Today was the first tournament day and I had the opportunity to go there for a few hours. Although it was still pretty quiet, about 80 contestants today, there were some well-known players and world record holders playing their games.
Right after I entered Funspot I ran into Mark Alpiger and Donald Hayes.
Both pretty well known for their skills. We chatted for a few minutes and Mark mentioned that he knew Aart van Vliet and how nice Aart is. Aart, if you are reading this, you get the warm-hearted greetings from both Mark and Don.
As I already mentioned, it was still pretty quiet today, although a referee told me that there were already about 30 contestants more on this first day than last year. But Friday and Saturday are the more crowded days.
And the ACAM team must have been pretty glad with the European attention that they even baked this for me:
LOL, I wish that would be true. No, I suppose it was someone´s birthday today.
Before I actually could watch the players in the tournament area, I was approached by a reporter of the NY Times for an interview (on request of the ACAM team). The reporter is doing a piece about the tournament and he wanted to ask me some questions about how we in Europe experience the classic games etc. I took of course this opportunity to briefly mention DLF, but I also got a chance to say quite a bit about Eurocade, what it is all about, what makes it so great and where it is located. The reporter seemed really interested. I made certain that he spelled Eurocade (and my name) correct, so let´s hope that we are in the Monday edition of the NY Times. The reporter couldn´t guarantee that he would use my input, but he promised to e-mail me the piece that will be published. Let´s wait and see.
After the interview I finally went to the tournament area and I watched Dwayne Richard putting up a Funspot High Score on Space Fury, which by the way is an awesome game. It´s vector, colourful and it has great gameplay.
All the registered scores (the contestors have to play each one of the 20 tournament games, but they decide themselves which score of a certain game will be registered. So a player can play multiple times on a certain game until he is satisfied with a reached score) are inputted right away in the scoring system, like the HS of Dwayne:
The Hall of Fame ´wall´ shows pictures and facts of a lot of players, and guess who is number one on the first page:
Here are some random Funspot fact sheets of a few players, guess which one doesn´t belong there:
Here is anoverview of the scores until today, the left column is the total of registred scores per player. As you see only about 50 of the 80 contestans have registered one or more scores.
Here are some pics of the small tournament area. Just see yourself if you see a well-known player
I will be there tomorrow evening also for a few hours until closing at 10 PM, like today
, so maybe I can speak to some more great players. Should be fun.
At one time I felt a bit foolish of myself. Outside the tournament area there was a guy playing at Super Sprint and taping his game. I watched it for a few minutes and I thought that he was pretty good. So I told him that he was pretty good. ´Yeah´, he said, ´I am indeed pretty good at this game´. Then I asked him why he recorded it. ´For when I get a world record score´, he said. I was like ´Oh´. A few seconds later it struke me and I asked him if he was by any chance the world record holder of this game. `Yes´, he said, `I am`. Oeps
So after a few more minutes I wished him good luck and went along.
Allright, this will be it, no more Funspot coverage for you guys, or something special must happen tomorrow.
I will close this report with some artistic shots of the Classic Games, thanks to a nice Camera App on my phone.
I appreciate all the nice comment that you gave to the reports and photo´s, that made it worthwhile.
Time to go to bed now, while you guys have to go to work.
