Fairfield, Iowa will host video game luminaries from across the nation this weekend as gaming historian and scorekeeper Walter Day presents his art gallery exhibit, The Video Game Trading Cards and Posters of Twin Galaxies.
Day, who founded Ottumwa, Iowa’s Twin Galaxies arcade in 1982, gained national prominence in early days of the video game industry through his efforts to establish organized scorekeeping and competitive play — a pursuit which led then-mayor Jerry Parker to proclaim Ottumwa the “Video Game Capital of the World.”
His exhibit features more than 200 Twin Galaxies posters created between 1982-2009, as well as thousands of trading cards, printed and designed by Day over the last three and a half years, which honor important video game inventors, competitors, designers and milestones alike. The exhibition will run Aug. 1-23 at Fairfield’s ICON Gallery.
In celebration of the exhibition’s debut, an awards ceremony will take place at the Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield on Saturday, Aug. 2 at 7 p.m., hosted by Fairfield Mayor Ed Malloy, Ottumwa Mayor Tom Lazio and Day himself. More than 80 people who appear on Day’s trading cards will be in attendance to receive awards and recognition, including the Billy Mitchell and Steve Sanders from the critically acclaimed 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. This event is free and open to the public.
The cards themselves offer a gritty look at the birth of video game culture — a culture that has since blossomed into a $93 billion annual industry. A culture that, whether he’d like to admit it or not, Day played an important role in shaping.
The story of Day’s lifelong affair with video games begins the way you might expect. with a moment of nerd clarity.
“I started playing video games in 1980 and realized immediately, ‘holy smokes, I love playing video games,'” he said. “I got addicted to playing Space Invaders, and that’s why I opened up Twin Galaxies, initially. It was an excuse to be able to play more video games.”
The following year, Day opened Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, despite his family’s reservations. His parents ran a successful real estate business at the time and wanted their son to take up the family trade.
“I was opening up in the agriculture center of Ottumwa. It was a new technology. My parents were against it; my father hated it.” Day said.
In addition to the arcade space, Day had been collecting high scores from arcades all across the United States, compiling the figures into what he dubbed the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard. With it came national attention, and Day found soon himself the industry’s de facto recordkeeper. His charts appeared in national publications like the USA Today, as well as the industry’s most popular enthusiast magazines like Video Games, Electronic Fun and Joystik.
But Day didn’t stop at recordkeeping. Throughout 1982-84, the Twin Galaxies founder organized dozens of regional and national video game competitions, offering the nation’s top players a chance to showcase their skills in an organized setting. Twin Galaxies’ ubiquity even caught the attention of The Guinness Book of World Records, leading to a decades-long partnership between the two organizations.
“Twin Galaxies, back in 1981-82, became the world’s most famous arcade,” Day said, sounding more surprised than braggadocious. “People would come there from other countries just to say they’d been there.”
In 1982, Mayor Jerry Parker proclaimed Ottumwa the “Video Game Capital of the World,” a declaration recognized by Sen. Chuck Grassley and endorsed by Governor Branstad, the Amusement Game Manufacturers Association and Atari in a 1983 ceremony hosted by Twin Galaxies. The industry was riding high.
And with the great video game crash, when industry revenues plummeted by an estimated 97 percent between 1983 and 1985, it all disintegrated. Arcades and arcade culture largely disappeared, and the rise of home consoles — most notably the Nintendo Entertainment System — would permanently reshape the wounded industry.
Twin Galaxies shut down. Day became a landlord.
The story is remarkable, and documented heavily in the aforementioned King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. In 1982, meanwhile, arcade fervor was best typified by a LIFE magazine photo, shot in downtown Ottumwa, featuring 16 of the era’s top video game players.
This Sunday, in fact, award recipients will travel to East Main St. in Ottumwa to recreate the classic LIFE magazine photo. Day says some of the original gamers from the 1982 photo will be in attendance. Sunday’s shoot is part of a publicity campaign in support of Ottumwa’s yet-to-be-built International Video Game Hall of Fame and Museum.
Day, meanwhile, hopes to tell the story of Twin Galaxies through song.
“I’m writing a musical,” he said. Day sounds exasperated when he says that last word, drawing out the syllables as if he can’t believe it. It’s raw passion wrestling with pragmatism.
“We’ll see if I can pull it off,” Day said, his tone more optimistic than timid. “I love it because it’s a huge challenge that’s completely above my pay scale, and completely out of my frame of reference. But I have a lot of energy for doing things like this, so we’ll just see if I can be intelligent enough and creative enough to actually produce something that will be a meaningful experience for the viewer.”
Day says he’ll cease trading card production on December 31, 2014, after which he’ll begin focusing entirely on his musical. By that time, he’ll have produced well over 200,000 cards, funded almost entirely through private donations and Day’s personal income.
As far as whether or not the brick-and-mortar arcade industry will ever bounce back, Day is understandably optimistic.
“It’s coming back,” he said. “Just last night, I got a message from someone in South Dakota who just opened up a classic arcade. [They’re] opening up all over the place.”
He might be right. Retro arcades are opening up all over the country. Iowa City’s own Tobacco Bowl is currently transitioning into a pizza parlor video arcade, in fact. In larger cities, retro arcades in the style of Chicago’s Emporium Arcade Bar are practically hip, featuring craft beer selections as diverse as the arcade cabinets themselves.
Day attributes the success of these establishments to the simple thrill of playing games in a social setting. “The older people go in for the nostalgia, and the younger people go in because they’re intrigued by the old machines,” he added.
Capturing this sort of fascination is largely what led Day to undertake the trading card project. Day says the cards are, in short, a storytelling project. The idea isn’t to showcase the best players or highest scores (“That’s small potatoes,” he says), but rather, to create a mosaic of micro-stories that reflect the broader video game culture — the kinds of things that “normally get overlooked in the history books,” as Day puts it. He’s a documentarist at heart.
“I’m out there using the trading cards in the same way an oral historian uses their tape recorder,” Day said. “These people … they contributed something, and even though it was small from their own individual perspectives, it played an important part in a much bigger trend that is was going on [at the time].”
As far as what people can expect this weekend in Fairfield, Day’s advice is simple.
“People should come and then go home with a big pile of trading cards,” he said, laughing.
