An Evening at the New Insert Coin Museum Exhibit
Image Gallery
There is a new arcade-focused museum exhibit in the Chicagoland area for a limited time only, October 26th-February 16th. The museum exhibit located at The Cleve Carney Museum of Art is dedicated to Midway Games, Inc. and is an extension of the Insert Coin Documentary.
Opening Remarks from the Premiere
It appeals to fans of video arcade games but also pinball because noted pinball people like Larry DeMar, Roger Sharpe, and many others are featured in this exhibit, and chances are your favorite pinball designer has had some involvement with video arcades.
Josh Tsui, the Director of Insert Coin, used to work at Midway Gaming, which was the video game division of WMS Industries, Inc. When he joined, video arcades were starting to take over arcades again. The video arcade industry nearly became defunct due to multiple bad releases and multiple home consoles, such as the infamous ET, Karate, and Fire Fly. Those were simply broken games or weren’t fun whatsoever. Then there were clones of successful games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders with games like King Kong, but it was just Donkey Kong or Mighty Mouth, which was just Pac-Man. These are the kind of games that spam up your MAME cabinet, and, oddly, the current video game industry has been facing similar problems for years with annual releases of identical Call of Duty titles or games with stolen Unity assets that are then put on Steam Early Access.
Anyway, I digress. It was ultimately the pinball division's turn to fail, but that is the reality of the entertainment industry, with booms and busts. Josh, however, found himself at the right place, at the right time, as WMS was on an upward trajectory with classics such as Total Carnage, Mortal Kombat, and NBA Jam in development. Josh portrayed Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat II. He later portrayed Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat 4 and Mortal Kombat Gold, and finally, Kung Lao in Mortal Kombat Gold.
What an incredible period of video game history Josh was in and helped create! More importantly for the industry, Josh documented many behind-the-scenes artifacts, office life, and production line work using a camcorder, saving props, scripts, photos, and various ephemera over the years. It came to a point that in 2015, Josh realized that a lot of this stuff needed to be released for fans and former employees to enjoy. So he created a Kickstarter campaign that was wildly successful, netting 1,316 backers who pledged $92,181.
Insert Coin will appeal to both pinball and video game fans alike, and a lot of the content will surprise you. Neil Nicastro, the infamous “villain” of the arcade industry after shutting down the pinball division, is featured in the documentary. Neil is often talked about with Pinball 2000 and the eventual Williams Pinball closure, but as far as I know, Neil has never been shown anywhere except for old ads and TV spots back in the 90s, which are now found on YouTube.
He goes into detail about his decision process on the demise of the arcade industry, as does Roger Sharpe. If you’re an arcade fan, the parts with Neil Nicastro alone should intrigue you enough to watch the documentary, which goes into full detail about how many of your favorite games were made with Eugine Jarvis, Ed Boon, Jack Haegar, George Petro, etc.
After the success of the documentary, Josh used, and to this day, still uses, the Insert Coin Documentary YouTube channel as a footage repository of various behind-the-scenes content. Some of the recent footage has featured pinball-focused gems like Doug Watson hand painting The Shadow backglass.
Recently, Josh created a limited-time museum exhibit as a homage to the video game industry and an extension of his work with Insert Coin. Luckily, having recently moved from the Boston area to Chicago, I was able to attend the premiere, which was probably one of the coolest events I have ever attended.
In fact, I felt a bit out of place because practically everyone in the room knew each other and had worked in one shape or form at WMS, but I didn’t know who everyone was. Some were immediately recognizable, like childhood crush Kerri Hoskins, others not so much, like contributors from less visible teams, like the Williams accounting department. There were also some notable absences, like Daniel Pesina (Johnny Cage, Sub-Zero, etc), whom I met back in 2016 with Josh Tsui at a retro gaming convention in Connecticut but it seemed like if associated people could make it to this event, they were there.
Video screens adorn the exhibit wall with footage from the documentary and snippets of people in a studio developing games. There is a letter from Carolco Licensing informing Roger Sharpe of the shooting schedule of Terminator 2, storyboards at the time of filming, and a Terminator 2 model used to accurately convert to digital form. Various autographed photos of WWF wrestlers were also there.
Probably the crown jewel of the exhibit is the Williams company sign that I’m dumbfounded was saved. Someone must have really loved their job to pry the Williams sign off the wall and save it for multiple decades without some sort of major damage to the item.
When I first toured Chicago, trying to figure out if I wanted to live here, I went to the location of the old Williams factory. It was a sad sight, as the building looked dilapidated, and the glass building behind it, which later became WMS Gaming (when the company shifted to gambling devices), is now a college university. However, thanks to the Insert Coin exhibit, you can now see the sign that was there and imagine for a second what it must have looked like at the old factory building.
On that note, I’ll send you off with a few memories I have that were created by the fine individuals at Midway as a 90’s kid.
I believe my first arcade game ever was Street Fighter when I was 6 (hey, I turned out alright…well, at least I think I did) at the local mall arcade called Fun Time Arcade in Billerica, MA. At the time, I thought I was playing the game; however, it was in attract mode, much to the bemusement of my mom and her purse.
One day, an older kid walked up in front of me to Mortal Kombat II and I noticed he didn’t just start playing. He put in quarters first, and suddenly the game started reacting to what the kid was doing. This was all observed by my mom from afar, who always likes to joke about this story. I came to her with my hand out because I didn’t know what money was.
I knew, though, that money was the key to actually playing those games, and according to her, it was all downhill from there. Fun Time Arcade is no longer around, along with the mall. When I was about 7, I recall dumping loads and money into Terminator 2 at Fun World in Nashua, NH. Fun World is still around but is sketchy at best–and maybe it was always that way.
Back in the day, though, they had every arcade game a kid could want and some seriously epic birthday parties. Another core arcade memory was playing CarnEvil when I was 10, and I cannot tell you how much money that sucked out of my grandma at a bowling alley called Wal-Lex in Waltham, MA. Wal-Lex is now a CVS Pharmacy because we definitely need more CVS stores. I was addicted to CarnEvil so much that my grandma wouldn’t give me any money to shoot things mindlessly and instead forced me to play a little-known title called Revenge From Mars. The rest, as they say, is history.
Check out the Insert Coin exhibit at The Cleve Carney Museum of Art (Glen Ellyn, Illinois) from October 26th-February 16th. Tickets are available online.
