When I say the word entrepreneur, or any variation thereof, take a drink.

This Friday, dozens of developers and entrepreneurs will be making their way to the InNEVation Center for a three day startup jam with one goal in mind: to leave on Sunday with a viable business.

Founded by Andrew Hyde in the summer of 2007, Startup Weekend has since expanded from a single Boulder, Colorado event to a worldwide entrepreneurial powerhouse, with hundreds of cities hosting and over a thousand projects started as a result.

The inaugural Las Vegas event was held at the El Cortez in 2011, and three others have since followed. This weekend will be the city’s fifth (we’re doing math, ya’ll), and even at this early stage, Startup Weekend Las Vegas has already had several successes under its belt.

“There are a few companies that have come out of Startup Weekend that have survived to become local startups, including ClippPR, the winner of the first Startup Weekend, and LaunchKey, winner of Startup Weekend 3,” said Adam Kramer, SWLV organizer and Director of Entrepreneurship and Vegas Young Professionals at the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Both of these companies are on the cutting edge of their respective industry and are making quite a splash.”

Launchkey is particularly notable, growing from a Startup Weekend concept to being the recipient of $750,000 in funding within months. Other Startup Weekend Las Vegas entrants that went on to become actualized companies include Phone2Action, Rumgr, Counterless, and Coupla.

With that said, don’t think that simply by placing at Startup Weekend you’ll find yourself sewing suits out of hundred dollar bills – in just two short years, the majority of SWLV winners have already shuttered, Twitter accounts and domain names dormant and discarded.

Entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurialism.

So with that said, how does Startup Weekend work?

Friday, Day 1

It starts with a pitch. After introductions and a short speaker session, badge holders with a concept are given a minute and a microphone. No powerpoints, no props, just sixty seconds and an idea.

Next comes the voting. Once everyone’s had their say, all attendees vote for their favorite pitches, and from those results, a handful (based on total attendance) are then selected as the primary concepts to be worked on over the weekend. Teams are formed organically as folks gravitate towards projects that interest them, and work begins.

Saturday, Day 2

Work continues, with the occasional break to eat or listen to a short talk. Coaches (including successful entrepreneurs and instructors from the local scene) wander about throughout the day, giving advice and helping teams sort through and overcome problems. Everyone works some more. The conference officially closes for the night at 10:00 PM, but most will end up hammering away at their keyboards well beyond that.

Sunday, Day 3

Work continues. This is the day where tired attendees panic upon realizing that they’ve only got a few hours remaining before their projects will be on display.

Halfway through the day, focus shifts as teams scramble to tie up loose ends, finalize their prototypes, and prepare demos. The judges arrive and presentations begin, with each team given five minutes to show off their product, followed by a brief question and answer session with the jury.

The jury then selects the winners, awards are given out – past prizes have included cash, a booth at CES, business services, and office space – and then everyone goes on to celebrate and/or catch up on sleep.

There’s still time to sign up!

Feeling that entrepreneurial itch? While this is a bit of a short notice if you’re just hearing about it now (look, this here is a biweekly column, see?), registration for Startup Weekend Las Vegas will remain open until the start of the event, so you’ll still got a day to clear your calendar and register. The entrance fee for developers, designers, and non-technical folk looking to take part is $99. If you’re the voyeuristic sort, Observation passes are available for a mere $15.

Startup Weekend begins at 5:30 PM Friday (May 3) and runs until 7:00 PM Sunday (May 5).

Startup Weekend Las Vegas
lasvegas.startupweekend.org

InNEVation Center
6795 Edmond St

If you grew up in Las Vegas, chances are you may recognize such names as Mary K’s, Ted, Ned, & Freds, Star-Cade, Pinball Palace and Jeanie Moore’s Arcade. During the heyday of the scene in the early 1980s, dozens of arcades were located all across the valley, and wherever there wasn’t an arcade nearby, there was a Poe’s Pizza or some other seedy establishment with a handful of cabinets sitting in the back just waiting to be played.

Casinos, of course, also had their own arcades, but aside from the rare exception, most of those were afterthoughts, meant to keep the kids busy while mom and dad whiled away the day on the slot machines.

These days, finding a local arcade is much harder, but luckily, Las Vegas has had a bit of a resurgence over the last few years. Here are some of the standouts.

GEMINI ARCADE PALACE

First, a suggestion. Visit Gemini this weekend.

The family-owned arcade has been a rhythm gamers’ mainstay for three years, featuring rarities such as the taiko drum game Taiko no Tatsujin, Sega’s quirky light-based Flashbeats and multiple iterations of DJ simulator Beatmania IIDX and Dance Dance Revolution.

But hurry — the arcade will shut down on Monday, April 22.

All is not lost for Bemani fans, however. While Gemini has chosen not to renew its lease at Sandhill Square, word from proprietor Juli is that they will reopen in a new location sometime in the future.

And a heads up to Gemini: The former home of the venerable Jeanie Moore’s Arcade and Mary K’s, smack in the middle of Commercial Center, is vacant. There’s a long-standing tradition of arcade history in that suite, ya know.

4180 S. Sandhill Road

PINBALL HALL OF FAME

Some arcades you wander into after dropping off the dry cleaning. Others are the kind vacations are planned around. Tim Arnold’s Pinball Hall of Fame is one of the latter.

After a successful stint running Pinball Pete’s in East Lansing, Michigan, Arnold packed up his extensive Gottlieb pinball collection and made his way to the warmer climate of Las Vegas. He would occasionally hold charity events called Fun Nights, where he’d open the doors of his warehouse and allow in-the-know members of the public to experience and play his historic collection of machines.

In 2006, Tim and the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club secured a spot in a Tropicana strip mall, moved in the machines, and opened the doors daily. Three years and the purchase of a building later, the Pinball Hall of Fame settled into its current location.

By far the largest arcade in Las Vegas, PHoF has a playable showcase of more than 200 machines, featuring everything from electromechanical parlor games to modern pinball and arcade cabinets.

1610 E. Tropicana Blvd.

INSERT COIN(S)

Opening two years ago this week, Chris Laporte’s Insert Coin(s) is the most visually impressive arcade in the city, if not the country. Billing itself as a videolounge gamebar and drawing inspiration from both arcade nostalgia and the Las Vegas club scene, Insert Coin(s)’ event lineups feature everything from video-game tournaments to performances by a rotating stable of resident and guest DJs.

Aside from an impressive list of arcade cabinets (with games priced at 50 cents a pop), Insert Coin(s) also offers access to the newest console titles along the expansive lit bartop. If you’re club-minded, head to the row of high backed couches and consoles against the wall, where bottle service is offered alongside the arcade quality fightsticks and Super Nintendos.

512 Fremont St.

HI SCORES

Take the concept of Insert Coin(s), add a dash of PT’s, throw in one of the best craft beer selections in town and you’ve got Hi Scores. Nestled against the less gamey and more cocktail-focused Player’s Club (both owned by Incredible Technologies founder Richard Ditton), Hi Scores features a casual atmosphere and a solid assortment of entirely free-to-play arcade and pinball machines, including Namco’s elusive Pac-Man Battle Royale, a simultaneous four-player take on the arcade classic.

Last I heard, Hi Scores was doing so well that Ditton and his team plan to open several new locations across the Las Vegas valley.

A heads up to Ditton: Have I mentioned that there’s a Vegas-historic arcade space available in Commercial Center?

65 S. Stephanie St.

Downtown Project has announced that they are in the process of purchasing one hundred Tesla Model S electric vehicles to be used as part of Project 100, a private transportation and ride-share system that aims to reduce area residents’ need for vehicle ownership within our very car dependent city.

What they don’t say is that the range will be restricted to Fremont Street, with Las Vegas Blvd on the west on 7th Street on the east. Basically, picture a merry-go-round of Teslas, powered by serendipity and slowly circling Downtown HQ, stopping occasionally to let passengers off once they’ve reached their destination across the street.

I kid, I kid.

Interestingly, the story was actually broken by Business Insider a couple weeks ago during South by Southwest, but the potentially thunder-stealing news was initially denied (with Tony Hseih replying that he hadn’t actually purchased 100 Teslas, as the deal had yet to be inked), allowing Downtown Project to finally push the news through their own channels this week.

This is big news. First, the purchase will be largest ever order of Teslas by the single entity, so congratulations to Zack Ware of Downtown Project and Elon Musk and crew at Tesla Motors for making the sale. Second, if you live downtown and have the estimated $400/month to plonk down, there’s a chance you may find yourself driving (or riding in) one before the year is out.

So this is how it’ll work. Once you’re a member of the service, powered by VegasTechFund beneficiary Local Motion (the same team that runs transportation across Google’s sprawling Mountain View campus), you’ll be able to launch the app on your phone and be given multiple options, depending on both your location and transportation needs. Alongside the Teslas (both with and without a provided driver), other vehicles will be offered, including shuttle buses for pick up services and even bicycles for door to door travel.

The aim of Project 100 is to serve as a complete replacement for car ownership, providing (nearly) immediate access to (fancy) transportation without the planning and mixed availability often seen with typical car sharing programs. To meet this goal, Project 100 will launch with “100+ on-demand drivers, 100+ shared cars, 100+ shared bikes, and 100+ shared shuttle bus stops,” all within the same monthly membership program. That’s a slew of 100s, and those numbers will only grow if the project is successful.

The initial plan calls for what they call a “hub and spoke” system, with most of the vehicles based around a high traffic hub (like say, Fremont Street), aided by spoke locations throughout downtown and other areas as the service grows.

As a born and raised Las Vegan, I’ll admit, the thought of not owning a car is the sort of fear that strikes deep into one’s soul. But hell, I’m excited, and if Project 100 can successfully pull this off, along with perhaps introducing more reasonably priced tiers for the less demanding (and less cash flushed) residents of downtown, this could bring our big spread out town just a little bit closer together.

Question for the class:

1. Where will all these vehicles live?
   

2. How will the downtown parking landscape change as a result? Once Project 100 launches, will it be easier or more difficult for existing car owners to find a parking space downtown?

   

3. How will the infrastructure be handled? Will private electric car owners be able to refuel at the same stations as those used by Project 100?

   

4. When can I drive a Tesla?
   


South by Southwest is a film, interactive, and music festival held annually in Austin, Texas. Last week, in an effort led by Gabe Shepherd (who will also be helping build the inaugural SXSW V2V conference taking place locally this summer, but more on that later), over 120 local members of the tech community made the trip out to Texas with a singular goal: to promote Las Vegas as the place to create and grow your next startup.

I spoke with Dylan Bathurst, founder of Rumgr and Used Gear Sale, and organizer of local community events Vegas Jelly and Startup Weekend about both his experience at the conference and the evolution of the Las Vegas tech scene.

What was the reaction of the SXSW crowd to the local push? What do you expect to come of it?

I think the reaction was pretty incredible. Vegastech was trending globally on twitter, and the cocktail hour and other parties were completely overbooked the whole time. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a #vegastech t-shirt of poster. It was awesome!

Since this was the first time doing something like this, I didn’t really set any expectations. Like any first time venture you just have to go big and put yourself out there, see what went well, what didn’t, and what you can do next time. I think Gabe and the Vegastech SXSW crew gave us as startups an incredible stage to experiment with and I think each of us came away with some great lessons learned.

What stood out in particular?

…the tradeshow booth. Each startup had a section of the booth to make their own and pitch their company from. It was a way for the founders of the company to be able to talk to people one-on-one for three days straight. We received a lot of feedback from passers by in that time, and some, like Rolltech, even got featured in a VentureBeat SXSW video contest.

As you mentioned, #Vegastech was the number one trending topic for a while there during SXSW. How did you all pull that off?

Focus. Gabe and his crew weren’t down there just kicking back and letting everything they worked for the whole year before SXSW go down. They were all over downtown talking to people, tweeting, retweeting, setting up, tearing down, and just hustling in general. It was definitely their effort that made everything go as well as it did.

On DTLV as tech accelerator

Is brain drain a concern, where we’ll end up losing talented developers faster than we can rope them in?

Not trying to self promote but I wrote an article about this exact issue.

The gist is that having successful and growing companies come out of Las Vegas is a win. Maybe not at face value, but it is. It gives us credibility as a legit accelerator city with a great culture that fosters crazy ideas like cellphone powered robots.

In Romotive’s case, I think only one or two of their 20+ people are actually from Vegas. Most were attracted here from around the US. That’s awesome! As far as capturing local investment, if Romotive and others get investment and then leave to go to SF or somewhere else where they think they can be more successful, that’s great. When they are successful, and their investors get 10x their initial investment, a lot comes right back here. 

So from your view, what does the downtown Las Vegas tech scene look like in 2013?

I think our tech scene is getting smarter.

By that I mean that 2011 and 2012 was where a bunch of startups rose and fell learning that you can spend all your time building a cool product and it doesn’t matter if nobody wants or uses it. We’ve all been learning what it takes to start a startup and have come together in different ways to help each other learn faster. “A rising tide raises all ships.” I think as the Vegas Tech Fund funds more and more awesome companies in 2013 for their ROC (Return on community) as well as ROI, and that knowledge is shared among the rest of the community, we all benefit and get smarter. 

Let’s talk about Dylan.

Used Gear Sale, your newest project, is now live. How did your experience building and launching Rumgr affect the path you took getting Used Gear Sale up and running? Did you do anything different this time around?

It took us three months to get Rumgr live, and another 9 months to learn some valuable lessons. UGS took us 1 week to bring live and 1 month to learn even more valuable lessons. We did everything differently. We’re still not done learning, and still not done changing. You just have to keep going.

Two efforts you helped found, Vegas Jelly and Startup Weekend, have been instrumental in facilitating and bringing together the local tech community. What’re your suggestions for folks that are eyeing Las Vegas, or those that simply want to get involved?

I really like the way Brad Feld puts it in his book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.

If people come asking how they can get involved, give them a task to do. If they do it, they’ll become part of the community and thrive. If they don’t do it, they didn’t really want to get involved in the first place. We saw that over and over again at the Jelly.

My suggestion for people that want to get involved is to get a lay of the land first. Find the other people that are doing things. See how you can help. Really execute on that, and then you’ll find your niche in the VegasTech community with other folks. It has to be a “give before you get” type of community. So embrace that and everything will be awesome.

This summer, downtown Las Vegas will join Denver, El Paso, Houston and dozens of other municipalities that have installed free wi-fi service in their city centers in an attempt to foster their burgeoning tech scenes.

Phase 1, active by early summer, will include an area bound by U.S. 95 to the north, Eighth Street to the east, Charleston Boulevard to the south, and I-15 to the west. Phase 2, following shortly after, will add an additional area bound by Charleston to the north, Las Vegas Boulevard to the east, Wyoming Avenue to the south and Main Street to west. A third phase is also in development, which will extend service further southeast along Fremont.

While the wi-fi umbrella will cover areas that are primarily home to commercial businesses, some residents of downtown will also be able to enjoy the free service. Due to the nature of wireless broadcasting, if you’re just outside the supported zones, you may still luck into being within connectivity range — even more so if you happen to have a longer-ranged wi-fi antenna available. If you’re particularly handy, pick up a cheap used DirecTV or Dish Network reflector from a garage sale and build one yourself.

As the wi-fi service will be administered and controlled by the involved partners, there will be no cost to the city. The antennas will be mounted on existing infrastructure (primarily light poles) and maintained by the companies providing the system.

Per-user bandwidth will be limited to 768/kbps downstream and 528/kbps upstream (about the equivalent of a bottom tier DSL or cable Internet account). In other words, don’t expect to stream HD films from your Netflix account, but for day-to-day browsing and even Skype use, the service should be fine.

The total bandwidth allotment has not been revealed, but Jace Radke, public information officer for the City of Las Vegas, says that coverage will continue to expand as high use areas are identified.

So, free wi-fi! Who are the players involved, and what’s the catch?

Internet service provider LV.net will deploy the hardware and broadband connection. The company has been online for ages (in Internet years), starting in the 1990s as a dial-up ISP, and it still provides both wireless and DSL services. You may have already seen, if not used, one of its local wi-fi networks: LV.net’s pay-to-use travelers wi-fi currently blankets parts of downtown and The Strip.

The front end and interface will be driven by R66T Digital Media (originally OnSite Media), a local content-management company.

In typical Las Vegas style, the downtown wi-fi installation is not a purely altruistic movement, as the network, supported by advertising, intends to be profitable.

These advertising-based systems generally work in one of two ways: Either the user must first sit through advertising before going online, or they are presented with ads continuously while browsing, most often in the form of a banner ad across the top of the browser. How our particular implementation will work has yet to be revealed.

Good thing: If the ad rates and access are reasonable, this may actually prove to be a boon to downtown area businesses, allowing for both greater exposure and discovery.

Bad thing: Being corporate rather than municipally driven, the wi-fi service will have to make money. If it isn’t profitable, don’t expect it to be around for long.

Still, free wi-fi! Ad-driven or not, it’ll be nice to have yet another item checked off on the #vegastech bucket list. Look for me in a few months — I’ll be the guy in the backyard a mile away from Phase 1, holding aloft a laptop and a modified Pringles can, trying heroically to catch a signal.

As of last week, SYN Shop is open for business.

Nestled within a row of shops on Fourth Street between Fremont and Ogden, the freshly painted space is bustling with activity as founders and friends build shelves, test hardware and set up equipment. Rows of soldering irons, copper wire tip cleaners and multimeters sit on a workbench under an oscilloscope, waiting to be arranged. A 4-foot-tall wirelessly controlled PDP-11 microcomputer, christened “NOMAD” and mounted to an electric wheelchair base, rumbles around the room.

With its origins in the monthly gatherings held in the garage of founding member Krux, SYN Shop is five years in the making. Several years of planning, negotiation and finally the acquisition of a viable location has led to this: Las Vegas’ first hackerspace.

Think of a hackerspace as something like a gym membership for your brain — a community workshop where, instead of treadmills, ellipticals and weights, you are given access to tools, electronics gear and manufacturing hardware. A place to create and a place to meet, collaborate and learn from other creators.

Hackerspaces are not new. However, aside from a few standouts early on in their history (with the majority of those started in the 1990s), they have only in the last decade begun to be seen as generally viable and self-sustaining, bolstered in part by the growing awareness and popularity of the maker movement.

A repurposed traffic light in the front window shines steadily, indicating the current hours of operation. Green for open, yellow for an hour or less remaining and red for closed. This is especially useful, as while there are posted hours (Monday and Thursday from 6-10 p.m., and Saturday 3-10 p.m.), founders will often open the doors as available, and anyone is welcome to come in and check the place out when the light is on. Access will expand once the space is fully up and running, but for now, the traffic light acts as gatekeeper.

Brian Munroe, ringleader of the group of volunteers that manages SYN Shop (everyone involved is a volunteer), walks me through the space, which features a planning area, a classroom and a maker’s dream list of hardware and machinery.

Thanks to member donations and the support of Work in Progress (which is itself funded by Downtown Project), SYN Shop has already acquired an impressive list of gear, including a Full Spectrum 90w laser cutter, an electronics lab, hand tools, an industrial sewing machine and other crafting tools, two 3-D printers (including a top-of-the-line MakerBot Replicator 2), a Shapeoko CNC mill and the crown jewel of the hackerspace, a Shopbot full-size CNC router.

Everything in the hackerspace is accessible after paying the $40 monthly membership fee, although members must supply their own materials and undergo a brief certification process with the more complex machines to ensure proper use and safety. For traveling makers looking for a place to tinker, day rates will also soon be available.

As the goal of the space is to give builders and tinkerers a place to share, create and learn, Brian emphasizes that SYN Shop is not a traditional or service-based business. At SYN Shop, parts or projects cannot be simply ordered for pickup later — this is an entirely do-it-yourself operation.

Thankfully, makers will not be entirely on their own when it comes to building their creations, as classes will be scheduled frequently, covering everything from basic soldering technique to advanced electronics and hardware design.

With so many of us spending our day-to-day lives working digitally, we often miss out on the pleasure of creating something we can grasp with our hands. To conceive and plan and construct, from the tactile pleasure of handling your own fully formed 3-D model, to placing a soldering tip to a board and seeing that which you’ve labored over suddenly come alive, that is an experience worth having.

Now that can be ours, simply for the price of membership and the willingness to learn.

SYN SHOP 117 N. Fourth St., synshop.org

“Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed – a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems – the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child’s natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic’ magazine.”

— Sterling North, Chicago Daily News, 1940

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about Rock n’ Roll!”

— Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros.

In the winter of 1574, early in the days of English theatre, the Common Council of London issued a statement censoring and restricting theatrical performances within the city limits of London, complaining of their great popularity among youth and, as they described it, “the inveigling and alluring of maids, especially of orphans and good citizens’ children under age … and many other corruptions of youth and other enormities.”

While fears of plague and the resultant risk of large gatherings also played a role in the ruling, chief among the reasons for the declaration was the danger that this form of entertainment posed for the young, lower classes, and the overly susceptible.

This was followed by an outright ban within the city limits of London and further censorship, lasting until the Restoration era of the 1660s.

From the 1690s until 1710, both Pope Innocent XII and his successor, Pope Clement XI, following previous bans on female singers, whistling, and shouting during performances, outlawed opera entirely, a sinful and seditious form of music at odds with the morals and spirituality of the Church. The Teatro Tordinona, a place where “extravagance, gluttony, and every other most guilty form of intemperance triumphed, so that the resources of families were squandered, youth were corrupted, and pilgrims were scandalized,” was torn down, only to be rebuilt several decades later with opera’s later resurgence.

Pope Clement XI did however go lax on one previous Papal view: cats, traditionally seen as a symbol of Paganism and often exterminated as a result, were finally allowed back into the homes of God-fearing Christians.

With the popularity of jazz in the 1920s, so grew opposition to the so-called devil’s music (not the first to be labelled as such, and not the last). Within a decade, over 60 communities in the US (and Germany in its entirety) enabled prohibitions against the public performance of jazz, with the music seen as “the accompaniment of the voodoo dance, stimulating half-crazed barbarians to the vilest of deeds.”

Sixty years later, the 100th Congress of the United States passed Resolution 57, designating jazz as “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”

It never stops.

And then there’s film, immediately after its rise in popularity and again and again throughout its history, most notably with the moral censorship guidelines of the 1930 Hayes Code, which stated among its goals that “the important objective must be to avoid the hardening of the audience, especially of those who are young and impressionable, to the thought and fact of crime.”

Television, every couple decades since its invention. As FCC Chairman Newton Minow put it in 1961, a procession of “blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”

Comic books, particularly during the 1940s and 50s. Portrayals of superheroes, crime, and horror led to the 1954 publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wetham’s Seduction of the Innocent, an alarming screed warning of the dangers of lowbrow sequential art. This was followed by the formation of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the same year, which held hearings on the potentially deleterious impact of comic books on young readers.

Role playing games in the 1980s. Dungeons and Dragons was believed by some to promote devil worship and suicidal behavior, with opponents often tying unfortunate events involving young players to the demonic influences of the game.

Don’t get me started on rock and roll.

So we arrive at the present, and with it a new target. Video games, a normative form of entertainment with over 90% of youth and the majority of adults playing, are the new opera, the new jazz, once again stimulating half-crazed teenagers to the vilest of deeds.

They’ve been connected to Sandy Hook (Adam Lanza was said to have played in his “underground bunker,” normally referred to as a basement), Aurora (James Holmes, alongside 10 million other players, was a fan of World of Warcraft, a fantasy adventure game), and the Virginia Tech massacre (shooter Seung-Hui Cho hadn’t played a video game since Sonic the Hedgehog in the early 90s).

During a press conference held the week after the Sandy Hook shooting, Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the NRA, called the game industry “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.”

On January 12th, following outcry against the industry, the Vice President of the United States met with the heads of several prominent video game publishers as part of a task force looking at the role of video games in mass shootings.

Last week, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, when asked about supporting universal background checks for gun purchases, replied that video games were “a bigger problem than guns.”

Never mind that murder rates have fallen in the United States over the past twenty years, while video game sales have skyrocketed.

Never mind that the largest video game markets in the world, per capita, also happen to have some of the lowest reports of gun violence.

Never mind that this same sort of hysteria has happened many times before.

During the rise to prominence of any new form of media or pop culture, there follows a cadre of misguided do-gooders, armed with misinformation and loose correlations, ready to lash out at any perceived potentiality for harm. They take to the streets with the notion of protecting the youth, publishing anecdotal evidence as fact, pointing to unrelated ties and exclaiming “This! This is that which we should repress, for surely it brings no good!”

When tragedy happens, the new medium is hoisted onto the platform, threatened and mocked, examined and dissected because somewhere, somehow, there has to be a link between it and our woes. Because it’s the easy way, because it’s the new, it must be at fault, lest we pause and find fault in ourselves.

Over and over again, until the new is no longer new and another arises to take its place.

Bigelow Aerospace sits on 50 acres of land in North Las Vegas, just a few miles south of the Craig Ranch Golf Course. I park in the small lot just inside the gate of the complex, where I am directed into the nearby security building.

Several other journalists are already present, along with a guard. After examining and recording IDs, we’re given badges and presented with the rules. No weapons allowed. No recording or photography outside the designated press areas. Keep your badge visible at all times, and always stay with an escort.

The guard hands us each a map. Guest parking and press room are highlighted green, unauthorized areas, AKA the rest of the complex, are bright red.

We’re shuffled back outside. An SUV idles nearby as another guard explains that we’ll be following him to the interior parking lot. We get back into our cars and caravan a quarter mile down a road called Warp Drive, into the sprawling complex.

In the summer of 1961, just months after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, a team of engineers at NASA and Goodyear Aircraft Corporation completed their two year project: to develop and prototype a new design of space station, a large inflatable donut that could be tucked within a rocket and launched into space, where it would then expand to a full diameter of 24 feet. Once pressurized, the rotating torus would serve as a way station for astronauts and transport vehicles as they journeyed to the moon and beyond.

Unfortunately, the proposed plan, alongside other 2001-style spinning habitats, nuclear-powered stations, and massive orbiting spheres, never made it farther than the prototype stage before it was shuttered. Serious consideration of an inflatable space station design was shelved, and wouldn’t be revived for another thirty years.

With the development of the International Space Station in the 1990s, inflatable designs were back on the table. NASA proposed TransHab, an inflatable cylinder with a 27 foot diameter, intended to serve as a habitation module for crew based on the ISS. Unfortunately, cost overruns and controversy mired the project, and in 1999 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act banned NASA from further developing TransHab. But there was hope embedded in House Resolution 1654 — an explicit exception stated that, while NASA themselves could not develop the inflatable station, they could lease such a model from commercial sources, provided the costs and safety risks were in line with with previously established guidelines.

Enter Robert Bigelow.

After hearing of the failed project in 1999, Las Vegas native Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites hotel chain and an avid space buff, reached out to NASA, eventually landing exclusive development rights to the technology. He brought on engineers from the NASA project to consult with his team, including TransHab lead developer William Schneider, and, bolstered by an eventual $250 million from Bigelow’s own coffers (with an additional $250 million pledged), development of an inflatable space module was once again underway.

Bigelow Aerospace has signed a $17.8 million contract with NASA, insignificant money when compared to the cost of the overall project, but a huge win for the private company. It has taken over a decade of development time and the launching of two test modules (the Genesis I and II, both currently in orbit) for Bigelow Aerospace to gain the space agency’s trust.

The milestone-based contract is for the roughly spherical 13 foot Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which in 2015 will be launched onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, connected to Node 3 of the International Space Station, and expanded. There it will live for two years, undergoing environmental studies and experiments, serving as an uninhabited test bed for future module deployments and laying the groundwork for Bigelow Aerospace’s next major project: their own commercial space station.

Earlier this year, Bigelow Aerospace and Hawthorne, California based SpaceX began a joint effort to secure customers around the globe for Bigelow’s proposed 2016 Alpha Station, a space station comprised of two BA 330 inflatable modules, the big brothers of the BEAM module, each capable of supporting a crew of six. Private and national crews to the station will be ferried at costs between $25-36 million per seat, with a minimum stay of 60 days in orbit and access to the station’s shared research facilities.

Beyond the Alpha Station, Bigelow Aerospace is in talks with NASA to make use of the BA 330 in ongoing ventures, and foresees a future where their inflatable habitats are used in Lunar and even Martian exploration missions.

Some of us linger for a bit once the media advisory is complete, chatting with the engineers and NASA representatives, wandering around the spacious press room that serves as Bigelow’s museum to the future, the floor filled with scale and full size mockups of inflatable modules, capsules, space stations, and terrestrial bases. It’s amazing that this place is in Las Vegas. Most people have no idea that Bigelow Aerospace exists, let alone that its facility is only minutes from downtown. Why is that? I mean, hell, they’re building space stations in there.

As Mike Gold, the Bigelow Director of Operations, admits, the company has been in heads down mode for several years, and public awareness has not been a priority.

The Bigelow Aerospace website, framed within a model of a BA 330, is woefully outdated, and the company has played no visible role in the recent growth and portrayal of Las Vegas as an up and coming tech hub.

Unlike NASA and SpaceX, who’ve both been incredibly successful in the online space with their outreach programs, Bigelow Aerospace does not maintain a Facebook page, nor do they have any sort of presence on Twitter.

Robert Bigelow himself is notoriously secretive, once claiming to have never sent an email, instead preferring more direct (and secure) methods of communication. Until recent years, he did not allow pictures of himself to be printed. Perhaps this sentiment is woven into the culture of his company as well.

Still, Bigelow Aerospace is doing incredible things, and deserves to be on your radar. In two years, when you see the news of the launch, when the module expands and inflates for the first time, revealing the red and blue Bigelow logo emblazoned across its side, remember one thing: that little piece of space station was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.

A major video-game publisher is coming to Las Vegas, and this time it isn’t simply to plant a booth at a convention, drink too much, sleep too little and fly home three days later with a massive hangover.

Thanks to nearly a million dollars in incentives from the Nevada Office of Economic Development and the City of Las Vegas, Take-Two Interactive will be relocating its Northridge, Calif., QA Testing studio to downtown Las Vegas, where it will take over two floors of the newly renovated 1960s structure at 302 E Carson, just one block south of the Fremont Street Experience.

Until now, Las Vegas has been pretty much off the radar of the major game publishers. We have studios that have done work with and for the big guys, but they are all independent, and aside from Petroglyph’s team of roughly a hundred, relatively small in size. A publisher the size of Take-Two deciding to uproot and build a studio here in Las Vegas is significant news.

A minor caveat: it’ll be a quality-assurance studio. This means that the bulk of the facility’s work will revolve around testing games created by the other studios under the Take-Two umbrella, rather than developing its own.

QA is traditionally seen as the more tedious side of game development. It’s a relatively easy way to shove one’s foot in the game industry door, and while there are opportunities for growth within QA itself, many do it with the intention of moving on to other disciplines as quickly as possible. The downside of the ease of entry is that it’s also generally one of the lowest paying and hardest working positions in the industry, with an average salary of $35,000-$40,000.

As a dedicated QA facility, Take-Two’s Las Vegas studio may not have the level of growth opportunities typically found within a full-service studio, as separation from the rest of the development teams may hamper the co-mingling, process familiarity and networking that is required to move up within the industry. Still, it will allow for passionate local industry newcomers and veterans to connect with and learn from each other, and who knows what will happen once those connections are made.

Again, this development is significant.

To understand why, see the story of Westwood Studios, started by locals Brett Sperry and Louis Castle, creators of the venerable Command & Conquer franchise. Local team, very successful, eventually purchased by Electronic Arts and folded into their mothership in 2003.

That’s not the important part. The important part is that as a result of Westwood and its success, Las Vegas was now home to a large cadre of skilled game developers who, even after the buyout and eventual closure, still wanted to make games in Las Vegas. As a result, nearly every active game development studio based in Las Vegas can trace its roots back to that original Westwood team.

With a plan to hire more than 150 developers, Take-Two’s new facility will become the largest studio in town. Thanks to a welcoming business climate, the proximity to Switch (one of the largest data centers in the country) and the growth of Downtown as a tech magnet, other studios will follow.

The game industry as a whole, not unlike Vegas, is very transient, and whether due to personal growth or layoffs, developers tend to move around. As new studios open, as alternative workplaces become available, the risk for these developers will lessen, and Las Vegas will become an even more inviting place for relocation.

The more industry talent that finds its way to Las Vegas, the more industry talent that is grown locally, the more we’ll see local studios continue to spawn. Las Vegas is the capital of casino gaming — with luck, traditional video games won’t be far behind.

If you’re heading to the Classic Gaming Expo this weekend, here’s a schedule of speakers and panels I whipped up:

http://bit.ly/CGE2012

My conference plan is to meet old-school game devs, get my Halo 2600 cart signed by Ed Fries, and burn way too much money on retro hardware.

There gon’ be a 187 up in here! A mo fuckin’ 187! Who’s it gonna be?!

We made a game for Molyjam (official entry here). I’ll write up more later, but for now, go play it!

What originally started out as a half-joke has now become an international event, with over a dozen cities and hundreds of game developers onboard. I’ll be hosting the Las Vegas game jam, and am currently finalizing location and sponsors.

The concept, in a nutshell:
Choose a game idea tweeted by PeterMolydeux (here are some of his favorites), team up with a few friends or strangers on the evening of the 29th, and then spend the weekend of March 30 – April 1 making a game.

If you’d like to take part, RSVP via the Facebook event link below. Cajole friends into signing up and form your own team, or group up with strangers and make some new friends. Win win.

RSVP for MolyJam 2012 Las Vegas

Update! Details!

So here’s the plan:

Meet at the Shuffle Master Interactive studio on Friday evening at 7:00pm. From there we’ll assemble teams, game concepts, and introduce the whole thing.

Teams can work together however they want over the weekend. The studio will be open and food and drinks will be served (huge thanks to Shuffle Master for sponsoring!).

At 7pm on Sunday, development will cease and we’ll have ourselves a mini festival, with each team given an opportunity to show off their game. Prizes may be awarded, but don’t do this for prizes. Do this for The Art.

Game Jam Location:
Shuffle Master Interactive
4035 S El Capitan Way
Las Vegas, Nv 89147