Friday Night Arcade™ is an ongoing series spread across two YouTube channels as well as Twitch. The Friday Night Arcade “main” channel features reviews, documentaries and retrospectives focusing on classic console games such as Atari, NES, SNES, Sega Master System and Genesis, Neo Geo, TurboGrafx-16, Nintendo 64, vintage gaming hardware and more. The second YouTube channel, Friday Night Arcade Plays!, features live stream archives from the main channel as well as the Friday Night Arcade Twitch channel. These feature streams of classic video games as well as occasionally some more modern games and are a more casual experience versus the highly edited episodes on the main channel.
On the main channel, Friday Night Arcade episodes are meant to encapsulate the golden age of video gaming hardware and software. “Where classic video games live on.” The goal is for fans of old school video games and video gaming hardware to have a place to relive these games as well as reminisce about them with like minded fans. When reviewing a game from a different era, Friday Night Arcade attempts to look at the game through the lens of the time and space that it was released. A game may seem pretty obsolete by today’s standards, but when considering hardware limitations as well as the fact that something like that may have never been done before in the late 70s or early 80s, all of the sudden what the developers accomplished on said game may actually be pretty special. Friday Night Arcade attempts to pay tribute to developers who thrived under those hardware and time constraints.
Friday Night Arcade made its debut in October of 2014 on YouTube with the pilot episode featuring the classic Sierra adventure game, Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon. The first episode took well over 100 hours to produce, shoot and edit over the course of several months. Although this episode was rough around the edges and ultimately the show’s format changed and evolved over time, the core elements were there: Relive classic games and reminisce about what it was like to play through them for the first time.
Aaron, (Owner and Host): Growing up in the 80s, Aaron initially got his start in gaming on the Atari 2600 aka the Atari Video Computer System – or as it was commonly referred to back in the day, simply “the Atari.” Aaron loved playing simple Atari games such as River Raid, Chopper Command, Space Invaders, Enduro and Starmaster – and he references these games often when discussing the system.
Aaron would go on to own a Nintendo Entertainment System and loved StarTropics, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden and the Macventure series games such as Shadowgate and Uninvited. Aaron is an unapologetic “Nintendo kid,” as he only really owned Nintendo consoles growing up, but anymore he seeks to find great games on all systems — Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Master System, Genesis, Sega CD, TG-16, Neo Geo and so on. He does not care about Console Wars or arguing about which system was better. The goal of Friday Night Arcade is to seek out awesome classic games regardless of which system they were on. He also had a Tandy 1000 HX computer in his household on which he would play various early era “text-only” adventure games such as Colossal Cave and Moonmist. Aaron was always fascinated with adventure games and text adventures in particular – the freedom that they allowed was unparalleled and made for a unique gaming experience at the time. Aaron also loves modern survival games and is hopelessly addicted to DayZ. Some of his other favorite modern games include Mass Effect, the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series and The Forest.
Aaron is also a husband and father and in his spare time enjoys woodworking and experimenting with his Masterbuilt Smoker.