Every second Tuesday of the month you may hear the unmistakable high-pitched sound of Mario squeaking “let’s go”, or Pikachu’s “Pika, Pika” emanating from a bar in Downtown Boston. You may hear somebody shout, “I don’t rub salt in wounds. I use sulfur”. You may wonder what the hell is going on. The answer is…. Game Over
Described as a night for gamers by gamers, Game Over is one of the nerdiest events taking place on the East Coast of the US. Scott Trano is the man responsible for organizing the bi-monthly event which takes place in Good Bar, Boston and is aimed at gamers of all descriptions.
Scott is also the organizer of Boston’s annual Zombie March now in it’s ninth year. The affable Seth Rogen sound-alike is impossible not to like and his energy for the projects he organises is contagious.
Scott took a few minutes to sit down and tell us about his latest venture; Game Over
What is Game Over?
Game Over is… interesting! It’s kind of an amalgamation of a hodge-podge/melting pot of a lot of things, pretty much everything nerdy! Everything short of sitting down and watching old Dr. Who episodes! We have Magic: The Gathering, old Nintendo Games, Xboxes, Dungeon and Dragons games, tabletop games, card games and pretty much everything that a nerd could hope for I guess!
What made you start Game Over?
So I manage another nerdy event called Barcraft where people watch live streams of StarCraft 2 tournaments and the manager of the bar that we do that at – he’s a big Magic: The Gathering player. So he proposed that we run Magic tournaments at the same time [as Barcraft] and I thought how cool it would be if we could mesh that in somehow. But Barcraft takes up the whole bar, so that wasn’t really an option.
Then I found out that Tuesday nights were free at the bar because a long-running event had ceased operation and I thought why don’t we give this [Game Over] a shot. I wanted to create something that wasn’t just for Magic: The Gathering players but incorporated lots of other games too. So we bought a bunch of N64’s, new games, and we just let it ride and about 120 people showed up on the first night.
So what’s the plan for the future?
I’m going to keep doing it for as long as people keep showing up. The thing about Boston is that we’re pretty much the biggest college town in the States so at the moment we lose 75-85,000 people when the semester ends and we’re not seeing the numbers that we would normally see if the kids were in town.
Once they get back we’re hoping to see much better numbers and hopefully we can do it weekly instead of every other week. That would be awesome!
Game Over is 18+ and takes place the first and third Tuesday of every month at 6pm in Good Life Bar. You can follow Game Over on Facebook or Twitter for updates.
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