Welcome to Topic of the Month #2! This month we’re going to be focusing on all arcades, attractions, and which stores had what!
Listing store arcades is important and I wanna explain first how this works. On any location page you can go to the Arcades & Attractions ^ section here. Here you want to find any and all arcades you can from photos, newspapers (yes they are really good for that), videos, store tours, anything!
The dates you put will be the time the unit was installed and when it was pulled (or the store closed). Be aware that 99% of these arcades you’re not gonna have a citable, creditable source/image for this. You’re probably just gonna see 1 photo in some random year and that’ll be it. You’re gonna want to set both the dates as 0000-00-00 to indicate it is unknown.
The last part of a listing is the notes, because most arcades we don’t know the start/end dates, put here what ranges you spotted that machine in. The best example of a great arcades section is what I did for the Concord, CA page:
You may also spot in this table I do put some ‘unknown’ machines, as some are genuinely impossible to find a full proper name for (if one even appears on the unit). This is also fine, but be sure to do research to ensure you are properly citing exact variants of a machine (think of how many versions of skee-ball there are but all feature the same name).
The most rewarding thing that will come out of this month is that each arcade page automatically links to any locations you did the prior section for!! To be clear- do not try to make ‘installations’ tables for anything on the wiki! Animatronics, stages, arcades, and more all automatically generate these so we don’t need to duplicate writing everywhere.
And yes, if you’re not here for listing arcades, make as many arcade articles as you’d like! This is not limited to CEC branded machines, if it appears at any location, you’re good to make a full page on it. This won’t be like last month where our focus was just on compiling images to make a catalog, we should be making proper pages for some of the most iconic machines.