Grapevine, Texas

Dear Friends:

For Memorial Day weekend, our family traveled to Grapevine, Texas.  This small city is part of the greater Dallas area.  We were there with some dear friends to go to the U2 concert in Dallas (see previous post).  We decided to make a weekend of it and we stayed at the famous Gaylord Texan Resort.  This is a MASSIVE hotel.  The interior is the largest I've seen (outside of it's twin hotel in Nashville).  These pictures don't even do it justice:

The kids were - no surprise - thrilled to explore this place.  There were games, displays, fountains and all kinds of shops that they loved to explore:

As I said, we were there mainly for the big concert.  The following day, we decided to go and see the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas.  This was such an incredible treat for me...and for the kids.  However, for me it represented not only a big part of my childhood...but a lot of years that I've spent working in the gaming industry.

At the entrance, there was a huge display of video monitors, as well as almost all of the well-known game consoles, modeled in gold throughout the display:

I was really impressed by the displays and artwork, as well as the curation of every game console I could think of.  At the front of the museum was a "timeline" that had all the systems displayed by their release date:

 I immediately went to find the first major consoles that I had actually worked on.  These represented almost 10 years of my adult working life.  First up was the 3DO Multiplayer system, manufactured by Panasonic:

Next, was the Sega Dreamcast...a much more well-known system in the U.S., Japan and Europe:

The museum even had a 3DO M2 System on display - this was going to be the next-generation of the original 3DO system.  It was never actually produced, so I'm shocked to see that they had one of these systems:

Feeling a little more nostalgic, I found a working version of a game system that my younger brother actually bought (but I played quite a bit). It was based on the popular arcade game "Donkey Kong" and was a simply LCD-based system.  Lots of hours on this thing:

Going back even further was this Mattel Football handheld.  It only had red dots to represent players, but I played with this toy for hours.  I can still hear the bleeps from running the ball down the field:

Still in the handheld area, I found all kinds of Gameboy systems.  I remember these Gameboy SP systems, because when I traveled with some of my employees back in the early 2000s, we would connect these together, on a plane, and hold tournaments while we flew to Japan and Australia.  The flight attendants would always come around to watch us play against each other:

Going back a LOT of years - this was one of the first computers that I ever owned.  It's a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer.  My model was actually the TRS-80 Color Computer, that would connect directly to your TV.  My system had a cassette tape interface, as shown in this picture.  That's how you would save and load large programs - because there wasn't any permanent storage on the machine...and floppy disks hadn't really been made commercially available at that time.

One other system that I learned to program on was the Commodore 64 - it was a sweet system:

The museum had dozens and dozens of systems that were completely playable.  They had a whole wall of racing games, set-up so that you could see the progression of the technology related to a single type of game.  The artwork on the wall was fantastic:

A very popular station was called "Typing of the Dead".  This was based on the Sega Dreamcast.  We had produced a keyboard for the system, and had a game where you had to type words to shoot zombies that were trying to attach you.  The tension in this game is quite high...and helped a few people be able to type a little faster:

Towards the end of the museum was a great game arcade, right from the 80s.  I found several games that brought back some fantastic memories of hanging out at the miniature golf in my city, as well as several of the local pizza restaurants.  BattleZone, Galaga and Star Wars were favorites:

I spent quite a few quarters on these next two arcade games - Centipede and Defender.  They both had great sound, fun gameplay and kept me coming back for more, all the time:

Overall, it was a fantastic experience.  I loved the care that the museum curators put into each of the exhibits.  I really love that so many systems were playable.  It gave me a chance to show the kids what gaming was like when I was a kid!

For lunch, we tried a great burger restaurant called Twisted Root.  The menu was amazing.  I instantly grabbed the special of the month - the Caprese Burger.  It was like putting a Caprese Salad on top of a high-quality burger.  That's just a win-win, in my opinon:

That afternoon, we took the kids to Paradise Springs - a small waterslide and swimming area on the Gaylord Texas Resort property:

The rides were fun, but we just enjoyed getting splashed with water and riding on the lazy river.  This is a promotional picture, as it was much, much more crowded on the day we went.  The kids had a blast, and we were heroes for taking them:

Overall, it was a really fun weekend.  We ended up driving back early on Sunday, to get to church on time.  I hope that we can go back with our friends, and spend a little more time there...and maybe next time get to invite my son and his family - who were busy with other family in town at the same time.  What fun!