BARCADIA: Here comes a new challenger!
23 September 202323 September 2023|
GeorgeBARCADIA: Here comes a new challenger!|
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12:32
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Good to see Tom on the BBC yesterday.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-67407712
Just had a look at the website to see if they had any events planned and look at this on the 10th of October!
“Our film quizzes have gone down so well, we thought it was time to try something that fits perfectly with the walls of our arcade bar…. A GAMING QUIZ. Hosted by the folks that brought you Did You Know Gaming, get ready for four rounds of game trivia. We’re talking everything from Donkey Kong to Xybots. Compete to win a £40 Barcadia voucher to spend as you wish! As usual, our fully licenced bar will be open, serving drinks, cocktails and our food menu! £2 entry per person, with maximum teams of 4. Arrive early to avoid disappointment!”
Are we going to rent a coach and go down then?
why does it matter what time you arrive at ? disappointment is always going to be on the cards !
Haha brilliant.
Pub quiz doesn’t suggest things are going too well. Having to put on events to get the punters in, what next, Bingo?
Do you need a licence for such things? is a quiz gambling?
So what IS Ashens, a owner or just a Backer? I went to check out the old Kickstarter page and went to see the top tier and see the Ashens profile logo. Were these backers the final people to throw in those last minute donations? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nostalgianerd/barcadia-arcade-bar/rewards
he’s apparently a partner, with shares, but pete has continually bullshitted about the nature of his involvement. last i heard “companies house have failed to update the share allocations so far”, or it was something like that. it’s bollocks. both pete and samantha are still the sole shareholders. re-allocation of shares and the updating thereof on companies house takes a very short amount of time, certainly not many months as is the case here. dazz, the sprite thief from the preposterous “spriters resource” website, is also meant to be a shareholder. again, he’s listed nowhere on companies house.
I check a lot of Companies House records at work, it’s rare for documents not to show by next day. Even then they will show up as a record but that the documents are not yet available. Can take about a week for paper submissions but barely anyone bothers with those. Only reason he’s set it up as a limited company is so when it all inevitably folds he won’t have any personal liability for the debts, hopefully he’s done like a lot of suckers do and signed the lease in his personal name before the company was set up!
TBH, you’d be a fool to have any kind of business on the high street and not have a limited company. They can seize pretty much everything to pay off creditors in the event of bankruptcy. My father’s business went under in the 1980s and the house got sold off to pay for the debt. Wasn’t a great time, my parents divorced as well. Thankfully I had my C64 and games to get lost in.
Something about the thing really is sketchy, but I can’t put my finger on what. I don’t know what these people all have to prove to open a shit-stink hole like that, as it looks so bare bones for a place that had that much extra cash to start them off. It looks cheaply thrown together like the type of pub that is set up purely to sell blow jobs and cocaine out the back door, (not saying Ferret Fucker is doing that, but looks like those places that are a front for something) also I don’t know if Dazz and Ashens have been dupped by it and if they are shareholders, their names not being listed with the business, wouldn’t they get shit all for payout unless they trust the word of Peter Prick to pay them their share out of his pocket? If that’s the case I hope he fucks the idiots over as I wouldn’t trust that tofu dick shitbag with a couple of pence on a tea run.
Thanks for the coverage of this and the other stuff about these bloody circus clowns.
It seems like they’ve done the bare minimum to open and now the hearts gone out of it. Either realisation that running a bar is hard work or the souring of his relationship with Sam. The fact he’s resurrected youtube is a pretty good sign the place won’t exist by next year.
…and as for NN, wow. I just had a look at his Patreon numbers and he’s back to 2017 levels of income, the only difference being that in 2017, he was still growing – now he’s tanking, big time. I think one of the things I find most offensive about him is that he clearly considered he was meant for bigger and better things and effectively turned his back on the one thing he’d actually managed to make money from. Now that he’s tried that – and failed, massively – he’s trying to mount a return to YouTube, but it’s too late. He’s pissed off a lot of people and they’re not coming back.
Like all retro channels, he has run out of content. There’s only so much retro content online and unless you have a great memory for the past or a huge supply of computer books and magazines you aren’t going to be making videos for very long.
Yeah, exactly. One of the few channels I still enjoy is Cathode Ray Dude – because he does proper research into the subject matter. It’s not some flimsy Wikipedia guff that anyone who look up, he goes and finds the original manuals and blueprints for the stuff he looks at, and he nearly always manages to get the actual hardware he’s discussing (repairing it, too, when he has to). As a result, his videos are often the only easily consumable content you can find online about those things. I can respect that, even though – as he freely admits – some of the stuff he looks at predated his existence. If you’re going to make videos about stuff you don’t personally remember, you kinda have to do that? Otherwise… what, really, is the point?
I think sometimes magazines and books are biased or wrong. There’s no substitute for experience. In some cases you’ll never get that experience as the hardware is too rare. Like who can realistically make a video on a Commodore C65? few own them, they weren’t officially released. Now you can get hold of a Mega C65 but that’s not exactly the same.
A channel I found a while ago is MikeTech. Not sure how old he is but he seems to have a lot of enthusiasm for old PC stuff. Only on about 15k subs, so still starting out. CPU Galaxy is another, but he’s gone quiet of late.
I wish Tom all the success in the world, this looks like an honest, for-the-people kind of enterprise and he deserves to do well. On the basis of his prices and the buzz he had for the opening day, he should prosper. Good on him.
My kind of place. Beer, £6/hr to faff about on games, simple grub allowing background watching of better gamers, and more beer.
You forgot the best part… the grub is cheese toasties. What more does someone need than beer, gaming and toasties?
I see the “Nostalgia Nerd” and Slops are guests at Play Blackpool this year. Last year they had the likes of Tim Follin and Dan Malone. Hopefully the Wereferret can do a bit better than “My name is Peter Leigh. Do you want some more?” this time (https://www.funkyspectrum.com/?p=12457)
That’s kinda what’s wrong with the retro scene. Too many events invite youtubers who talk about retro stuff rather than the actual creators of the tech and games. The Revival, Zzap and Crash live events have all the actual games devs talking, some of them such as Malcolm Evans (trashman) were completely taken aback at how people remembered his games.
When I go to a retro event I want to hear from the pioneers, not people with pie between their ears.
I imagine going to a US event and it’s the 8-bit guy or Perifractic on the stage. I’d probably get thrown out asking them a question, “Have you written your full AI yet David?”.
i completely agree mate, imo there’s absolutely zero point listening to wankers talking about games they had nothing do with when you can, at any time, watch them talking about games they had nothing to do with on youtube. Chris is doing the right thing in bringing the actual people responsible for the games to his events. i can’t imagine much worse than enduring a panel where “the nostalgia nerd” is supposed to be the main draw. the man is an awful cunt.
I mean, I think the 8-bit guy is a bit of an idiot and arrogant but he can at least code so he’ll have something to talk about. But if you just made videos then all you can do is talk about yourself and making videos, that’s not what a retro game panel is all about. I’d sooner if they had guests from the modern era they got people who make hardware or modern games.
I don’t the organizers of a typical US event such as VCF would even return NN’s emails or DMs, especially when they regularly attract A-listers such as Bil Herd and Leonard Tramiel.
Would he even go to the US? I expect he wouldn’t fly out of principle, too much pollution etc..
With Barcadia hemorrhaging money hand over fist, and the Nerd’s Pareons leaving in droves, and his viewing figures falling off a cliff, every little penny helps I guess. Wonder if he declares his appearance money on his tax return….
I imagine many of these guests ask for cash in hand.
Wow, just checked out socialblade for the ferret. With income figures like that he’ll be under the personal allowance, no taxes paid.
So, your opening a new business venture.
Do you appeal to the widest demograph possible, with ultra competetive prices, or do you appeal to a tiny narrow spectrum of the population, and attempt to fleece them for all they are worth?
Tough choice….
Wonder which will survice more than a year……
Niche businesses can work. After all, there’s no competition right? But you can be so niche as to have very few people to pay your rent.
It’s on the same street as Peter’s ‘office’, the Circle Jerk HQ. Just a few minutes walk.
wonderful. if peter was a real man he’d fire a paving slab through the window like trevor does to the jobcentre in “made in britain”. however, peter is not a real man and for seconds he couldn’t lift a sheet of paper let alone a paving slab so the excellent albion games cafe is safe !
With who he currently shares a bed with, it might end up being more like ‘The Rats’!
Film version obviously, nobody is ever going to be writing the book.
Like others, I had a look over their website and noticed that not only are the prices incredibly reasonable, but also benefits from catering for everybody rather than one demographic.
I wish them all the best and would gladly visit should I ever visit Norwich, where I would only walk past Barcadia, look in and then avoid.
yes mate i would happily visit this place. i KNOW everyone mostly has consoles etc at home but a place like this would be a great spot to make friends and play with others in the old school style and presumably they can do lan linkups of consoles and/or they’re all connected online so people can play COD in teams and suchlike. i would happily pay £6 an hour for that and would probably visit several times a week if i lived there. as for barcadia ? no, no thanks. it’s not just the principle of it and who’s behind it, either. things are way too expensive and the games are just an afterthought really. i can play any of them at home on my barcade and get the exact same experience. it’s not like you can have a lan tournament on ghosts n goblins (if they even still have that as last i heard they were getting rid of it. might have been ghouls and ghosts, not sure, but still it was being removed for difficulty reasons)
The stench of vegan farts coming from Barcadia should be enough to put you off going in.
Norwich now has 3 retro arcade venues? That’s an awful lot of shitty zombies for Alan Partridge to fight.
and a lot of DDR too mate ! :p
What what? where was the kickstarter for this place? Oh they opened it themselves with their own money? wow!
why learn when you can just take peoples money and do what you want anyway ! (which is exactly what they did)
If only someone had pointed out all of the possible pitfalls before they started on the Barcadia endeavour.
We are just as culpable as Mr Cherry Blair’s smile because we just sat on our hands when it was all going on. We should be ashamed of ourselves for not highlighting the potential issues whilst they had a chance to can the project and avoid huge personal and financial embarrassment. We should speak up more in future.
There was like a gazillion questions from backers and they censored them all, almost like they didn’t want to learn.
So this is the THIRD retro gaming themed arcade/cafe joint? Fuck me, how many do they need? Either way, it’s over for Barcadia.
i’m not sure you could class barcadia as even being in the competition. the locals don’t like it, no-one is going to travel there to see that rat faced fucker and the machines are fucked and there’s a bad selection. staff half arse everything etc etc it’s just not a good picture. all this from a self styled business set up guru. or, if you take the word of people on the internet, a twat. retro replay is a real arcade. albion games is a real gaming cafe. barcadia is one mans vanity project funded by gullible idiots. i wonder what he’ll be begging for next, the insufferable little shit !
You just know what happened. He probably had an irate customer complaining about the machines or the food, Pete made to look very small and he didn’t like it. “I’m the Nostalgia Nerd, don’t you know who I am” etc..
What will he be begging for next? Why the book telling the full behind then scenes story of Barcadia of course! Maybe he could get that well-reknowned author Octavius to ghostwrite it!
It’ll be a book about relationships and how to run a successful kickstarter campaign.
One day maybe someone will cover this whole saga, or not. Slops seems to be staying clear of it.
slops will not want to upset his bumchum. if you add all my videos together, much like the ones on the vega+ saga, all the main points are hit. i may well do a summation as and when it inevitably closes.
When whatever lease he signed is up it will be closed and all references to it will be removed from the internet so he can pretend it never happened
i would imagine so mate but it’s up to us to keep the #neverforget movement going. what peter has done here is cuntery in its purest form. this vapid little shit has never done a hard days graft in his life and has never produced anything of any consequence. taking 25k to basically play landlord for five minutes is a piss take on a grand scale. everyone involved in this needs blackballed, no exceptions. absolutely thankless, narcissistic scum.
Unfortunately for him there will be accounts submitted to HMRC and available on the companies check sites for us all to see. We’ll soon see if a £25,000 black hole in the finances of the board game place magically disappeared.
Thanks for the vid. The menu prices for this new place are very telling – it’s clearly aimed at regular people, rather than hipsters and young people who can’t think of anywhere else to go on a date. There’s nothing wrong with the humble toastie. (They used to sell those at the National Videogame Museum when it was in Nottingham and they went down a storm.)
Also, i had a look on Google maps and you’re probably a million times less likely to get your head kicked in on your way to and from this new place compared to the horrible, seedy part of town in which Barcadia is located.
agreed on all points mate. i love a toastie, too ! cheap and cheerful, and very hard to make a mess of. you know what you’re getting with a toastie. Britain’s backbone is composed of toasties !
and yes, the menu prices simply serve to showcase just how much of a piss-take those of barcadia are. i mean, i MIGHT spend that much on something (if i had the money) if the surroundings were sumptuous, the staff extremely well trained and the food itself divine, but barcadia food looks shite, the place is staffed by dullards at best and the environment puts one in mind of the holding area in a chinese prison. it just looks like an absolutely fucking shit place to be. everything about barcadia from the first begging video onwards has been threadbare and blatantly bullshit. everyone involved should be fucking ashamed of themselves and i hope to fuck that ferret face and his crew of conspiring cunts are forever marked by this debacle. what’s ALSO telling is that tom has put 20k of his OWN MONEY into Albion Games. Not a single jot of “demanding money from the community” involved. if peter wasn’t such a pea brained, self important, narcissistic little fuck then he’d be ashamed of his own antics and the way this has all turned out. barcadia has been an unmitigated disaster of gargantuan proportions.
Yep. Not having a vegan option on the menu keeps a load of annoying permanently offended tssers out of your establishment and stops them ruining the atmosphere.
I’m a little surprised at how sparse Albion Gaming’s menu is, and I’m also a little curious as to how they’ll turn a profit given how inexpensive their items are. It comes across as more like a social hub for gamers that just happens to serve food and drink than a full-on arcade or themed pub.
Good on them for offering something genuinely different to the Norwich gaming community and I wish them success.
it’s £6 per hour per screen. there are 12 screens in there, so if they’re busy on average it should get them around £60 per hour. that seems not bad to me. that’s if they’re busy of course, but on top of that there’s the food and drink. the price being so reasonable will hopefully encourage lots of younger folks to actively hang out there, unlike barcadia which is prohibitively expensive for zero reason. i would imagine the dip switches on the barcadia stuff are set to moderate or high difficulty (no doubt a brilliant brain wave of that ferret faced wanker) so six quid would get you pretty much nowhere there. also in albion games they bill at the END of the session, so you don’t have to get up every hour to pay them more, you’re just charged for your time when you’ve finished playing. tom has also said that the menu IS sparse and they’re going to be expanding it a fair bit. i’m not sure how well kitted out the kitchen is, or if there even is one, so we do have to bear that in mind. however i’m sure they could expand the menu of cold food substantially with relative ease and that seems to be what they’re intending to do.
Charging an hourly rate per screen seems like a pretty good business model, and probably explains how they can keep their customers fed and watered for such a reasonable price.
As for the limited menu… that’s probably a good thing in some ways, as it’d keep kitchen costs to a bare minimum.
The more I hear about Tom and Albion Gaming, the more I like the cut of his jib.
yes mate, the stuff available as food could be put together by whoever is manning the place at the time. doesn’t need a “kitchen” as such, and, as you say, will keep costs down for both staff and produce. it’s a sensible business model. cold sandwiches and stuff like that are best for such places. barcadia is daft offering the crap that it does, it’s just going to get the machines messy. their food looks terrible, messy and is very overpriced. not thought through. the whole thing is like a complete fucking retard has brainstormed “how to get as much money as possible from a totally disparate set of interests and jam them all under one roof”. there’s no flow to the business at all, it’s just a messy hotch potch which is what i’d expect from an asshole who seems to have grifted his way through life on others money ! just no idea !
It’s sustenance, helps people keep hunger at bay to they stay in the shop.
Barcadia couldn’t quite work out what was the focus, the cabs, the food or the bar. The cabs seem to be unreliable, the food is overpriced for being junk food and the bar? couldn’t tell you but I’d imagine it’s not somewhere you go to get bladdered.
that’s what i’ve said about barcadia numerous times. it’s a bunch of disparate things all connected together simply by being under the same roof. there’s no flow to the business. it’s a fucking mess. this is from some rat faced twat who’s allegedly (if you believe the hype he would spin about himself several years ago) a business guru. what a hateful little dick. if he wasn’t such an arrogant twat he’d have listened to EVERYONE as we were all telling him this is about as good an idea as drinking bleach. but who cares if you’re pissing about with other peoples money eh ? he’s too much of a coward and wallflower to run a bar in that side of town. completely out of his depth.
I was only thinking the other day, how much longer has that place got?
A niche pub with a bit of plastic vine tacked up. Can’t last for too long.
It will last until the first round of large annual bills or it will have a half arsed ‘relaunch’ and limp on for 6 months more.
they can’t relaunch it, they’ve already fucked it and to relaunch would be to admit they’ve spunked 25k on NOTHING. most businesses would kill for that kind of cash injection and this ferret faced wanker has just chucked it down the drain on a vanity project (or to get his ex-mrs out of debt, if rumours are to be believed)
Oh I’m not saying a relaunch where they address all the issues. I’m suggesting the kind half arsed thing failing radio stations do just before they go bust. Or Commodore with the CD32. We’re sinking but we’ve quickly slung together this old shit which will be sure to save us!
A bit harsh on the CD32. It was selling well and were it not for Commodore operating on cash terms then loads of stock stuck in warehouses in the Philippines, Hong Kong etc. could have been sold. The US division had tanked, Commodore UK was solvent.
Or like when MG Rover imported that horrible little shitbox from India and slapped a CityRover badge on it.
Yet there’s loads of EV MGs around now and people seem to like them. Of course an EV isn’t for people who really cared about having a fancy car anyway.
not long now mate, it’s a goner. his “i’m sorry” video sealed the deal, really. he’s clearly moving his eggs out of the barcadia basket and back into his usual grifting on youtube. however, i think a lot of people are very sick of him and his cohorts now. they were all on borrowed time from the off. there’s only so many wikipedia articles they can all fight over.
You never know, he might do another kickstarter to “relocate it”. Have they bought any cabs yet or are they still renting them?
They were supplied by someone who also dumped a load into the crowdfunding campaign as a way to bolster the grift, effectively shilling for them. They were trying to put spare, less-loved cabs to work for them that weren’t being used in other ventures, hence why they are poorly maintained. Cabs were offered based on last relations and a belief his following might possibly carry the business for a while, rather than going all in on another venture with their own machines they chucked a few quid their way to help create artificial interest in the crowdfunding, but kept their risk down by giving them weak machines and not maintaining them at the level of commitment they otherwise would do. If it did well they got a cheap entry and money off the back of the cabs, but if it flips they’ve lost very little. Shilling is just another part of the grift.
I hadn’t seen the current Barcadia opening hours.
I hope Sam is making Peter work there every hour it’s open. It’s not like he’s got anything else worthwhile to do.
He can use the numerous days they’re closed to work on his little YouTube hobby.
from what people are saying, sam and peter are no longer a thing. can’t confirm this 100% myself. peter has worthwhile stuff to do (in his mind anyway). he’ll be back to creating amazing, clickbait shite for his youtube channel so that he can continue to fleece his patreons and sponsors before they all get tired of him doing fuck all and piss off elsewhere. youtube is the best grift that this talentless little wanker has had thus far in his life, so he’s going to mine it until he falls through into a bottomless void. at least he’ll have his own self importance for company.
Sam, despite her use of kickstarter herself did seem to be the brains behind the business and probably isn’t afraid of some graft. She clearly thought the ferret would actually do some hard work and not doss about.
I almost feel sorry for Sam. She’s obviously not afraid of putting in the work required to run a business, but getting mixed up with NN led to some bad choices. By the time the whole Barcadia enterprise falls over, she’ll be back to square one financially with only a bruised reputation to show for it.
If she goes back to the board game cafe business full-time, maybe she should watch what Tom does with Albion Games and take some inspiration.
You can sort of see how it all happened. NN turned up one day, saw a vegan business, a lady who is attractive enough and he thought he’d get in there. “I’m an influencer with a big youtube channel” etc.. Like most people they see 500,000 subscribers and think “If I could get £2 from each of those it’s a million quid”.