 How's it going Jim? It's going good. How are you Tim? I'm doing good. Yeah, hanging out in the living room together. Yeah, we've been waiting for this moment. It's good to be back in America, frankly. Does it feel like everything you ever thought it would be? Even better. Yeah. They really do have gold on the streets here. Well, so you're on the robot and if you've got controls of the robot, I actually want you to roll into my camera shot so people can get a sense of like how I'm able to talk to you right now because it's pretty. Oh, I have control people. You have control. I have control. I don't have control of a personal space. Should I carry my robot? Yeah, yeah. Turn over and you'll be able to see the camera shot there and then. It's good to be home in the living room. Hello. Yeah, so the stream could see this. I actually put a little face mask on you, so. That is awesome and strange. It is strange, but since you're not actually here, I think I could take this off so we can get a little bit more. Yeah, I think we can get a little more intimate now. That's right. That's right. That's the beauty of things being virtual, right? So I think so. So you're on the robot. You're going to go back over there, but obviously you've got your green screen hooked up. And this was something that we talked about on previous streams about being able to use your green screen as a way to like have a sense of presence, which I think is pretty wild. Exactly. So yeah, we're both in the living room, so to speak, but it's really just the composite of you and I in front of the living room shot. Am I out of the scene? You are? Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna park this, baby. Park it. This is so fun. It is fun, right? I think it's kind of interesting to think about like we talked about that sense of presence and how it can be fun for people there, but it's also really an intimate and funny word, but it is in some ways like the ability for me to kind of just hang out and talk with you and have you on a robot, which might seem creepy at first, but then it becomes like, wow, this is a different way of conversing with someone. Yeah, it's funny because this morning when you and I chatted, which was the kind of genesis for this Reclaim Today episode, I came in by robot, like I set up the robot, it's like, hey, I want to run an idea by you. Right. And I was like, oh, okay, jump in the robot, but just sitting here looking at you and talking and this morning the same was really special. It's like, it's very different. Yeah. But let's go, let's do a little bit of a rewind for this episode in context because just yesterday, you and I had a discussion where we were bemoaning a little bit the fact that between COVID-19 and the uncertain future for a project that we were really excited about a year ago, six months ago, that's been on pause, somewhat indefinitely, and with the sign that things may not get better, like we kind of came away from the meeting like, maybe we'll try and do something, but it won't be what our real vision was. And I think we came away from it knowing that we want to do it, but between me being here, no prospect of coming back, you being there, no prospect of it opening, we felt a little bit like, where is this leading? Kind of discouraged, right? Yeah, but then this one seems like you had an epiphany, and now I'm fully on board, but what was that epiphany to? I mean, obviously, one of the things you said early on, the virus sucks. Coronavirus hit, and we were all kind of depressed, we've had our moment for several months. I got back in, I was like, well, I'll start getting things set up in the space, but it's month after month continued to feel like, when is this going to go away, especially for the US? And it can be depressing. And as you're kind of figuring out your long-term plans of kind of like, when are we going to open? What can we do? One thing that you said early on was, what if we double down on the idea of the virus? And everybody has to wear a hazmat suit, full body in order to get in, which would be funny, but nobody wants to really do that. It's just kind of all in jest a little bit, but today, so this morning, I found a website that we're going to show on the stream. It's called Telemelt, and the idea behind it is real tuna melt. Make yourself a fancy tuna melt. And the idea behind it is pretty simple. It's the ability to play old school arcade games, like emulator style, like you've been doing with the RetroPie and stuff like that, on a website and have a low latency way for you to pass the controller to other people and play. And so the idea being that you can play games together even when you're remote. The guy who built it, his name is Andy Ritano. He goes by Batsly Adams on Twitter and other places. And he worked with some other people, started developing this around March when things started hitting as an idea for people to be able to remotely play games together, collaborate together and do like really interesting stuff. And so I was like, oh man, at first I was just like, well, that's fun. I mean, that's right up our alley. Let's definitely play around with that and play games. And then it suddenly hit me. I'm like, what if that's like a context for the arcade is how might an arcade open that could allow people to come in remotely, which is not necessarily a new idea. You've been playing around with it with the video store, you know, with the robots and things like that. But I got to thinking, we have the robot, now we have a way to play games remotely. And suddenly you start to think about what if you have small groups of people that are in the space, collaborating and bringing in people externally. I mean, we have people in our community, they've said like, oh, I'd love to come and see the arcade. And they're all the way up in Canada. And who knows if they'll ever get a chance to actually come to the space. And yet you're here. And in some ways, hopefully it feels like you're actually here in the space with me. And if there's ways for us to marry that with the idea of social gaming, I think it's really interesting. The idea that people could sit in the living room and bring in someone remotely that's also in the living room, and then you could pull up a game on the TV. And the people who are remote can play that game and you're seeing it live. So I think what hit me when you were saying this this morning and why I was so sold on it was the fact that I was sitting there looking at you talking. And then we played with telemelt. And I was like, Oh, wait, so there's a different element of me being in the room with you talking, seeing you through the robot, but then also playing collaboratively on the browser. It was unique. I mean, presence is interesting. And I think that's what we're exploring here. And we are treating it that but the way in which then like, how do you take what we're going to show people with the NES in a little bit on to some of the actual cabinets, right? Like us playing, you know, Robotron or Smash TV or Pac-Man or what have you. It's just, it's a cool experiment to see if we can actually make something work. Yeah, let's look at Toonamelt and actually give a show people what that's about because you've already joined in here. So I'll switch this shot so that people can get a sense of what this looks like. And so if you go to Toonamelt.com and you go forward, it gives you a unique URL that you can send to other people. And so I sent this URL to you ahead of time. You're connected in here. And so down at the bottom, it actually says you're holding the controller, but I'm connected as well. You get to pick a three letter name, which works really well for you and I and an emoji. And so you can actually pass the controller back and forth and you can load games in there. And so we'll load and it supports Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and all of the various like Sega Master System, those kind of things, Game Boy Advance and regular Game Boy. And I think that might, I think that covers it for now anyway. And so and those to be clear, those are ROMs. You download a ROM. I mean, we don't need to get into it, but you can find them all over the web and download download those game files. And then you upload the file via Dropbox on here. So there's a button down here to open up Dropbox and load a game in. And it's it's pretty sick. And so like, do you want to load a game or do you want me to either way should work? Maybe we should start with the classic Mario. Yeah, absolutely. And I actually so and to be clear, this also supports game controller. So I went I ran home and grabbed a PlayStation 4 controller, which I've got with me and just have it plugged into the computer. You're doing similar with a Xbox controller. I am. So I did order on Amazon that you can buy like for real cheap, like a five pack of all the various classic controllers, but they're USB. So like the actual standard Nintendo controller, Super Nintendo with the with the same buttons and everything. So I felt like, you know, eventually I want to get to there with it. But it was like a pie. It was like a raspberry pie set. It was really like villos. It was nice. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's meant to work with like the retro pie that you created, or not that you created, but that you built for yourself to create. So but it'll work with any controller, you know, that you have plugged in with USB. So I'm going to go in here. Let's see. I'm going to find my mouse and hit Dropbox. That's the thing about this. I think as you're doing that, is it's super easy. Like my retro pie, I have to really finesse my controllers and figure this like this. I plug my controller in. It works. I load a ROM from Dropbox. It works. Like the thing about this idea of game emulation in the browser that's shared is really slick and works right quite well, which makes this idea doable. Exactly. I've got a folder in my Dropbox called ROMs. And I just downloaded a few. These are all the Nintendo entertainment system, the original Nintendo. So I'll select Super Mario Brothers. And yeah, so you should I'll make this full screen again. You should be seeing the same thing I do, which is the start screen of Super Mario Brothers. I do. And I see a little thing underneath that has your name highlighted in my next to it. Yeah. And so I know that it's your turn. Right. So I so the idea, yeah, and that that we should make clear. The person who built this, his idea around it was that instead of having multiple people on multiple controllers, had that there's a sense of social gaming in which you play single player games, but you pass the controller back and forth. And so that's how this works is that instead of playing a two player game, we're going to play a single player game. But I might play a level and then I might say, All right, Jim, now you try and we can in the controls just hit the space bar in here. And now you've got the controls, you know, and back and forth. So it's kind of a different take on it. There's a little sound. I think maybe they've heard like absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Exactly. So let's let's start a game here. We'll start one player game and I'll start out and see how long I last. You'll last longer than me. Well, I did find that the controller does make it a lot easier. So, you know, So, so, you know, as Tim's playing, I can see everything on my browser he's doing, which is really amazing. And as I take this over now, so I'm gonna hit space bar. Yep. And I'm gonna now go. Yeah, you have to park the robot. The robot. All right, so we've learned something here, which is that you should park the robot. And maybe park the robot before you play next time. Some bugs to be worked out there. People watching the stream have no idea what was going on. But all right, this oh, oh, ready for this. Oh, yeah. All right, let's see if I what I can do on the flag. Oh, I missed it. There we go. Well, I found the button in which you can run faster. So that definitely helps. But I missed the jump as I fell to the ground. So all right, so we'll switch back over to you now. Oh, wait, you jumped out of the website. Wait, I'm loading it in Safari. And now, okay, let's see if it works. Let me make sure we don't die here. But then I'll pass it off to you. So you know what, for some reason in Safari, because I didn't want to have to do to have the same problem in Chrome. So if you play play the game for a bit, okay. Hold on one second. I'm not as good as other Twitch streamers that can talk and play at the same time. This is quite the challenge. All right, let's see. I'm jumping out of the robot for a quick second. I gotta remember what the buttons are on this too. All right, so now this I remember let's see. And then he go up there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a game hack for all you all you young ins here. That's pretty cool that you went up above. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. And then I died. I might move again. Let's see if it moves again. Oh, actually the game's over. But let's do another one just to see if my if my robot moves. Okay. Ready? No, you're parked. Yeah. Yeah, it's still trying to move, right? Yeah. It's interesting. It's treating that you know why because it's the person. So switch it over to you. See how easy that is? Yeah. It's that easy. All right. I'm not screwing around now. We're gonna get a good game in. Get my coin action. Oh, there it is. Nailed that one. How did you do it? How do you jump to get all the way up there? Well, so on my PlayStation controller, I've got X and O which are the B and A and if you hold down X while you're moving, you move faster. So let me kill them. So like this is normal running speed. If I'm holding B down, that's the speed. So you can get a head start running faster. All right. Come up here. So running start, get up there. Yeah. So you can go faster like that versus that's the normal speed. All right. Let's just see something. All right. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna make it back up. Yeah, there we go. Oh, warping off. All right. Are you gonna go to four again? Yeah. I don't have a chance at four. Take it. Okay, here I'm gonna try. I set you up for success. You've got the shooter guy. Whatever they call that version of Mario. That's gonna make it more difficult. So this is me playing. Yeah. You were playing now, I'm playing seamlessly. You understand how radical this is, people. Can you understand the vertical and the horizontal? And you got the robot to stop moving too. I did. I have to take out the Xbox controller. Oh, you're just using your keyboard? Yeah. Okay. As you can see, I'm trying to get through. I don't have any hopes to find any. I don't know. You're doing better on the keyboard. Take it over. Finish the level. That's good. So then I say, I says to the guy. That's sick. All right. I'm gonna jump in here. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Let's see if I remember another thing here. Oh, I tell you, this is like right for the last two hours. It's like riding a bike. This is the instead of like learning, instead of learning the hard sciences, this is the kind of stuff that I chose to keep in my brain. And yes, in like 85 or 86. And I'd still been on Atari 2600 kind of like hardcore guy, but I was in like 10th or 11th grade. And I was reading it back in this new we have moved houses. And we were I was in a new house and I was reading Macbeth. And between scenes of Macbeth, I would play Mario, like the Super Mario. And so I always have Macbeth and Super Mario Brothers, like in one thing in my mind. And I like this game is amazing. Yeah. I was really blown away by it. But I don't I'm trying to think I don't think we ever I don't think we ever actually owned a Nintendo. I knew people who had them. And so like, spent a lot of time at other people's houses, play it. Look at that. Another works in the summer of 85. No, the Christmas of 84 85. Yeah. And it kind of blew up. It gave the whole gaming industry. At least on life after the whole Atari era and arcade machine, co-op machine were kind of dead in the water. So good. Oh, I had it going. You blew it. I was doing much better. All right, let's see what you can do. Let's see what I can do. Nothing. Go Tim. Okay. Oh, well, at least I'm small. That'll help here. Let's get small. This is so cool. But like, literally, while you're playing, I'll just say a little like that. Watching you play like this and knowing there's no latency, there's no issues, and then I can take over the game with a with a click. Now show them the things that we have accumulated some like points. So if you start playing, I can go into my life ghost. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like change things. So yeah, if I I have to switch to you and then although I'm not seeing it yet, do you need to start playing or maybe Oh, I think it's only supported in certain games. What game were we playing? Contra? We're playing Contra when we were playing around with it. So let's load that in here. So let's try Contra. Yeah, I mean, this is awesome. If I didn't download it, I'll grab it real quick. Yeah, I don't think I did. I didn't see it in Blades of Steel either. But a couple of things while Tim's doing that, the full screen mode in this is really elegant. So you can take your browser, make it full screen. And the way I'm set up here in Italy, I got one screen with the full screen of Mario, and then another screen with Tim. But I'm looking at him in a separate browser with the with the robot. So when I'm looking this way, I'm really looking at Tim. Yeah. And then when I'm looking straight on, I'm looking at my browser with it. And so it's really feels real. That's another thing that feels official that this is fun. Yeah. So now we've got the ghost in here. It's down in here in the bottom right. Yeah. And if I click it, let's let's switch to you and you can start playing. And it's gathering gold or whatever in here. This was something called NES Spectre or any Spectre or whatever. Same developer who built this. And the idea behind it was that you could play around with how the game works while the other person's playing. So let's say like corrupt the pallet cycle background pallet. Yeah. Random spread gun. I'll give you a better gun there. Yeah, you're welcome. So people who are viewing while they're playing the game, someone else is playing the game, they can interact with the game too by like adding different elements. Okay. Uh, let's see. I gotta, I gotta figure out what the controls are. It's, oh yeah, for that one. Yeah. It's not a quarter per game. Yeah, exactly. All right. Jumping and shooting. Easy enough. Yeah. And it's interesting because you accumulate the dollars or whatever by just staying in the game. I'll do the color pallet. Nice. I love that one. That blinking one in the water. And then I'm going to call up sound registers. Not hearing the sound register corruption, but I'm going to give you the spread gun here shortly. Oh, nice. Like that. That's a guy can do this good. It's so cool. See, we're friends. I died. Uh-oh. All right. You try. You try playing for a little bit. All right. Thank you, Tim. You're welcome. I'm dead. I died giving up that. It makes you feel really athletic. I got the audio down a little bit here. Back to you. Back to me. Oh, okay. Contra is not one that I played all that much. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a strange one. They, they have an arcade game on it too. We played it in Utah. So let's, so I'm going to do it on my side. Okay. Let's do, I'm going to now load to get out of this. So how do I get out of the game? I got to get out of the spectre. Um, I think, yeah, I get out of spectre and then you just hit drop box down at the bottom and load a different one. So how do you get out of spectre? Uh, one of the buttons is exit spectre. Yeah. So now I'm going to go to drop box and I'm going to load my favorite NES game Blades of Steel, which is a 1986, I think. Um, hockey game. It is so fun. I love this game. This was my promise in the, yeah. And there's a really cool thing between, okay, hold on. Okay. So I got to actually play. So let's do this. Oh wait, I gotta give, I gotta give you controls. Right? Or no. Oh, I should take control. Take control. Yeah. There we go. There we go. Player one. This is one of the games where you could actually fight the opponent and like you, they showed you the fight. Like hockey. I was always Chicago. Yeah. I was always Chicago versus Edmonton for some reason. The computer was Edmonton and I was Chicago. Why? I don't know. It's not like I'm a hockey fan, but the whole thing is great. Like the crowd and it's pretty good graphics. This is 86. Yeah. And it's got a game within a game. So it's got like a little, uh, I don't think we want to spend 20 minutes to watch me get to it. But like it is kind of interesting how the game is cool. I'll show it a little bit. See if I can score a goal and then we can step out and talk a little bit more. There we go. Oh, I'm the red. You're red. I shot from mid court. Not a good idea. They immediately took your puck. They immediately took my puck, but that's Oh, they tried to shoot on me. Well, and they scored. Are those Canadians that you're playing? Yeah. Edmonton. Yeah. And Marie Scott right now. I think it explains a lot is right where this Edmonton Eichler's on. She's the goalie. Exactly. Yeah. God damn it. I did it again. Just give it a hand in it to him. Hold on. Hold on. It's just, oh, oh, yes. Oh, nice. Oh, okay. I'm doing the wrong button. Hold on. It was easier definitely with the controller, but that's all right. I got it. I did. I got the pass. You see that, Timmy? I was so close to Grayton. Oh, come on. Oh, oh, oh. Put them again. They're Canadians. And look at them celebrating in my court. Like, right there by me, like, you suck. That's definitely a pre-COVID crowd up in the stands for sure. I mean, that's got to be a little bit of shock. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like having palpitations. So that's it. One more. If I get a goal, we can quit, but otherwise you have to all suffer through this. With the pass. Oh, so close. I love that he says, with the pass, with the pass. Oh, nice. Nice. Oh, you made a shot. Oh, didn't get in. Made a couple too. Yeah. Oh, here it is. Oh, there's the fight. I want to show you ready. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Isn't that awesome. And then I get it. And I'm going to do what I want. It's like a little like super punch-out kind of situation in the middle of it. It's the best. This game is like my favorite NES game. And I love Mario, but, or I love the idea of Mario, but this is the best game. Edmonton is kind of like, they're like Hulk people too. They're all green. Good. Yeah, they're good. Come on, I can get this. All right. Oh, and I'm leaving it wide open for them. Can I, oh, there we go. Okay. My last chance. If I don't, we're still getting out of it. Oh, you were set up. I was set up. Okay, but I won't sit and make you watch me play this. It's super cool. It is super freaking cool to play that together. Yeah. I don't want to be indulgent on the stream, but we could just sit around and do that. Right? Yeah, no, exactly. And I think, obviously, we got to figure out how to stop the robot from moving with your controllers and that kind of thing. But I think like ultimately, yeah, like the idea behind like social gameplay like this where you have a sense of presence and you're in a space together by robot and through the web and stuff like that. I just, I think it's worth exploring more. And I really liked your idea when we were talking this morning about, you know, what would it mean to do this? Like, you know, Andy Rattiano did for NES and for those, you know, it's similar again to the Internet archive and emulation, but the emulation of the browser is working so smoothly now. So what if you can get that to work with a machine we have in Reclaim Arcade? Right. And so someone comes, like you said, with the robot, there's a QR code that they scan. And then they're able to play that Pac-Man. Yeah, it's being played in the space, but it's also being shared online with them and someone else is in the space or someone else all together. And they're trading who has the controls to that game. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's super cool. And it gets it like we always joked about, oh, the robot needs to have hands, but the web is your hands in that sense. And you've got a way to like work together in that sense. I think it could be super cool and allow the sense of like bringing people in when you can't necessarily be in person. And it's I think it's a unique idea. I don't know of any other people playing around with this. There's one group that I've followed some of the work they're doing called Surrogate TV. Surrogate TV is a website where they're taking physical things and connecting them to the web. So like they have two pinball machines that you can play online, but the problem is the latency. Like by the time you press the button for a flipper, like it's like a good half second to second delay. They're over in the Netherlands. So like that's part of it. But that's where it kind of starts to fall apart with the physical. I think if you can fix the latency issue, which clearly like the tele-melt thing has already done in many ways, then it's like, if you can solve that, then you can have real-time exploration of playing physical objects remotely, which I think is wild. Which is for us now that the project of Reclaim Arcade, which is super fun. Yeah, totally. In addition to like, you know, playing the VHS and all that, the video stuff that it just builds on what we've already been doing. And I think it's right in line with with that aesthetic that we're going for. And it's the perfect time to be doing it. In some ways, we were kind of pression. Just because you were in Italy, we wanted to have a robot controlling a video store. And now it's like, yeah, but what if you've got robots controlling the games and running the arcade and doing things like that? You know, I think it could be wild. It's our armor against COVID despair. That's right. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. I'm having a blast with it. So yeah. I agree. Well, that's cool. I think that covers it, man. That's pretty awesome. Absolutely. And, you know, once we have more updates to come on it, we'll do another episode about it. I think we'll have to play some more games. I'll have to look at, I was a big Sega Genesis person. I had, I got a game gear for Christmas. And so like I was on the handheld Genesis stuff, like Sonic the Hedgehog, those kind of things. I never owned a Nintendo, but I had the game gear and I got the knockoff Genesis, the Sega Master System, because you could rent the Master System games at the local video store for pretty cheap. And so I would play those games on there. So that's, that's my jam for sure. Yeah. And that's cool too, because that's a system I don't know. Yeah. So to play on this with you would be like, for you, your ability to almost seamlessly teach me. Yeah. Right. Like with the blades of steel, like you hadn't seen, but like you get to see something new and like someone who does experience it. Like that's a key part of that because we do feel present. Exactly. I feel like I'm with you. We're talking, I'm looking at the browser, but I hear you laughing. Right. What the hell with the boxing? Like that's everything. And that's what the, the person who developed Telemount wanted and missed. Yeah. So I really believe in that vision. That's super cool. I do too. And this whole setup is fun. Like I think this is one of the cooler streams we've done with us, both being in the living room and online and that kind of thing. So I'm excited. We'll definitely have to play more. It's coming together. We never have a real plan, but it always seems to come together, which I love. Yeah. It's always a success in our own eyes. We're always the best people. Yes. That's right. We are, we are winning in our own minds. Well, thanks folks who are watching live and people who catch it after the pack. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you all later. Bye bye. Bye.