Editor’s Letter: Public Play
A smuggled arcade behind a hair salon in Bridgetown, and what it says about where games are going next.
Last year, I had the pleasure of visiting the former British colony of Barbados. During a visit to the capital Bridgetown, I was planning to head to the beach, but my trip was arrested by a familiar sight—the effervescent shape of the Nintendo 64 logo. Of course, being the proprietor of a videogame magazine, I poked my head in. Down a pink corridor and past the music store and hair salon was a small windowless room adorned with several televisions and a display case full of comic books. Several Bajan adolescents sat rapt with attention as the TVs hummed with new titles like Super Street Fighter IV, or Gears of War.
This was an arcade.
