I Made a Commercial for Newcade at Circuit Social in Norfolk

My two greatest loves have always been television and arcades.

For a while, I wasn’t sure how to – or even if I could – reconcile these diverging interests. My video-focused day job ate up more and more of my mental resources, whereas consequently the Wilcox Arcade blog lost some much-needed steam.

You’d think, with my knack for video production, doing something with the Wilcox Arcade YouTube channel would have been a no-brainer. And in fairness, I had posted audio versions of select articles, as well as some “off-the-cuff” commentary babble, in the past, but it all seemed to come at the cost of the website I cherished so dearly.

As such, Wilcox Arcade remained an exclusively written enterprise – until one fateful day when a revelation struck me like a bag of bricks: Why don’t I make commercials for arcade-related businesses?

Said revelation came shortly after I published a promo for my then-upcoming set of machines slated for Trends N Treasures in Murray, Kentucky. Because I already adored the art of promos, extending that to paid advertising didn’t seem like too wide of a logical leap.

And I’m not joking when I say I love promos. In my youth, watching the CW4Kids on Saturday mornings wasn’t just about Sonic X, B-Daman: Crossfire, or Dragon Ball Z Kai. The packaging surrounding that aforementioned programming was every bit as meaningful to me, too, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it at the time.

So with a plan in mind, I next needed to sell my first commercial, the question being to whom. It was then I decided to call upon a colleague I had sorely neglected for far too long: Midnight Studios owner Jeremy Alessi.

You see, Jeremy had initially reached out to me in 2022 to see if I’d be interested in helping him sell his “Newcade” remote play project to venue operators beyond the bounds of Virginia. I enthusiastically agreed – but soon learned I wasn’t cut out for the task. That, apart from occasional check-ins, was regretfully the extent of our conversation for a while.

When I moved onto commercials, though, I realized this was the most tangible way I could actually help my friend to the east, because at least I’d be relying on skills I had already honed to a serious degree. Luckily for me, he accepted my offer with open arms.

His one request? Do it like a ‘90s Sega commercial, which was absolute music to my ears. My approach to editing has always been to overstimulate, and that I did when it came to Newcade. Literally every second of the commercial involved several hours of After Effects work on my part to make it just about crazy as can be.

A particularly shining example of this would be the second shot, tasking players to “drop [their phones].” Before animating the sequence itself, I had to painstakingly replicate the look of the Fortnite V-Bucks shop for my not-so-subtle parody dubbed “Fartnite.” (It’s hard to tell in real-time, but those “F” coins are faux 3D models.)

Heck, I went so wild with it that I was kind of afraid Jeremy wouldn’t sign off on it before I showed it to him. The good news is he seems to espouse the same the values as me in terms of advertising, considering he gave it a resounding stamp of approval upon his first viewing.

Now close to a week removed from the process, I can wholeheartedly proclaim the Newcade commercial is my favorite piece of video I’ve ever produced. I had never before been able to pour in the sheer man-hours required to pull off something of this scope, though I’d argue the finished product is all the better for it.

The second commercial on my docket is for another remote play system – albeit one meant to service the redemption market instead. That would be Arcade Online by ArcadeXR, something I’ve already kicked off and hope to drop on YouTube within a month or two.

In the meantime, make sure to subscribe to the Wilcox Arcade YouTube channel to keep up with the latest developments on all fronts, because I plan to create other types of videos, as well. Case in point: While I was in Lexington, Kentucky, for Breyerfest, I gathered B-roll pertaining to several hot ticket titles housed at Main Event and GattiTown (one of which starts with “N-B-A”).

Thanks for reading this brief behind-the-scenes snippet today. If you’d like to purchase a commercial for your arcade-related business, email me via wilcoxarcade@gmail.com, or call me at 270-484-8161. I’m always hungry for more.