The admissions material accurately describe the show as a museum of working games. There were machines from the early 70's through the current decade, including many classics and some really rare ones. Some of the real oldies included "Computer Space," "Space War," Space Race," and "Tennis." Keeping these ancient machines functional requires ongoing maintenance, and is a labor of love for many of the collectors. The opportunity to get access to them, all set on free-play, for a day is well worth the $30/day door charge to get in.
Computer Space, which appeared in the movie Soylent Green, was amusing but not particularly compelling to play. The amazing technical detail about it, however, is that it has no CPU. It is entirely implemented as a state machine in 74xx series logic.
Tennis and Space Race were really engaging. They are both two player games, and rather pointless without someone to play against. Mike Napolitan and I played many games of both, chatting as we played. It's fun to imagine people 35 years ago playing those machines...
My favorite game, if I had to pick one, remains Atari Lunar Lander. In this game, you select one of four levels, which generally correlate with how realistic your flight controls are, as you attempt to land on the surface of the moon. On the expert level, you have to counter-thrust to stop rotating, or your rotational momentum keeps you turning the direction you started. Heavy gravity requires careful management of a limited fuel supply. The controls are simple, with buttons for rotate right, rotate left, and a thrust throttle lever. The thrust lever is a huge beefy handle with an awesome feel that you can really believe is out of a 60's era spacecraft. One more button, labeled "abort," allows you to terminate a landing attempt, and can be used as a "cheat" switch. It instantly reduces your horizontal velocity to 0, then automatically orients you vertically and applies a blast of thrust far more than you can get with the throttle, to immediately arrest your fall and accelerate you to about 50 feet per second upward. If you've let your vertical velocity get too high, this can save you, at the cost of a high fuel burn, but as I said it always felt like a cheat to use it. The sound is also really well designed, with a booming bass speaker to provide the rumble of a rocket engine throttling on and off.
Lunar Lander is not a twitch game, and actually requires thinking about the physics of a space ship. I'm not sure how popular it was in bars and then arcades when it came out, but I find it really compelling to play, and I kept thinking about how to determine the minimal-burn landing path that gets you to your target, often a tiny little landing platform, by which time you need to have minimal horizontal velocity and vertical velocity of less than 15 feet per second. It obviously wasn't as popular as the next game Atari released... Many lunar lander cabinets, both in production and in the field, were re-configured into Asteroids machines.
Some of the games at the show are prototypes. One in particular, "Teeter Torture" is one-of-a-kind, an Exidy title that even Exidy's old employees didn't seem to remember producing. Apparently for some time there was speculation that it was actually a bootleg ROM running on Exidy hardware. From a distance, it looks like a regular arcade console game, but when you get closer you realize that the artwork is all hand-drawn with art-markers, reminiscent of story-board drawings from a movie. The game play was fun, although the little gunnery station that the player controls was really (and probably unintentionally) phallic. The ROMs are available for MAME, but that one machine is the only known console.
Not all of the old games are good. Some were poorly-made movie tie-ins, like "Krull" or "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.." Some were fun and even successful but are showing their age, like "Red Baron" which has a nauseatingly slow frame-rate that renders it almost unplayable at times. And some are obvious rip-offs or amalgamations of other games. But many of them are still surprisingly fun to play, even if you are doing the same thing over and over again. And the minimal graphics and compute power lead to game designs that placed an emphasis on game play... That seems to have been lost in many of the modern crop of games that are graphically stunning but just not particularly fun to play. I think this show offers a lot to learn, and like I said, I always find it imspiring.
Here's the complete list of games that I played at the show:
- Lunar Lander
- Tail Gunner
- Red Baron
- Teeter Torture (One of a kind prototype)
- Discs of Tron
- Tron
- Joust 2
- Robotron 2084
- Missile Command
- Sinistar
- I, Robot
- Computer Space
- Space Race
- Tempest
- Gravitar
- Black Widow
- Atari Quantum
- Space War
- Asteroids Deluxe
- Turbo Sub
- Crossbow
- Rebound
- Kick
- Die Alien Scum (Prototype)
- Rally-X
- Stargate
- Wizard of Wor
- Gorf
- Omega Race
- Spy Hunter
- Tapper
- Reactor
- Timber
- Guitar Hero
- Joust
- Ice Cold Beer
- Star Castle
- Armor Attack!
- Battlezone
- Major Havoc
- Time Crisis 3
- Need For Speed – Underground
- Galaga 88
- Space Invaders
- Xevious
- Crazy Climber
- Venture
- Jungle Hunt
- Deer Hunting USA
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Krull
- Twilight Zone Pinball
