Meow Wolf is a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based artistic outlet full of immersive visual and aural displays and exhibits. This weekend, it hosts Score Wars, which is centered around both professional and amateur Galaga tournaments. The nearly three decade-old game has held a following in the arcade and retro gaming scenes that has drawn the interests of players of all ages for just as long as it’s been around, but there have seldom been any well-established tournaments for the game in which players could showcase their Galaga skills. Adam Drucker, Meow Wolf, and a ton of talented players are changing this.
Meow Wolf Entertainment Creative Director and Score Wars creator Adam “Doneone” Drucker saw an opportunity to bring history, art, and community together. In the pro tournament alone, longstanding names like Andrew Laidlaw, Andrew Barrow, and Phillip Day have come together from around the world alongside fresher faces to compete in a bracketed tournament for their chance at bragging rights and a piece of the substantial prize of $10,000. Meanwhile, players from all walks have been invited to compete in an amateur-level tournament as well for their chance at $1,500. Among these tournaments, Meow Wolf has also brought other classic arcade cabinets together with legacy gaming champions like Donald Hayes of Centipede, Tim McVey of Nibbler, and more to try to overcome their own records. It’s a weekend of bringing people together all in the interest of kicking butt at some classic gaming.
Twin Galaxies Editorial is on deck at @meowwolf this weekend for #ScoreWars! Players of all levels are getting ready to throw down in Pro and Amateur legs of the GALAGA World Championships while #RetroGaming champions attempt to crush their own previous records all weekend! pic.twitter.com/6TVa42YmTX
— Twin Galaxies (@TwinGalaxies) March 29, 2018
Drucker has some experience in gaming himself. Besides carrying an impressive past as a poet, rapper, artist, and producer, Drucker has also put his musical skills to work on creating soundtracks for several games including Nidhogg 2, Enter the Gungeon, and other indie projects. For him, building up Score Wars came to be as a casual thought between Drucker and Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek.
“Galaga is Vince’s favorite game,” Drucker explains. “Back when the Meow Wolf location was a bowling alley, he used to play it all the time here as a child. Years later, George R.R. Martin bought the bowling alley to make way for Meow Wolf exhibits. Vince was playing that game as a kid in the very room in which we would built the Score Wars exhibit years later. Eventually, Vince asked me if we could do a Galaga tournament. He knew my background in indie gaming and wanted to know if that was possible. I said, ‘maybe?’ and that’s when we started looking at some of the players who were big in the Galaga scene.”
Drucker’s formation of Score Wars began with tracking down a particular name: Phillip Day, who once captured the world record in points for Galaga in Tournament play before eventually being dethroned by Andrew Laidlaw and Andrew Barrow.
“We looked at all the top scores,” Drucker recalled. “But no one seemed to be publicly proclaiming who they were or that Galaga was still part of their lives. With Phil, I tracked him down to a website full of paintings and I wondered if it was the same Phillip Day. I emailed him, he confirmed who he was, and it gave me confidence to find other greats in the Galaga community. I hunted down Barrow and Laidlaw and got them on board soon after.”
According to Phillip Day, it was a fantastic idea from the start and a good way to reengage with a hobby he had been away from for quite some time.
“Once I had gotten my record score, I had left Galaga behind,” Day claimed. “Leading up to the event I started practicing for the tournament, but after I got my world record, I hadn’t played a game of Galaga since 2009. That said, I felt it was exactly what this specific gaming community needed. It wasn’t about records to me. It was about the people coming together, bringing players into the scene, and allowing spectators to see the true spirit of the arcade environment.”
For the legacy arcade players and record holders, Drucker says it was Dwayne Richard, holder of several Twin Galaxies records, that helped him find his way to much of the retro gaming champions. Dwayne claims that he found Drucker’s attempt at a Galaga tournament in a Twin Galaxies Forum thread and saw an opportunity to bring a lot of great gamers together in a cool setting.
“Adam put something up on the Twin Galaxies Forums back in August or July of 2017 asking for help with a Galaga tournament and I told them I could help,” Richard explained. “Originally they wanted to do it in Decemeber, but they were worried about participants. So where I came in was helping them get the word out, decide on how people would qualify for the tournaments, and things like that, but as it grew, they decided they wanted to create an experience beyond Galaga and build a bigger human experience about arcades and telling the stories around the people who love those games.”
From there, Richard helped Drucker along to experts in other arcade games that would fill out the legacy arcade line-up making up the other end of the Score Wars event.
“I realized early from talking to Dwayne that Score Wars shouldn’t just be about Galaga,” Drucker claimed. “It should be about this whole culture of crazy genius these guys have. You’ve had tournaments like Kong Off in the past, and the Galaga tournaments were always going to be the core of Score Wars, but I started hearing about these amazing guys like Hector Rodriguez, Abdner Ashman, and Donald Hayes with these insane skills, and the only person in the world they’re really up against is themselves. It’s a line of genius where play meets pattern recognition and muscle memory. These guys pushing through and breaking these games is the reason why game designers had to work harder to make better games. They’re the forefathers of esports, whether anyone wants to recognize it or not.”
One of the things that has given retro and arcade gaming new life in the modern era is how easy it is to communicate with others about what was once a niche thing. Drucker found himself absolutely fascinated, not just with the level of skill these players had, but the way in which they shared their information and hobby with one another decades before.
“It was so interesting listening to Dwayne talk about the way the enthusiasts would stay in contact,” He explained. “One of the ways was just through telephone and a unique way of getting past certain rules and charges back then. Basically they’d call each other via this unique method and just describe over telephone these tips and tricks they had discovered or accomplished in a game. And that’s cool. These guys have kept their connection through the years. Just being around them is amazing. We’re in the presence of god-tier talent. I’m really happy we can give them something that recognizes them and is fun.”
More than simply being in their presence, Adam spoke to the unique nature of the competitors, especially in the Galaga tournament. Even though they all play the same game, they each have a different background and approach to it that speaks volumes.
“Our legacy Galaga players have very different relationships to the game and their accomplishments and it’s amazing what comes from their interactions,” Drucker continued. “Phil has said that he was depressed when he found his way to his original record and one of his goals is to sort of overwrite that experience with a better one. Meanwhile, you’ve got completely new faces like Armando Gonzales who plays incredibly different and aggressively compared to other players. According to Phil, a lot of more regular players in the scene have styles where they come out looking very similar, but if you showed him a video of Armando’s style, he could tell who it was in an instant by just how different Armando plays. So in their styles there’s just this sense of mental and physical strategy that’s amazing.”
Drucker also added that he’s excited to dive deeper into the backgrounds of players, especially during streams and other interview opportunities.
“You’ve got stories like Dwayne’s,” Drucker told us. “Where he had a good childhood friend who was rich and had a huge allowance, and that’s where his access to games and the gaming scene came from. Meanwhile, Armando claimed there were arcades he stayed away from specifically because of the rough and dangerous elements around them. It’s crazy. Nobody has to stay away from Call of Duty because they’re concerned for their lives. Each of these players has got a story to tell and they’re all interesting to hear about. There’s also just the sense of handling all of this old technology and making it work proper for an event like this and building the arcade scene.”
During the early days of Score Wars, we saw lots of younger players at the event. Some of them look up to the older players and we even saw one child a little star-struck as he recognized and got to talk with current Galaga Tournament Points Champion Andrew Laidlaw. Drucker is absolutely into and supportive of the crisscross between generations and demographics.
“The idea of kids getting exposed to this level of skill and talent is awesome,” Adam explained, describing his enthusiasm to see a diverse array of talent at the event, including in the tournament scene. “The first person to sign up for the amateur tournament and qualify was a sixteen year old girl and that makes me so happy. There’s definitely the sense at times that this particular area of gaming is a boys club and there have been barriers to entry in this hobby, but I love seeing people of different ages, sexes, and backgrounds getting in there and playing this tournament. There’s no telling who will win.”
Drucker’s love for the chaos of the tournaments and their participants extends to the pro side as well.
“You can get on there and if you don’t warm up, you can die in two minutes. It doesn’t matter if you’re a legend like Barrow, Laidlaw, or Day or anyone. This game doesn’t love anyone. You can have all the skill in the world and still fall victim to a bad run. Meanwhile the fact that it’s a head-to-head tournament has a lot of these players excited. They want to fight and match their skills up against the best.”
Indeed, both tournaments feature bracketed players facing off against one another in 5-ship Tournament machine settings consisting of 250 levels. Whoever can put up more points by the end of the level limit wins the round. It’s not just about playing against their own scores. They’re playing directly against the skill of the competitor across from them, which will make both competitions incredible events to watch.
The preliminary days of Score Wars have seen some amazing turnout and been a welcome experience for all comers pro and amateur. The best is yet to come with the upcoming tournaments, so we had to ask Drucker what’s in the future of Score Wars. He assured us that Score Wars is anything but a one-and-done scenario.
“I want to eventually include every end of gaming,” Drucker admitted. “This year we focused on classic and retro gaming champs because these guys deserve respect and we have a lot of love for them, but I would love to do similar styled tournaments and events with rogue-like and indie games personally. Games like Binding of Isaac, Rogue, Enter the Gungeon, and Spelunkey speak to me as a collection that would great for another Score Wars. After that, we might go back to retro with a Score Wars themed around Robotron 2084. From this event we learned that there’s an incredible amount of love for that game and it’s so much more different because it’s very hard to lock down a pattern in it. There’s a lot of random elements, so that sounds like a blast. Regardless, the idea behind Score Wars is that we’re pursuing games that aren’t played out and will bring about some awesome players, stories, and competition, but there is absolutely more Score Wars to come.”
With that said, Score Wars is ready to go into full gear this weekend. Legacy members have been setting records that we’re sure to see soon in the Twin Galaxies database and the brackets have been set by pros and enthusiastic newcomers alike. The clash is going to be epic, and Twin Galaxies will be here with Drucker and the players for every step of the spectacle.
Want to catch the action live along with us? You’ll be able to view the amateur and professional tournaments live via Meow Wolf’s Twitch channel, starting on Saturday, March 31 at 10AM PST.
Want to check out even more score-smashing reads? Check out the records we highlighted in our previous Scoreboard Spotlight!
