Back in the day I was quite the playa…and actually had status at the arcade.
I was around when everything went electronic. Galaga ended up being my favorite and best game. I’d love to have a Galaga machine for the Asylum!
Was anyone else out there into pinball and arcade games back when they were actually cool?
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32 Comments!
*raises hand*
Phoenix. Only found it in a few places, but I loved that game. Was good at it too.
I remember playing pinball machines when it was quite an achievement to rack up over 100,000 points. Nowadays, if you can even find one, you get that many points for putting the ball in play. Must be a self-esteem issue.
Very early eighties an arcade named Cosmos’ opened in my hood.Tempest,Phoenix,Moon Patrol,Window Washer,Gorf,Qbert,Donkey Kong.So many great games.
I’m not a gammer, but RDRTrash is, in fact he’s at a gamming convention this weekend. I was all excited to tell you that you can get Galaga on the Roku 2 XS player (my kids LOVE it), but apparantly the channel is no longer available for purchase.
If you’re interested, I can send you a DVD with an emulator that has every damn arcade game on it. It uses the actual game ROM chips code not some lame knock off versions. I love it. I always put in on any new computer before anything else.
You name it, it’s on there.
In fact, after posting that I just played a game of Galaga and did the old two ship trick and won the Challenge stage. Then I stunk up the joint as usual.
^Do you need a special device for them?
I’d LOVE that! I so once in awhile need to let my mind be “mindless”…I haven’t read fiction in forever!
Pinball Locator
Sorry, no Galaga.
I put way too many quarters in a certain big yellow Pong machine at one time.
I used to have my name on the arcade records wall when I was young. Played some pinball and early games, owned a 1981 Bally Midway Pacman for quite a while, sold it when times got tight.
Got to spend some time in a mostly empty arcade for a while before it closed, it was in a bad location, I would bike 4 miles to get there, gave big token discounts because it was so empty.
Some of those early “video” games? Tank Command, Sprint (was pretty fun cuz you could race another player and had a choice of different tracks), Night Driver, then came Space Invaders and Asteroids. All of those plus pinball were at the bowling alley I ended working at when I got older (high school). Before that I had to go to 7-11 for pinball- so few of those stores are around now! Most of them have turned into espressoterias. And bowling allies are a thing of the past too. What are young kids, esp ones from Soho down to Brighton, s’posed to do?
Asteroids during happy hour at the local tavern. I sucked at game, but the beer was two for the price of one and I had a pocket full of change.
First pinball machines I played didn’t have flippers. You sort of had to really know how far back to pull the plunger and sort of kind of controlled the path of the ball by applying a gentle tap or two to the machine, without tilting hopefully. The object was to get 3 or more balls to fall into the holes near the bottom of the machine and win money. Like some slot machines, you could pour a couple of rolls of nickles in them and build up the odds. Sounds lame but they were popular in truckstops and beer joints along old US25 before I75 came along and ended all the fun.
And you could put a hole in a nickle, attach it to a string, and cheat some of the machines….learned this from some North Carolina truck driver. But it was an excellent way to earn yourself an ass kicking.
In Steven Levy’s book, “Hackers”, there’s a story about the first “Pong” videogame, installed at a place called “Andy Capp’s Tavern”. When the owner complained to Allan Alcorn, one of the game’s creator’s, that the game had suddenly stopped working, Alcorn opened it and immediately discovered why: it was jammed with quarters.
Other than “Asteroid”, I wasn’t a big videogamer – didn’t see the point in pouring money into something that I sucked at.
Same here I played them all as s kid. Still love them. In fact, there’s a chain of bars on the east coast called Barcade that has them as the center of their business model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcade
I never had too many loose quarters and like thunderbottom I generally stunk. I would watch my friends play. Everybody loved to play tank with me, though.
There was a phamacy in the small town where I bussed from the farm to high school. Had tables, chairs, pinball machines and a fountain serving ice cream sodas in the back. It was the hangout for the town kids, especially girls! Town boys were pros on pinball machines and I didn`t have many spare nichols, so I sucked when playing against the townies..
However, I noticed that the girls didn`t give a shit for the pinball champs, so I had a clean shot at sitting at the tables with them and eye-fucking their nobbie blouses and sweaters. Thinking back, I may have learned some of my first pickup lines practicing on those gals. (…it was later, as a Marine fighter pilot that I peaked by licking and sticking a hundred dollar bill to my forehead before introducing myself to stranger girls who were clearly on the *hunt*!….)
They used to pay off. The guy at the counter of the local chili parlor I’d pass walking on my way to my after school job would pay a nickle a game on the counter, and would sell rolls of nickles to feed the machine. I’d make a couple three bucks a week that way. That was pretty good considering I was making $1.10 an hour at my after school job.
That was 1959 and I haven’t played pinball since. Can you still find places that pay-off?
In our little town it was the pool hall with pin ball machines— card games in the back room– it was the “guys” hang out– girls did not enter.
I was the guy who made twenty bucks an hour on the side repairing and refurbishing them.
Darned right I loved arcade games!
MC
Defender, Tail Gunner, Asteroids, were some of my early favorites. I even worked for a couple of weeks at a place called the octagon. Never really was good/interested in pinball unless nothing else was available.
We had a place here for a while that had all the old games, new virtual reality games and an adult sized 3D maze (like McRonald’s). They served beer, wine and food so was a fun place to hang out while it lasted. Block Party I think was the name. Now there is supposed to be another similar business coming but I’m not holding my breath.
Oh, and there’s an arcade in Vegas that I took my little brother for a stop on his bachelor party night.
You can get those old arcade machines for a few hundred $, maybe a grand for a fully restored one.
I was a bit old for these in the early 80s, but I did enjoy some Asteroids. There’s a cool place near me with about 60 vintage pinball machines from the 40s to 90s and maybe 20 video games from the 80s to current. All free play! He has kid’s birthday parties for $7.50 a head, bring your own eats. Parents get to play for free….. and he has Asteroids!
I started on old pinball machines (it was called Bow and Arrow), winning a free play was a VERY big deal
and I was still young enough to be playin when the electronics came out
my favorite was asteroids
Oh, yeah. Love me some pinball. I have a pinball emulator for our Wii with a bunch of the old Midway/Williams pins – Taxi, Gorgar, Funhouse, the Black Knight, PinBot, etc etc. It’s not exactly the same as actually leaning up against some machine and giving it just the right jostle to save a ball from the outlanes, but it’s still fun as all-get-out to play. And the tables are quite authentic, as far as it goes. I got a shot to play an actual Space Shuttle table in a thrift store in Red Bank NJ, and based only on playing the simulator, I was able to put up rather a strong score, despite one wonky flipper.
Alas, the licensed titles aren’t on it, and are unavailable. No Doctor Who, Addams Family, Twilight Zone, T2, or Star Trek TNG. Maybe someday…
We found out about a trick on Galaga. You can have it where they do not shoot at you after the 2nd stage. Defender was also good and so was Gorf
As for Pinball The Black Knight and The Black Hole were my favorite as a kid
I was more into foosball…
Dig_Dug.
no need to say more
I can hear the howling.
How could I forget QIX. I probably spent more quarters on that in the student union building basement between classes. . .
The video arcade craze also coincided with many people like me having a company beeper.
I remember one time thinking I was beating some game I was playing only to have a kid tap me on the arm and say, “Hey Mister, your pager is going off”.
Then one time I lost a beeper in a case of produce that ended up in a Safeway stock area and they thought it was a bomb getting ready to go off.
Don’t I go off topic good?
Space Invaders and Asteroids!
Heck yeah…
what was the other one….
Centipede?
You’re really Katherine Heigl in “100 Girls” aren’t ya?
Back in the eighties I worked as a service tech on pinballs, video games and juke-boxes.
I could never get into the actual PLAYING thing with the games. The other tech and I used to let the junior trainees stay back all night and leave notes for us to read in the morning.
Juke boxes were different: at least they could provide a variety of music while you worked on another machine. I particularly liked the compact NSM juke-boxes. The biggest problem with them was hooligans kicking in the glass front panel or tipping the entire machine upside-down.
The other interesting problem was vandals trying to crack the coin mechanisms. In many “cocktail table” games, inserting a tyre lever to crack the cabinet near the coin mechanism put them perilously close to the high-voltage circuitry of the picture tube. Unfortunately, none of these scumbags ever seemed to die on the job.