A meeting organized by a theme bar with classic arcades and national video games cut off vehicular traffic this Sunday on Gascón street between Honduras and El Salvador, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, and “took the video games to the streets” so that people of all the ages will play for free under the motto “Fichín is culture”in a context of “resurgence” of national video game developments in this format, according to fans.
“The fichín is culture because it exceeds playing, it is a collective experience and there are many artistic expressions that go through it,” he began by telling Télam Santiago Idelson (47), the co-founder of the drinks bar with arcades of the ’80s and ’90s, The Flashwho organized the meeting.
“You can appreciate the pixels, the music, the furniture design and the convergence with the cinema, it is a small film, in which scriptwriters, cartoonists, programmers, carpenters, musicians, narrators, game designers work. Video games are a creative industry that mobilizes a very active and vibrant community”complete.
Dozens of people came to the place to play in the street on a sunny day. Adults and children played together in 20 fichines arranged in two different islands: the national arcades and the classics.
While they played and paid full attention to the screen or the flipper and pressed the buttons and joysticks with emphasis, other people waited their turn to play and at the same time shared the experience of who was giving up everything to reach the goal of the game.
“The difference between playing on the computer and in the fichines for me are the buttons and levers. And yes, I beat my dad,” Joaquin Velazco (11) from Palermo told Télam, who came to the place with his father Mariano (44) and they played Street Fighter and Wonder Boy very closely.
“Before he said to me ‘did you play this?’ And now he is fascinated by vintage games, and on a platform called Toluene he looks for all the vintage games, like Tetris, “added the father, who also recalled that when he was a boy he played in video game rooms.
Mariela (42) from Villa Urquiza, also took her 6-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son to see the fichines. “It’s good that they come to know our childhood games, I played Wonder Boy and Tetris,” he told Télam.
There was also a small video game youtuber, Juan Ponce de León (9), who went with his friend Baltazar and his father Charly (40). “You have to save your initials when you finish, son, it’s the most important thing,” the father explained to him, between excited and proud when he saw him finish playing “Juanito”, a national fichín. “I found it surprising what it was about and what had to be done. You have to go shooting monsters, you have to hold on as long as you can“The boy who records PlayStation games on his channel and is fascinated by Tetris told Télam.
The fixed games at El Destello, inaugurated in 2018, are international classics such as Pac-Man, Wonder Boy, Tetris, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat.
“Many of the games that we were buying come from the Argentine Atlantic coast” -where a large part of the classic fichines remain, explained the owner. But, in this meeting, they also added other games: those that have made up the current national fichín scene for ten years.
“National fichines began to be driven by the independent developer community that values classic arcades and create games with similar characteristics, but made in Argentina. The phenomenon began 10 years ago and every year two or three new games are added, all with their furniture,” added Idelson, who is also an audiovisual director.
About the phenomenon, the youtuber specialist in the subject, Nicolás Olivieri (39), from the channel “Las Retro Aventuras”explained to Télam that “ten years ago there began to be a resurgence”, not only nostalgic, but also “a new wave of independent indie creators”, made up of “the generation that once in the 80s and, especially in In the 90s, he grew up touring arcades, videogames, and movie theaters and, today, they are people who have studied careers related to technology, narrative, or audiovisual design who try to channel all that and find a space in an industry that seems nonexistent. for a lot of people, but it’s getting bigger and more interesting all the time.
One of the national fichines that paved the way for this phenomenon was “Nave”, a video game developed in 2012 by Hernán Sáez and Máximo Balestrini at the Videogamo studiowhich is dedicated not only to creating video games, but also the machines to play them.
“One of the characteristics of Nave is that there is only one in the world, it is in a cabinet of the classic fichines, it is only played on that machine, something that I find very interesting and different because it invites you to a community challenge, to go out home and surround themselves with more people, a revolutionary idea at this time when everything tends to get us into our homes and consume content individually,” said Olivieri.
“The game was going to be web, but at the time they invited us to a sample and we decided to put it in a machine with a lever and a button to show it, at the same time we saw the appeal of the fantasy of having an arcade, although today it is somewhat more common, many people have arcades in their homes,” he told Télam Sáez, one of the creators, about Nave.
“We took a classic machine from those that are on the coast -atlántica- to assemble it”, reconstructed the developer, who is also a designer and filmmaker, also telling how it was that they came to do “tours” with the machine.
In its ten years of existence, with Nave, fichín for which they lined up to play in the Palermo matchThey made 190 presentations and every year, at the end of the year, they hold a world tournament.
“Each player’s score has been stored in the machine for 10 years and that score is time, what the machine counts is time, the longer you resist, the more score you have,” explained the developer.
In this sense, he said that there is a community of players of Nave, and on the other hand a community of developers who move their traveling machines to parties, cultural spaces and museums so that people can play them.
With respect to the new generations and the format that the fichín presents, for Sáez “any kid sees a video game, comes up and plays, it doesn’t matter if it’s old, new, if they know it or not. On the contrary, it has happened to us that children under ten years old play them and say ‘this seems from the future’. There is no notion of time, it is something that you like or not”.
Some of the Argentine fichines that make up the national development scene are Argentron, Dobotone, Fuga, Cacaborg, Fuga, Trucotron, Tunnnel, Truchogol, Mad Rollers, Chacal, The black Heart Arcade, among others.
One of the latest releases was Thunderball, a game of a futuristic sport that is played by four, developed by Nando Sarmiento, and presented in 2023, which can only be found at El Destello.
For Olivieri, the new generations are attracted to “the physicality” of the arcade: the giant cabinet with a front light, a huge banner with lurid images and, when they have the opportunity to test themselves, “the games that hold the attention are the classic games like Pac Mac or Street Fighter. A good game, like a good song or a good movie, stands the test of time,” concluded the youtuber.
The meeting was held from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. within the framework of the “Cultural Streets” program of the city of Buenos Aires. At night, the bar will resume its normal operation aimed at adults who can play with their drinks.
Mar de Ajó, Mar del Plata and Santa Teresita, where the fichines resist
The first fichines that entered the country, in the mid-’70s, were imported, manufactured in Japan or the United States, bought by the machinists or owners of the video game halls, he explained to Télam the youtuber specialist in the subject, Nicolás Olivieri, from the channel “Las Retro Aventuras”.
“With the passage of time, with the most unfavorable economic movements, in Argentina, thanks to the fact that there was still a workforce that came from the strong industry of the ’50s and ’60s, it was to recreate cabinets,” he added. Between the ’80s and ’90s “there were cabinets built in Argentina with plates cloned in Taiwan, something that, for example, did not happen in Chile, which always imported the machines,” replied the specialist.
As he assured, in Argentina the the importation “was reduced only to the Flippers or bigger machines like Daytona”, but those that have to do with Pac Man, Space Invaders, Street Fighter, “those games inhabited machines that are called ‘clones’, built in the country”. What was made in the country was the wooden furniture, the tubes, the levers were obtained, the button panel was assembled, the graphics of the furniture and the entire structure, and the plates were brought from Taiwan, he specified.
Regarding the location of the fichines, the youtuber explained that the fichines businesses that are currently open, “in many cases try to recover those machines that are lost throughout the country” and “many -machines- sleep in winter in the Atlantic coast, and wake up in spring so that people can enjoy them in summer”.
Arcade video games “explode” on the Argentine coast. In that area of the province of Buenos Aires, “the bulk of the machines are still there” and he stressed that “Mar de Ajó, Santa Teresidta and Mar del Plata are the places that preserve these machines the most and best”.
Some of the places to find fichines today are the El Destello bar, Feliza, Acatraz, El Perro Negro, Clarck Flipper and Arcades, Arcade Club Social, as well as mainstream chains such as Playland, Neverland, among others, as mentioned by fans. Each place has different modalities of access.
