Jacob Lowenstein
Contents
Details
Name: Jacob Lownstein
Aliases: Arcade
Affiliation: None
First appearance: December 11, 2004
Family: Ira Lowenstein (father-deceased)
Biography
Jacob Lowenstein is the only son of penny arcade magistrate Ira Lowenstein. Ira had been involved in entertainment for years, funding sideshows, pinball strips and circuses. Jacob was an electronics genius, who enrolled in MIT at the age of 16 and graduated with a double doctorate in robotics and electronic engineering. One day in 1977, in a bowling alley in Peducah, Ira watched four teenagers pour close to forty dollars in quarters into a brand new Pong game. It struck him, and after speaking with his son, in four weeks, he had opened the very first Excelsior Arcade in Staten Island. Within five years, Ira owned thirty-five of them, from Detriot to San Deigo. Jacob had made a deal to pay back the cost of his schooling by agreeing to work for his father for that time, serving as a roving manager and displaying an almost magical ability to fix the machines. It was Jacob that first started installing speeding levels to ramp the games up after certain levels and times to nigh-impossible speeds. He figured out that the faster you got people on and off the games, the better for him.
But Jacob was hardly happy serving as just his father's lackey. He began to recruit people in the arcades, and was soon distributing drugs in the darkened corners of the chain. He took his money and invested it, using his technical knowledge and uncanny instinct for entertainment to find developing stocks. As a result, Jacob's holdings included most major software companies, a respectable percentage of Microsoft, and massive double-blind holdings in the entertainment field.
Jacob and Ira had a major falling out in 1985, when Jacob had urged the selling of the highly lucrative chain. Ira resisted, not wanting to slay the goose that laid the golden eggs. Inside of twenty-four hours, Ira Lowenstein was dead of a massive heart attack, and his only son Jacob inherited the family business. Jacob immediately sold everything of the Excelsior arcades except the name itself to a conglomorate, pushing a substantial percentage of the sale money into a then little-known Japanese company called Nintendo. As Jacob predicted, Nintendo destroyed the arcade business, and he reaped enormous rewards from it.
Jacob took the majority of his profits, along with his substantial earnings and waited for the right investment, which came along in 1991 in Las Vegas. At the time, Las Vegas was suffering it's worst year in history, with tourism at an all-time low and revenues equally down. Lowenstein invested an estimated 3.2 billion dollars into the strip, buying controlling stocks in two major hotel/casinos and a sizable percentage in four others. He, along with two other developers, stood at the bottom of a cycle they knew would come up again. His hotel's stripped away the 1960s faded chic, and remade themselves into amusement parks. Vegas quickly switched from the mob-riddled gambling capital to a family vacation resort in months. The organized crime was still there, of course, and Jacob spent the next ten years solidafying his position as a player in it. His money silently made it's way into the lobby to legalize prostuition, he backrolled several political figures to power, and crushed a few wise guys who thought that rules of the 70s still existed in the year 2000.
Lowenstein, or Arcade, as he's often called, has also spent millions on civic donations and grants, earning him political protection and excellent press from the city. The money he possesses is largely forgotten by him, considered a useful tool. Arcade's almost pathological fear is boredom, and even since a young man, his needs to elivate that have grown increasly imaginative and cruel. For years, the rumours of 'Murderworld', a sort of macabe theme park where you can pay to have your enemies kidnapped to and watch them challenge a series of death traps, have circulated around the underworld, and more than a few missing people are rumoured to have been victims of it.
Arcade's new fascination involves mutants, and he's put his considerable intellect into learning all he can about them. His newest and largest casino, the Excelsior opened for business Jan 10th, 2002, and incorporates high-tech creations of his to counter mutant powers and abilities. The threat of a telepath sharking the poker tables or a luck probability mutant shaking down the house is a big issue to the casinos, and considerable funds have gone to Congress to support the Mutant Registration Act. Arcade uses mostly brute force but effective methods to counter mutant powers. He's developed a sort of 'white-noise' generator for telepathy, which essentially 'blinds' any PSIons on the floors of his casino. He has neural spikes scattered throughout the building, which randomly cast out a high powered globe of sub-synaptic energy that 'rebounds' of X-positives, temporarily disrupting their powers, and a number of other surprises. His security team also incorporatesmutants, although far weaker and far fewer then he'd like.
It was this new curiousity that allowed him to find out about William Stryker's plans, and his contacts managed to grab several files taken from the most secure areas of the mansion's computers by Stryker. Arcade has not tried to break the encryption yet because he's well aware that the quantum encrypted files are government property and highly dangerous. He has no quarrel with the X-Men, but enough members of the underworld are worried enough that they would pay a handsome sum for the intelligence. That sort of auction 'game' is Arcade' drug, and he's set it for Dec 9th to follow the 100th anniversary celebration of Las Vegas' link to the national railway system.
Arcade is perpetually hyper, antsy, like an ADHD child. His red hair is going grey at the temples and receding slightly in the front. Arcade likes to talk, and more importantly, likes to hear himself speak. His manner throws people; his overty friendliness, homey bits of wisdom, and contant smile has made more than one Mafia don underestimate the diminutive jew, normally to their own fatal error. Despite his almost ridiculous manner, Jacob Lowenstein is ruthless, vicious and cunning. His electronic genius isn't far behind Anthony Stark's, and he understands how to pay the game without being incriminated.
Powers/Abilities
None
Plots
Meta
Socked by: Dex
PB: Dustin Hoffman
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