“Hey!” shouted a cheerful voice from a truck stopped in the middle of Ottumwa, Iowa’s bustling East Main Street…“Where can I finda video game arcade around here?”
Two men, precariously perched on two tall ladders in front of a modest storefront, swung around and excitedly shouted “We’re right here.” Their excitement was almost uncontrollable because they knew the truck had arrived with a shipment of video games. Before the day would be over, John Bloch and Walter Day would be the proud proprietors of Southeast Iowa’s newest video game arcade, and the wooden sign they were installing above the main entrance to the establishment at 226 East Main Street proudly pro- claimed this fact with the words “Twin Galaxies.”
It was November 10, 1981, and Bloch, the creative genius of the two, had just figured out that very morning how to use a jig saw and cut a long stretch of plywood into the words “Twin Galaxies.” Shimmying down the two ladders, Day and Bloch looked up at their new sign with divine satisfaction. They both absolutely loved playing video games and now they owned their own arcade.
Running to the back door of the building, they arrived just in time to meet the truck that was backing up to the loading dock.
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Walter Day - As the founder of Twin Galaxies, the oldest video game scorekeeping and adjudication service in history, Walter Day is known as the creator of e-sports and has often been called The Patron Saint of Video Games. His remarkable efforts to find, verify and catalog video game world records has led to a decades-long partnership with The Guinness Book of World Records.
