The Big Buck World Championships fire off this month in New York City.
By Matt Caputo • Illustration by Dan Masso
The weeknight crowd shuffles slowly into Good Co., a cozy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar with a back yard patio and a tattooed, handlebar-mustached bartender doling out cheap PBRs and ice-cold Presidentes. It’s a hip yet low-key place whose interior, the owners claim, features “restored wood planks from a historic Rockaway Beach boardwalk.”
The place is not without female talent, and the drinks and shots are flowing, but Good Co.’s real draw, believe it or not, is its Big Buck Hunter arcade game.
Hunters and Hipsters
You’ve probably seen an arcade hunting game at some point or another, in a bar or a shopping mall. Big Buck Hunter is a first-person shooter that simulates actual hunting without harming any live animals. The objective is simple enough: Take out as many bucks and other fair-game critters as you can with a fluorescent-orange or -green, pump-action plastic gun. Launched in 2000 by Play Mechanix, BBH has since spawned several versions and attracted a cult following while also generating an elite class of players: The fifth annual Big Buck World Championships—with a grand prize of $15,000—will go down in November at the Altman Building on West 18th Street in New York City.
The game’s blend of realistic hunting elements with no actual bloodshed has enabled it to attract a unique combination of hunters and hipsters. BBH is as popular in rural Texas and Minnesota as it is in Williamsburg. And a new version of the game has been packing ’em in lately at Good Co.: “The new HD version is the second machine we’ve had since we opened in 2010,” says the bar’s co-owner, Ben Ward. “We’ve only had the new HD version for a month. It’s bringing in a ton of people, and girls love playing it.”
Released in July 2012, the HD version of BBH is the first high-definition bar and arcade game with 1080p graphics. BBH HD also has a social-media functionality that connects players and bars to competition via an online platform, CoinUp. The Showdown mode allows players around the country to square off. “The new social-media element captures the subculture really well; you see all the players on there,” says Andy Lin, who finished fifth in the 2010 World Championships. “It’s brilliant.”
With only about a month to go before qualifying for the 2012 World Championships begins, Lin isn’t the only elite player in the bar tonight. While Good Co.’s regulars raise and aim shots of tequila and whisky, Alex DerHohannesian, the 2010 world champ, fires off some practice rounds of BBH HD alongside Lin.
Big Buck Beginnings
BBH creator George Petro takes pride in the fact that his company, Play Mechanix, designs games for the bar crowd. Petro had already spent a decade in the arcade business when he rolled a demo-edition BBH machine into a bar in Aurora, Illinois, in 2000. His aim was to create the ultimate sports-hunting videogame, and he hit a bulls-eye with his first shot. “It was just one level of the game and people mobbed it. We saw one big dude playing it over and over again,” Petro says. “The guy turned out to be an Army sharpshooter with a medal to prove it. He said, ‘This shoots really well; this is good stuff.’ ”
Petro got interested in videogames when his father, Louis, an architect in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was hired to design a local arcade in the early 1980s. George shadowed his father throughout the project, and when the Electric Circus Arcade opened, he got a job there. “I looked into the back of the machine and it totally blew my mind, like, How does whatever is back there make the graphics and cool gameplay?” he recalls.
After working at the arcade during high school, Petro hooked up with Williams Electronics, which eventually became Midway Games. He began as an intern and was hired as a programmer after graduating from the University of Indiana in 1987 with a degree in computer science. He worked under Eugene Jarvis, who’d created arcade classics Defender and Robotron.
One of Petro’s first projects was Narc, an urban shooting game with an antidrug message. In the process of creating Narc, Petro pioneered technology Williams used for the next ten years on arcade editions of Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam—in which Petro is a hidden character. He also directed arcade projects for Terminator 2 and Revolution X, the Aerosmith shooting game.
In 1995, Petro left Williams to found Play Mechanix, where he worked on various gaming projects, including popular slot machines. “We were doing well, but we weren’t really making money,” Petro says. “Around Christmas of 1999, it just dawned on me that we were really good at gun games, and that a hunting game would be perfect.” Three months later, Big Buck Hunter was born. “We took the adrenaline part of hunting, which is lining up the kill and shooting, and we distilled it,” he says. “You’re not spraying deer piss on yourself and hiding in the bushes.”
Performance-Enhancing PBR
For all its success in arcades and, especially, bars and taverns, Big Buck Hunter hasn’t quite transitioned to the living room. Petro released a successful Nintendo Wii version in 2010, but Play Mechanix is committed to the arcade format. A bona fide BBH machine would run roughly $6,000 at retail, so players rely on bars for access to the game. “There’s a culture around this like there was with Donkey Kong back in the day,” says Lin, who’s nicknamed “Big Buck Ninja” for his smooth, effortless style. “It’s perfect for everywhere there’s a bar. There’s a whole subculture around the competitive players, too.”
Originally from upstate New York, Lin, who makes his living as a photographer, is a household name among Big Buck aficionados in the metropolitan area. The same goes for DerHohannesian, the 2010 champion, who’s a bit of a ladies’ man. With his slicked-back hair and laidback demeanor, he caught the eyes of the handful of hotties in Good Co. Lin and DerHohannesian spend an average of ten hours a week firing shots at virtual animals. They got into the game, like most players, by trying it out after a few beers one night. “I was working as a bartender at a place called Mama’s Bar in New York, and I’d play the game on slow nights,” Lin says.
Like darts and bar pool, the game attracts players of varying levels of devotion—and blood-alcohol levels. Indeed, regulating those levels is a key to performance. DerHohannesian says he shoots his best after a half-dozen PBRs. Lubrication aside, though, most of these virtual outdoorsmen know it takes commitment to make it to the BBH finals. Action-sports stars Travis Pastrana and Scotty Lago both tried to qualify for the 2011 World Championships, and both fell short. DerHohannesian plays four or five hours a day in the weeks leading up to the competition, and he and Lin have an intensity—but no geekiness—about their gameplay. They’re also deadly accurate. Clearly, practice pays off. The most successful gamers know there’s no way around that. “I’ve got a machine in my house,” says Nick Robbins, who won the 2011 competition. “Believe it or not, paying a few thousand to get your own machine will actually save you money.” That’s if you’re training for a world championship, of course. Amateurs can subsist on the virtual venison available at the corner tavern.
Taking Aim
Sixteen players from four regions compete in the championship, but some must travel outside their zone. Robbins, an IT guy from Minnesota, endured a 700-mile drive from his home in the Twin Cities area to the nearest qualifying machine, which was in Mason, Ohio. Driving across state lines is a common last-minute act of desperation for BBH players who want to qualify, but the practice often comes at the expense of local players. Last year, Lin went on vacation and came home to find out he’d been eliminated by carpetbagging gunners.
“The qualifying score around here is a lot higher,” says Robbins. “There are a lot of good players in Minnesota.” So some of them migrate to less competitive qualifying regions.
That points out another, arguably healthier, difference between Big Buck Hunter and other gaming competitions. While most gamers are barricaded in basements and bedrooms, BBH players conduct most of their training and competition in a social environment.
“It’s fun because you realize it’s a bigger thing than just something played at your bar, in your town,” says DerHohannesian. “We always say, if we’re in a bar killing virtual animals, then we’re not out there killing real animals.”
Or stinking of deer piss.
