Friends of Life Bar: Neil & Coleman

This series is our chance to recognize some of the people who have become part of the fabric of Life Bar — whether they contribute their time and talents, help make the place better, welcome new people into the fold, or are simply a joy to have around. That is what Friends of Life Bar is about.

And for the very first installment, it only made sense to start with two people who have managed to check pretty much all of those boxes.

Neil and Coleman.

Neil and Coleman first came to Life Bar as customers, but it didn’t take long before they started taking a deeper interest in what was going on behind the scenes. They were especially interested in some of the game consoles around the arcade. After talking with us about a few of them, they offered a simple question:

“How can we help?”

That question ended up being the beginning of quite a lot.

They started helping with console projects, troubleshooting problems, researching solutions, and tackling things we either hadn’t been able to get working yet or simply hadn’t had enough hours in the day to address.

One project led to another. Helping out turned into hanging out. Hanging out turned into friendship. Before long, Neil and Coleman weren’t just customers anymore. They had become part of Life Bar.

Neil

Neil has found plenty of ways to make his mark on Life Bar.

He helped build out the Life Bar Discord server, giving the community another place to connect, share ideas, make plans, and keep the conversation going outside the arcade.

He has also stepped into the role of Life Bar’s official pinball tournament director, helping take responsibility for organizing and running tournaments and becoming an important part of the growing pinball scene at the arcade. Which is no small task!

And sometimes his contributions are a little more unexpected.

When Peter’s birthday was coming up, Neil decided that Godzilla — one of Life Bar’s pinball machines — needed a shaker motor. So that became the birthday present.

Neil helped get the new hardware installed, turning what could have simply been another maintenance project into an excuse to crack open a pinball machine, work on it together, and make Godzilla just a little more amazing.

But Neil’s contribution isn’t just technical.

He is one of those people who notices the room. If somebody is hanging out alone or looks like they might not know anyone yet, he’ll talk to them. He’ll pull people into conversations, introduce them around, and help make the place feel less like a room full of strangers and more like a community.

That matters.

Coleman

Coleman has a habit of hearing an unusual idea and then figuring out how to actually make it work. One of the best examples is Life Bar’s pay phone project.

The idea is to take the old phones in the arcade and make them genuinely functional again — buttons, dialing, recordings, and eventually even the ability for the phones to interact with one another. Coleman dove into the research, started testing hardware, and began figuring out how to connect an old-school piece of technology to a modern internet-based system.

The first hardware solution didn’t quite fit the phone model Life Bar had, so he went back to the drawing board and found another option.

Naturally, the project has since expanded.

There are now additional neon phones waiting to be installed, and the long-term idea is to fill them with strange, nostalgic, and entertaining numbers people can dial — old commercial hotlines, recordings, forgotten 800 numbers, and, if we can pull it off, things like the old Nintendo Power help line.

Coleman has an entire spreadsheet of ideas, because of course he does!

He has also built a dedicated pinball tournament website that can handle things like tournament sign-ups, brackets, results, publishing, and connections to the IFPA. Then he went a step further and built a system for reporting problems with machines.

It is a perfect example of Coleman’s approach: find a problem, get curious about it, and build something useful.

More Than the Projects

All of those projects would be enough to earn Neil and Coleman a place in this series, but they are not really the reason we wanted to start with them.

The bigger reason is that they show up.

They talk to new customers, welcome people who came in alone, bring people into the group, and sometimes keep the night going somewhere else after Life Bar closes. That kind of thing is impossible to manufacture.

You can build an arcade. You can fill it with games. You can plan events and tournaments and karaoke nights, but you cannot force a community into existence. That happens because people decide they care about the place — and about the people around them.

Thanks, Guys

Neil and Coleman came into Life Bar as customers.

Somewhere along the way they became troubleshooters, builders, tournament organizers, idea machines, ambassadors, regulars, and friends.

Life Bar is better because they walked through the door.

So, for everything you have already done, everything you are currently tinkering with, and all the strange ideas that are undoubtedly still sitting somewhere in Coleman’s spreadsheet:

Thank you, Neil and Coleman.

We’re glad you’re here.

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