Adrian Buckley regards the UK as the “final frontier” for coin-operated electronic darts and has never relinquished the ambition to make this kind of game popular in British pubs.
The latest tool to help him in this is the Arachnid Bullshooter Galaxy 3, a device packed with entertainment as well as serious sporting challenges.
Buckley, these days a consultant with his company, Diana Marketing, based just outside of Barcelona in Spain and the European distributor for Arachnid soft-tipped darts games, gave way to his son, Nick, now managing director of the company. It was Nick who made a presentation of the device to an audience of top executives at Sceptre Leisure, one of the UK’s largest national operators of pub machines, at their headquarters near Preston, Lancashire.
Nick Buckley ran through the operational benefits of the Galaxy 3 and its host of popular and unusual darts games and strongly pressed the case that soft-tipped darts will succeed in the UK if operated properly with organised leagues. That is further supplemented by the national and international Bullshooter competitions that involve thousands of players across the globe.
The European Bullshooter finals will be held in Sevenum, Netherlands, in March. The grand final will be in Chicago, US, in May with $300,000 in prizes.
His father, the founder of the company, said: “Darts games are successful all over Europe. It is only the UK that the game has failed to achieve its potential, for a number of reasons. But Galaxy 3 has so many features, even the ability to have a real-time on-line game with a player elsewhere in the world, that I believe it should be given a chance.”
He proved the point when Nick played against an opponent on a built-in screen in the demo machine; that opponent was based in a bar in Spain.
The Sceptre team was led by CEO Ken Turner, who watched the demonstration carefully.
“Electronic darts has been tried in this country before,” he said, “but with such a strong tradition of steel-tipped games, it has always struggled.”
He said that his team of specialists would be evaluating the sample Galaxy 3, which the Buckleys brought to his office.
Pictured: Nick Buckley (left) and Ken Turner with Galaxy 3
