by
Mike Huguenor on September 29, 2021
While LVL Up undergoes construction, the newly minted LVL Uproar on First has been an excellent interim host for events like karaoke and live music. This Saturday, they cover it all in a layer of glitter as Drag Arcade takes over the brewery for a night of drag, dancing, performance and gaming…
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by
Mike Huguenor on September 8, 2021
When the house lights went down on San Jose’s Center for the Performing Arts on May 17, 1984, showgoers experienced “a tempestuous noise.” Thunder clapped. Lightning struck. And out on a raging sea, a lone ship made its way out towards a magical island.
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by
Mike Huguenor on July 7, 2021
Ever since 2016, when JVNA burst onto the EDM scene with a stirring and emotional cover of “Dearly Beloved” from PS2 classic Kingdom Hearts, the LA producer has been blurring the lines between dance music, video game culture and pure emotional outpouring. You don’t have to be a gamer to get caught…
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by
Nick Veronin on March 9, 2016
It’s doubtful that any of us ’80s babies realized it at the time, but we soaked up a lot more than words like “shoryuken” and meme-worthy phrases, like “all your base are belong to us,” while we sat cross-legged on the floor, frantically tapping our plastic Nintendo and Sega controllers. It would…
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Some day, Kevin Wick hopes to play video games in his own video game bar. That day, he tells me on the back patio, will be “The day I can sleep more than five hours a night.”
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Every February for for the past three years, longtime local music promoter Eric Fanali has devoted all his energy to wrangling nerds—herding a large and disparate group of indie rockers, chiptune artists and video game fanatics into the same place for a weekend-long video game and music festival known as Rockage. His job…
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Silicon Valley pinball wizards and fans of classic arcade games gathered at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara for California Extreme 2013 to reunite with hard-to-find video games that, along with the pay phone, are becoming nearly extinct cultural artifacts from an era before Angry Birds and farming games took over.
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by
Maureen Coulter on February 5, 2013
Eric Fanali doesn’t want you to go to San Francisco. The man behind the scenes of many downtown music events, from no-cover Blank Club concerts on Wednesday nights to the SubZero Festival and shows throughout Silicon Valley, puts all of his resources into nurturing the local music scene and connecting fans. His…
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Just last week, I was at a bar ordering a drink, and when the bartender turned around to set it down on the counter, I saw that he had a tattoo covering his entire inside forearm recreating a screen from the old Donkey Kong arcade game. For some reason, the first thing…
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Anyone who was disappointed when the Minibosses didn’t play their version of the Legend of Zelda theme at Subzero—hey, there are more of us than you think—can take some comfort in the knowledge that an entire show will be devoted to the themes from various games in the series when the “Legend…
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