This first film is a tribute and a nostalgic journey to «the Quixote of video games», those of the arcade genre, which had their golden age in the 80s and 90s through the vertical machines that populated bars and arcades all over Spain with games like the first Pac-Man and Mario Bros, Pong !, Space Invaders or Asteroids, precursors of current video games.
Mario-Paul Martínez wanted to do Arcadeology for two reasons: to publicize the effort in the recovery work of these last century machines carried out by the Arcade Vintage association, responsible for the creation in Ibi of the first Videogame Museum in Spain -model for many others, which will reopen its doors on July 3 – and, on the other hand, raise the importance of maintaining this legacy by going through the history of the Spanish arcade to the present day, in which this phenomenon revives a boom in recent years.
During the filming of the documentary, the team -captained in photography by Vicente Javier Pérez Valero, also a professor at the UMH and a member, like Martínez, of the Massiva Research Group, which studies the interrelation of audiovisual arts and mass culture- has conducted more than forty interviews with experts and disseminators of this universe, but the pandemic caught them in the absence of an important one: “We still had to talk to the technical director of the National Library of Spain, who has started a project of recovery of the Spanish video game, since we are not preserving it and many are not cataloged because at the time they were not required to have legal deposit or they did not have it “, explains the director of Arcadeology, and, in a way,” this still legitimized us more to make this documentary and reflect work that many associations have been doing for some years now.
Martínez indicates that just as the books, paintings or films that define our history as a collective are preserved as part of our legacy, “video games must also be preserved as part of our culture.” For this reason, this film is not only aimed at geeks of the arcade movement or experts in video games, but at the general public “because it is a cultural fact.”
That the documentary, the first made on this genre and Martínez’s film debut, hits theaters at the end of July is something that even he could not imagine in his best dreams: «We cannot complain because we have come much further than we believed, especially to see the work that has been done from Alicante by Arcade Vintage with José Litarte at the helm ».
Before being screened in theaters, the film has been selected in the official Documentary section of the Kingdom of León Film and Television Festival, which takes place in mid-July, while it will be screened out of competition in the operas section premiums at the Elche International Independent Film Festival on the same dates and on July 17, also out of competition, at the Sax Film Festival directed by producer Miguel Herrero.
Preview in Petrer
The film, however, will enjoy a preview in Petrer – “the place where everything happened and where the first plane of the film was shot,” says Mario-Paul, since it was there that in 2013 Arcade Vintage began its activity to then move the museum to Ibi. This will be on July 8 at the Cervantes Theater in the town.
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