Maker Faire Bay Area 2024
Spacebar Arcade
Home: California, United States
Spacebar Arcade is a Virtual Reality saloon arcade set in the wild west of cyberspace. You enter this virtual world by way of a real-world 16-foot-tall arcade cabinet. Play on the "outside" using game pads and the giant screen, or don a VR headset to go inside the Spacebar with your friends and family. Inside, one can find a variety of low-gravity games and digital refreshments to enjoy with the other patrons. You might find our ornery A.I. barkeep, Cyberspace Sam. The physical cabinet and the virtual game were both designed and built by creative technologist (and lifelong maker), Sam Mateosian, in his San Carlos garage studio with the assistance of his two daughters, various friends, and helpful neighbors. It was first exhibited at the Augmented World Expo Playground in June 2024.
https://spacebar.games
Makers
The Yarn Corporation
The Yarn Corporation is comprised of me, Sam Mateosian, and a loose band of merry hackers who have spent years building and shipping various weird, wonderful, wacky ideas in the world of games, interactive art, and virtual reality storytelling. It's the love child of my first company and a collective we started in Maine called Hack Portland.
https://yarncorporation.com
What Inspired You to Make This?
As I was moving on from a failed startup project I thought it would be fun to open a physical barcade in my neighborhood. I love to design hangout spaces and I love arcades and retro games. But as I researched the viability of such a project I found that bars are a tough business and the up-front cost would be quite high. Since I had previously done work in Virtual Reality, I thought, why not make my barcade as a virtual space. So I spent a year learning to make VR games with Unity. One of the core ideas of the virtual arcade was that players could go inside the machines and play from both outside and inside of the games. That's when the idea emerged to make a physical arcade cabinet that would be big enough that people could go inside of it, and that would be an awesome way to exhibit my new game world. I pitched the idea to the AWE conference and they loved it. But, with only 8 weeks until the show date, it would take several miracles to pull off a build, let alone largely by myself. But somehow, someway, miracle of miracles, the Spacebar Giant Arcade cabinet was born into this world. The first of it's kind. A glorious beast. And now I offer it to the Maker Faire.
