Thursday, March 20, 2014

The promise

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in Fullerton with a little time on my hands, so I returned to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Brea to play some trivia. My scores can be found on my profile.

This raises the question - why didn't I go to Lamppost Pizza in West Yorba Linda, where I had played in October 2013?

Simple reason - Lamppost Pizza has apparently discontinued Buzztime. And frankly, I can't blame them - I was one of the more frequent players there, and I hadn't been there in months.

Which returns me to my previous post in this blog, back from all the hoopla from my tenth anniversary of blogging. Back in the mid 1980s, the NTN technology held so much promise:

Bar Game Gives Bears Plenty Of Quarterbacks

September 11, 1987|By Jim Sulski.

When the Bears take the field Monday night against the New York Giants, Coach Mike Ditka and his quarterback-whoever he is-won`t be the only ones calling the plays.

In bars throughout Chicago and the rest of the nation, hundreds of fans also will be deciding whether to run, pass or kick. Instead of huddling with the players, however, they`ll simply be pushing buttons....

"This is the next stage after video games," said NTN sales representative Steve Perille, 24. "In this case, players actually interact with a live football game."

"People have been second-guessing the coach or the call ever since the first football game," added QB1 founding father Dan Downs, the executive vice president of NTN Communications. "We`re in a society where people just don`t want to be spectators, they want to be involved. That`s the market we`re aiming at."

However, the economics of the thing haven't really taken off, advancing at some times, retreating at others.

Steve Perille would be about 50 years old now. I began wondering what he was doing. I did find a Steve Perille from the Chicago area on LinkedIn, but he did not list NTN as one of his former employers. This Mr. Perille started performing business development for a staffing service in 1988, and continues in that industry today. If this is the same Steve Perille, then he would have left NTN a few months after the Chicago Tribune article was written.

Probably a good move.