Rich Babich of The Game Exchange of Colorado is among the newest members of AAMA’s Amusement Industry Hall of Fame.
In 1974, at 23 years of age, he began his career in the coin-op industry working for Funway Freeway, a regional chain of mall arcades. Over the next two and a half years, he oversaw the development and buildout of a whopping 19 arcades. In that process, he had to create all the operating procedures and cash controls and was tasked with the responsibility of running most of the stores.
“Apparently, those 19 arcades didn’t give him enough to do, so in 1976 – at the advanced age of 25 – he started a Denver route operation called Automated Amusements,” said AAMA Executive Vice President Pete Gustafson. “Automated grew to over 200 locations with 1,200 pieces of equipment on the street before being sold in 2001. At the time it was sold, it was the largest independent route in the greater Denver metro area.
“But again, the arcades and the route just left him with too much time on his hands so in the early ‘80s he started a distributing company. Yet again, he found the arcades, route and distribution business just weren’t enough to occupy his time, so he decided to try his hand at product development and in the mid-‘80s created the first dual motion video game simulator called The Hot Seat.”
Today, he operates a local chain of Nickel-A-Play family entertainment centers, his distributing company, and an extensive consumer sales division.
While he was running all these businesses, he somehow found the time to immerse himself with the AAMA, where for the last 20 years, he’s served in leadership roles on almost every AAMA committee, and as a member of the board of directors and executive committees of both AAMA and the AAMA’s charity foundation.