Arcade Memories
Listening to my newly favorite podcast The Geekly Weekly, there was an item about arcades and how a couple of ‘older geeks’ were reviving one in their home town.
An older geek would be described as someone who grew up – sadly – in the time before the ubiquity of computing and who had to make do with DOS and BASIC and machines with wires you had to figure out yourself.
It would also be someone who practically lived in arcades before the days of online console gaming, just like Ryan Harvey:
Like most children of the 80s and early 90s, Ryan Harvey grew up feeding coins into machines.
Just like me.
One game that was already a classic in my time – apparently dating back to 1975 – was this Sega shark game.
Technically, it was a video game in the true sense of the word, rather than a computer game. All you got to see was a projection of a cartoon-like shark that you had to shoot with a little harpoon gun. When you hit it, the shark shrieked. That was it.
In 1983, Atari released a classic game, though, that was to be my favorite for a long while. And one that must have cost me tons: Star Wars.
This one was seriously cool.
And in my memory it was as high-tech as nothing before. It may well have been. And, though it’s hopelessly retarded by today’s standards, it still looks pretty neat.
And the graphics, boy, were they awesome too:
Well, perhaps not.
Still, it made sense, as you were not looking at a depiction of your – supposedly real – game-world environment, rather than at what an X-Wing pilot would have seen on their in-cockpit console.
In case you never got to play this, they’re still around and videos of it are available on YouTube.
I had the star wars game for my Atari ST computer. I love it. It was so very fun. *sigh*.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:48 pmYeah, there were tons of versions for micro computers and early consoles as well. I remember one based on Empire Strikes back that had blocky AT-ATs walking across the screen and tiny fighter craft that shot pixels at them. ‘Fun’ indeed.
August 28th, 2008 at 10:11 pmI loved that Star Wars game back in those days… Same vector graphics as Battlezone, only with color!
August 29th, 2008 at 4:18 amSadly, I came along after these machine were already old school. They were similar to the ones I played on my neighbor’s Atari, though.
I remember being amazed at the original Combat, where you were little more than a rectangular blob that shot pixels at another similarly-designed opponent. For the love of God how can I steer and shoot in different directions? And what was with the invisible opponent?
August 29th, 2008 at 5:59 amI loved Battlezone. Seem to remember playing it (or some spinoff) on the C64 too. Which, by the way, was a platform that had a lot of pixelated blobs you had to shoot with.
August 29th, 2008 at 9:13 amI didn’t used to play that much in arcades, although I did have BBC Micro at home. I did one summer though when i was just into my teens play WWF all holiday and got blisters on my fingers!
On the subject of old games check this out – Wolfenflickr.
August 29th, 2008 at 4:40 pmHey! Thanks very much for the props– we give you a shout-out in the latests episode. Thanks for the youtube links– they bring back some great memories…
September 11th, 2008 at 7:05 am