A movement by Ottumwa, IA resident Chris Hoeksema to get Twin Galaxies recognized and re-establish the city's claim to Video Game Capital of the World with a Video Game Hall of Fame has gained momentum after Hoeksema got the city council to meet on the idea on Wednesday, April 29.

 

Ottumwa was where the original Twin Galaxies began in 1981 as a small arcade owned by Walter Day.  Upon a call to Williams Electronics to try and find out if a gamer in the Twin Galaxies arcade had just set a new Defender World Record, Day discovered that nobody was tracking the official high scores on video games at the time, and offered to take the job.  Calls to numerous other game companies of the day followed, with all agreeing to refer all inquires on high scores to Twin Galaxies.  The first call came in only 30 minutes later, and the Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard was soon born.

 

The city of Ottumwa soon declared themselves Video Game Capital of the World, a claim later backed up by the Governor of Iowa as well.  The now-famous LIFE Magazine photo shoot in the streets outside the Twin Galaxies arcade contained gamers from all over North America has been featured in both The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade. The photo is also on display in arcades such as Funspot in NH.

 

The city council meeting on April 29 featured Walter Day as well as famed gamer Billy Mitchell and Steve Sanders, who both appeared in the LIFE Magazine shoot and both of the aforementioned films.  Mitchell offered to donate his personal Donkey Kong arcade machine as the first piece for the museum, the same machine he set the current Donkey Kong World Record on in 2007.

 

The meeting, attended by several dozen people, seems to have brought this idea a great deal of momentum, as well as a large flurry of traffic to the Twin Galaxies website later that evening as the news spread across the globe, making the second Twin Galaxies news story to go mainstream in a 72 hour span after a flurry of visitors came in on Monday, April 27 after national attention came to Steve Wiebe's new Donkey Kong Junior World Record.

 

Billy Mitchell was confident that the Video Game Hall of Fame idea could do for Ottumwa, IA what the Baseball Hall of Fame did for Cooperstown, NY.

 

"It had to seem like a silly idea to most anybody who heard about it, but it was something that absolutely memorialized Cooperstown," said Mitchell. "Ottumwa is on the edge of that."

 

A Facebook page supporting the ideas for Ottumwa has gained over 500 members.

 

Check back to TwinGalaxies.com for more information on this development as it takes place.  Also check out the links below to the Facebook page for supporting this idea and a link to a local Ottumwa news station with video of April 29's meeting.