2024 Year In Review

It’s the end of 2024 and Wonderville celebrated five years! Wow, we’ve accomplished a lot thanks to all of you! We’re so appreciative of the community that keeps supporting us through the years and we wanted to highlight some of the games and events that happened this year!

New Games

This year we brought in SIX new arcade cabinets! First we welcomed Dyebreaker by Running Jump Games. In the summer, we built a brand new arcade cabinet for Tough Love Arena with lots of help from our friend Steve Faletti. We also brought in the custom arcade cabinet Phil D. Basket by sTo Len after a residency at the Department of Sanitation. In the fall, we launched the newest arcade cabinet by Arcade Commons - WeatherSys Admin - with financial support from Brooklyn Arts Council. The following month we built a cabinet for Bumpy Grumpy, a previous Wondercab resident, and brought in Zombeez, the newest arcade game by Bumblebear!

Museum of the Moving Image Residencies

In 2024 we spearheaded a partnership with the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens to feature a custom arcade game in their lobby! From February to October, Video Freak lived in the Hearst Lobby. From now until April, the museum is hosting Waxwing in the same location. It’s so exciting to see these custom games getting the recognition they deserve in a prestigious museum we love!

Other Partnerships

Since Wonderville has limited space, we’ve been working with other venues to host arcade cabinets for short term residencies. Right now, Particle Mace and Super Sharp birds live at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park in the Trees Lounge on the 2nd floor. Powerboat Italia ‘88 is at All Night Skate and Volleygon is residing at Windjammer in Ridgewood (in partnership with Footlight Presents). Lastly, Slam City Oracles is at LoFi, a new bar in Prospect Park! 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 Star Mountain, Bumpy Grumpy, Waddle Throttle, and U.F.O. (Unidentified Feline Obliterators). On the Pico-8 arcade we had PICOHOT, Wire Tripper, Sushi Belt, and Sand Trap.

Community

Our monthly playtest nights hosted by Blake Andrews continue to be a huge success, with 20+ developers showing up each month to showcase games on the last Tuesday of the month. On the first Saturday of the month, Blake has also been facilitating the 2 Hour Game Jam Club where attendees learned how to make games using Twine, RPG Maker, Lunar Magic, Downpour.games, Inkle Inky Ink, Mario Builder 64, Scratch, Construct3, and more! We are grateful to all of the work Blake has put in and are excited to grow this community more in 2025!

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, Disasterpiece movie night, Brooklyn Experimental Electronic Music Night, Open VCR Night, and Wonderville Karaoke! We also have recurring DJ Parties like Weeb Adjacent, Tackycardia, Smash Bash, and City Soul (playing New Year’s Eve tonight!)

This year we teamed up with Problem Child and Sour Somethings to host a series of Drag Shows with themes like Adventure Time, Over the Garden Wall, and Toonami. Our staff also played an incredible Halloween Show and covered Blink 182, Gorillaz, Death From Above 1979, Siouxie and the Banshees, and Misfits! We also teamed up with Death By Audio for a workshop to help people solder their synthesizer kit

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. Bumblebash took place in Chattanooga Tennessee this year, which marked the 10 year birthday of the game! Mark and Steph traveled down to talk about Wonderville and building indie games. Thank you to Bumblebear for the invitation! We’ve also grown our virtual community on our Twitch channel (check out Fort90 TV every Monday!) and have archived over 400 livestreams since 2020 on YouTube

Book Launches

In 2024 we also held a series of book launches for Nature of Code by Dan Shiffman, LAN Party by Merritt K, and Output, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort. Pick up a copy if you are able! We look forward to hosting more book parties by community members at Wonderville in the future!

Randwiches

2024 was our third year working with Jenn de la Vega aka Randwiches! We featured 10 signature hot dogs this year, bringing the grand total to 56 hot dog recipes since we started this partnership! Thank you to Brooklyn Cured for always supplying us with the best dogs. We’re celebrating with Jenn by hosting our annual Hot Dog Appreciation Night on Friday January 17th so come meet the chef and eat some dogs! Free hot dogs to the first 25 people!

Wonderville Projects

With everything going on in the world, we are grateful that we can contribute a litte bit of positivity through our small arcade space. Last year we launched Wonderville Projects, a 501(c)-3 organization, that helps to fund much of the community endeavors. We look forward to continuing these programs in 2025 and starting new partnerships and events!

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!

Wonderville Merch

You can also support us by buying merch! We rolled out new hoodies, long-sleeve shirts, magnets, fanny packs, and tote bags - all designed by Maria Kleback - this past November. The quotes on the apparel are from actual Google Reviews!

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