2023 Year In Review

We're nearing the end of 2023 and it's been another roller coaster ride for Wonderville. In May of 2024 we'll be celebrating our FIFTH birthday (crazy right? Keep your eyes out for the party details!) and things keep getting better and better each year. In case you missed it, here’s some of the things we worked on this past year.

New Games

In January we closed the bar for a week to install new floors during MAGFest. Almost our entire collection traveled to National Harbor, Maryland to be showcased in front of 30,000 attendees. During the same month we received our Nidhogg 2 cabinet, produced by DSM Arcade! In 2023 alone we debuted 6 new indie arcade cabinets - Nidhogg 2, Speglar, Waxwing, Hoverburger, Cakefoot, and Frog Game.

Partnerships

With the acquisition of cabinets, we needed to start partnering with other locations to feature games, since they can’t all fit at Wonderville. We moved KungFu Kickball to Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park - it’s playable in their second floor arcade. Powerboat Italia ‘88 is now at the KCBC Tap Room, and Slam City Oracles is at All Night Skate. We hope to continue to partner with venues to feature our games and rotate them periodically so we can keep building new cabinets at Wonderville!

Residencies

We also continued our two seasonal residency programs. On the Wondercab we featured Leisurely Eatery, Molar Mayhem, Trapped In Here With Me, and Bam Boom Blade. On the Pico-8 arcade we had Demon Slash, Cosmo Boing Deluxe, Kalikan, and Eyevasion.

Community

In collaboration with Blake Andrews, our monthly playtest night has been a huge hit! Last month we had over 15 games featured on the last Tuesday of the month. Additionally, Blake's 2 Hour Game Jam Club has been wildly popular, with 8 different game engines featured in 2023.

Internship

With the help of Karl Hohn, we've expanded our curation internship with NYU Game Center. In the spring, Yasmine Batniji hosted three showcases featuring alternative controllers and game installations. In the fall, Alex Zheng hosted another two showcases, with a third coming up on Sunday January 7th! We're so honored to be able to partner with Game Center students to host these unique events each month.

Events

In addition to our work with games, Wonderville continues to host a wide variety of events like WordHack, the Donut Lounge hip-hop showcase, LiveCodeNYC and Bit Rot Chiptune shows, Disasterpiece movie night, and more! Every Wednesday is our Killer Queen Open Hive Night, and it’s been wonderful to see the community around that game grow over the years. We’ve also grown our virtual community on our Twitch channel (check out Fort90 TV every Monday!) and have archived over 200 livestreams since 2020 on YouTube

Randwiches

2024 will also mark our third year working with Jenn de la Vega aka Randwiches! We featured 14 signature hot dogs this year, bringing the grand total to 46 hot dog recipes since we started this partnership! Thank you to Brooklyn Cured for always supplying us with the best dogs.

Renovations

Running a small business hasn’t been a walk in the park. Because our building is so old, we’ve had a lot of expenses just to keep everything going. This year our ancient HVAC finally died, so we invested in new energy efficient heating and air conditioning. We put in new floors in the bar and a new awning in the front. We also finished renovating our backyard, and with the help of Alex Panait, built some beautiful picnic tables. It’s cold out, but sneak a peek back there if you haven’t seen it yet! Thank you to our contractor Danny for always helping to build some stuff when we need him!

All of that said, we’re looking forward to 2024! We have so many ongoing projects and many more ideas in the pipeline! This year we also launched our nonprofit Wonderville Projects, an official 501(c)-3 tax exempt organization! Donations will help us to fund our community programs and keep Wonderville operational into the future!

If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, just follow the link below:

We also offer monthly memberships to Wonderville, which include discounts on event tickets, drinks, and merch at the bar! If you’d like to check out our membership tiers, head over to our WithFriends page!

Do you have another idea or want to collaborate in some way? Send us an email! We look forward to hearing from you!