Sounds of tokens dropping through coin slots and plastic game buttons being pushed ran between the arcade games of Funspot on Thursday, marking the start of the 12th annual International Classic Videogame Tournament at the American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM) in Weirs Beach. Continue reading...

When Gary Vincent ushers you up to the third floor of Funspot, the world's largest arcade, in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, he knows he's welcoming you to the Promised Land. "The biggest joy I get," he says, "is the first-time visitor who comes up the stairs and they're like, 'Wow." What you behold is a carpal-tunnel-inducing Xanadu of 8-bit graphics and Casio keyboard soundtracks. More than 250 vintage coin-operated arcade games blink hypnotically in the dimly lit room, all of them still costing just a quarter to play. Continue reading...

Weirs Beach, NH, 3/8/2010 -- The annual International Classic Videogame Tournament is quickly approaching, and 2010 marks the 12th year for this historic event. The tournament will take place from Thursday, June 3rd through Sunday, June 6th, 2010. Tournament hours are Thursday Noon-10pm, Friday and Saturday 10am-11pm and Sunday 10am-5pm. Admission is $40 and includes 200 game tokens and a commemorative color poster provided courtesy of The American Classic Arcade Museum. This year's tournament is sponsored in part by WPNH 101.1 FM, WFTN 94.1 FM, WSCY 106.9 FM & Gamer Soda. The first 200 registrants will receive a commemorative T-shirt and goodie bag. Continue reading...

BOSTON — Despite the wide array of new and experimental indie games on display at PAX East last weekend, the weirdest thing I played at the videogame festival was Us vs. Them — an arcade game from 1984. Continue reading...

Not content with being the world's largest arcade, Funspot in New Hampshire, USA, also houses the American Classic Arcade Museum, a collection of almost 300 original cabinets from the Golden Age. Curator Gary Vincent regales Paul Drury with the tales behind some of its most precious treasures. Continue reading...

Bob Lawton puts his beer down and gestures out of the bar to the huge arcade beyond. "In the mid-Seventies, we had a small arcade with pinball machines and shooting galleries. This Italian operator from Concord came in one day and started waving his hands around saying, 'Let me get rid of all this junk and put in some good games!' The first videogame we had was Tank 2 and it grew from there. One game could take as much as a whole room of pool tables! I loved that guy..." Continue reading...

As you ascend the stairs to the top floor of Funspot Arcade, you half expect St Peter to be handing out quarters, because this is truly Retro Heaven. Rows of mint cabinets stretch out before you - Red Baron cockpit, Atari Drag Race, the shimmering Star Castle, a full-motion Space Harrier.. every turn brings a fresh jaw-dropping discovery. You simply never want to leave. Continue reading...

The Funspot Family Entertainment Center in Weirs Beach has always been the on the “hot list” for kids birthday parties. Besides having the distinction of being the largest arcade in the world, with three floors of fun, Funspot now has a Party Room, with seating up to a hundred, that is totally free of charge. Continue reading...

“In 1952, at the age of only 21, this year’s recipient borrowed a few hundred dollars from his grandmother to start a miniature golf course and arcade named the Weirs Sports Center,” began Sue Cerutti, Executive Director of the Meredith Area Chamber of Commerce, at a recent meeting. “Now fifty-seven years later, that start up, known as Funspot, is a 70,000 square-foot family entertainment center that was officially recognized in 2008 by the Guinness Book Of World Records as the largest arcade in the world.” Continue reading...

Funspot, the venerable, three-level, 60,000 sq. ft. FEC in Wiers, NH, is no stranger to publicity and fanfare after almost 60 years in the business of fun, its still ongoing development — inseparable from the life and career of Bob Lawton, who at 21 borrowed $750 from his grandmother to start his first mini golf course and arcade as the Wiers Sports Center — shows the embrace of the most successful fun center trends and thinking, alongside several unique approaches to the business. Continue reading...

When you step into a modern family entertainment center, you're often greeted with an array of dazzling high-tech video games employing the latest audio, video, and special effects. But the recent 11th Annual Classic Video Games Tournament at Funspot in Weirs, New Hampshire, showed there's quite a following for the older games as well. Continue reading...

Who could have guessed that putting 250 ancient video arcade mechanisms in one place would open a temporal wormhole for aging gamers to relive their wasted youth? That's the American Classic Arcade Museum. Continue reading...

Enthusiasts of classic video games have gathered at Funspot for competition, record-setting, and overall fun and camaraderie at the 11th annual International Video Game Tournament. Continue reading...

The 11th annual International Classic Video Game Tournament ended on Sunday and all of us would like to thank everyone who attended and made this a very special event. Even with a poor economy 160 players showed up and registered for 4-days of fun which was amazing since last year we had 176 players. Continue reading...

(NECN: Lauren Collins, Weirs Beach, N.H.) - It may look -- and even sound -- like fun and games, but these folks are in serious competition. It's the Eleventh Annual International Classic Video Game Tournament, and it draws gamers from all over the world to Funspot, the landmark arcade in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. Continue reading...

Heading north out of Boston, Massachusetts towards New Hampshire, there’s not much along the highway capable of taking you by surprise. This is rural America, and there seems to be little here more than the occasional charming tourist town. But around the shoreline of the glacial Lake Winnipesaukee, the small village of Weirs Beach hides a secret: the world’s largest arcade, Funspot. Continue reading...

When the cream of UK arcade players headed across the pond to compete against their US rivals, retro gamer set Paul Drury along to report on where you should be taking next year's summer holiday. Continue reading...

Harbor House Pictures, a film production company located in Westchester, NY will be coming to Funspot, Tuesday through Saturday, March 25th -29th to film their next feature, "Altar of the Unnamed." Continue reading...

Twin Galaxies is proud to posthumously honor John Lawton, of the Funspot Family Fun Center, in Weirs Beach, NH, for holding the "Longest Held Video Game World Record." Continue reading...

EAU CLAIRE — A middle-school science teacher and a videogame legend vie for the world record on the classic arcade game Donkey Kong in "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" (2007), screening Jan. 31-Feb. 3 at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Seth Gordon's compelling, hilarious and universally acclaimed documentary will be shown at 6 and 8:30 p.m. Thursday through Sunday in Davies Theatre. Continue reading...

In 1967, a small team of engineers, led by Ralph Baer, designed the world’s first videogame console – The Magnavox Odyssey. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first videogame console, legendary gaming pioneer Ralph Baer will attend the annual International Classic Videogame & Pinball Championships on Saturday, June 2nd from 3:30pm until 7:00pm. Continue reading...

Skee-Ball was invented and patented in 1909 by J.D. Estes of Philadelphia. These first games were 36 feet in length and, as one can well imagine, required considerable strength to play. So in 1928, the length was reduced to 14 feet. This new, shorter Skee-Ball achieved tremendous popularity and appealed to women, children and the elderly. In later years, a 10-foot long Skee-Ball made its debut. Continue reading...

On paper, Seth Gordon's documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" sounds like it might appeal only to hard-core gamers. It could well be titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Donkey Kong World Record" or "Men Who Game Too Much," and much of its action consists of watching youngish men (and one elderly woman) slumped in front of arcade games, working the buttons and knobs as if it's second nature. And yet, the movie's a kick: Gordon, a Seattle native, has a knack for shaping a story, taking the audience on a ride as manic and unexpected as that on any video-game console. Continue reading...

Long before Xboxes and Wiis, the arcade was the field of battle for video games, waged a quarter at a time, sometime back in the first Reagan administration. The new documentary "The King of Kong" uncovers today's diehard fans of that earlier era's games, people whose thumbs are callused from games like "Pac-Man" and "Centipede" instead of more modern fare like "Grand Theft Auto." Filmmaker Seth Gordon chooses to focus on the high-scores competition between two "Donkey Kong" mavens, feebly playing up their rivalry and squandering his promising topic. Continue reading...

Andrew Gardikis is a 17-year-old kid from Quincy with a shaggy mop of dirty blond hair and a long, lanky frame that he's still growing into. In the video game world, Gardikis is famous for being one of only three people to achieve the so-called "Holy Grail" of gaming records: a perfect speed run on the original Nintendo Super Mario Bros., which means that he finished the game and saved the princess in 5 minutes and 8 seconds. Continue reading...

Promotion is the name of the game in the amusement industry and nobody does it better than the Funspot family fun center in Weirs Beach, N.H. Founded in 1952 and currently located on 21 acres of property, Funspot is closing in on half a century in business and still growing. The facility recently added an indoor golf center with six deluxe golf simulators and a pro shop offering custom clubs and top of the line merchandise. Plans are on the drawing board for a hotel and convention center, too. Continue reading...

RICK FOTHERGILL DOESN'T look like a world-class athlete. With a gray-flecked T-shirt clinging to him like Saran wrap and a pair of pale legs protruding from his baggy shorts, the 27-year-old concrete tester from Ontario, Canada, looks as though a round of golf might kill him. Continue reading...

Taking care of over 500 video games and pinball machines is a labor of love for Randy Lawton, Chief of Technical Services at Funspot, who practically grew up in the arcade here and has been keeping both the old and new games running for nearly 30 years. His work on the innards of the game machines qualifies him as the resident "pinball wizard", a title he has also held during the 1970s when his mastery of the intricacies of the games earned him a reputation as one of the top pinball players in the country. Continue reading...

The Coronation Day Video Game Championship held at Funspot over the weekend was a homecoming of sorts for Doris Self, the world's oldest video game record holder. Now 74, Doris learned to water ski at Weirs Beach in the 1940s, taking lessons from Bob Lawton, Weirs Times publisher who, at that time, was giving water ski lessons at the Weirs. Self made history when, at the age of 58, set a new world record on Q*bert, one of the most popular games of the Classic Era of video games. Born in South Boston, Doris said that she was always active, having been a tennis player from an early age, and she says that there are few experiences in life that she missed out on. She has gone bungee jumping, parasailing and celebrated her 40th birthday by going surfing at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a few miles from where she currently lives. Continue reading...

On July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M., taking nearly six hours to accomplish the feat -- on one quarter -- Billy Mitchell, 33, a Fort Lauderdale hot sauce manufacturer visiting the famous Funspot Family Fun Center in Weirs Beach, NH, scored 3,333,360 points -- the maximum possible points allowed by the game. The results will go into next year’s edition of the Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records -- which is the official record book for the world of video game and pinball playing. Continue reading...

Curt Vendel of New York had a dream; the establishment of a permanent Atari Museum. Unfortunately he realized that was not likely to become a reality and this left him with a problem - an extensive collection of rare coin-operated games in storage gathering dust. So how does one solve such a problem? What did Curt do? He called Mike Stulir of Back In Time Classic Gaming and Mike hooked him up with Gary Vincent of the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH. Because of this connection, Curt donated several classic games in his collection to Funspot's American Classic Arcade Museum. Continue reading...

To drive the rolling roads around Lake Winnipesaukee is to risk arriving, entirely by mistake, in some other decade. The Moultonborough general store rears up out of the year 1781. The area's grandly named little motels pull you straight back to the 1950s. The motor ship Mount Washington has been carrying passengers around the lake since 1940. And then there is one little corner of Laconia where it is forever 1983, and robots are trying to take over the earth. Continue reading...