartner at (317) 444-6752. Follow her onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram.