I’m a writer by trade, not an electrical engineer (nor any other kind of engineer), and when I look at any of the new deluxe games like the driving simulators, I honestly wonder how anyone could have developed and built such an amazing contraption. Where AI (artificial intelligence) might take us in the future is tantalizing, but I don’t understand AI either. Neither do most people, including the game players who look at this industry’s inventions and take them for granted, thinking somewhere on the earth some very clever people make these things.
It does take clever people to make amusement games, which combine inspiration with that engineering knowledge I touched on above. Route and arcade operators pass by designers like Gene Jarvis, George Petro and Pat Lawlor at trade shows not knowing they just missed rubbing elbows with the true stars of coin-op … the “Paul McCartneys” or even the “Rogers and Hammersteins” of our artform. These are people who spend most of their work weeks thinking and tinkering with their drawing boards, white boards and circuit boards to bring forth a device you can wheel into a building, plop onto the floor, then plug into a wall socket and let the genie out of the lamp.
Like all commercial artists, be they songwriters, musicians or novelists, their foremost thought is whether their inventions will be appealing enough to coax customers to pay money to enjoy them. There’s the difference between pure art and commercial art: money. Coin-op is that sort of artform, and it’s a tough discipline that puts fire under the feet of its designers to give the salespeople something they can put their arms round so that operators will spend hard-won money to be able to bring their magic to their customers (players) here and abroad.
Our new Directory Yearbook is done and mailed. Use it in confidence. RePlay’s staff put in a whale of a lot of work getting it all together. I hope it helps you and your company have a prosperous and happy 2026.