Whew, where to start?
1978 or so.
My dad had passed and my mom took us kids out to Austin TX to be with my uncle. He was cool....and when we went to a mall with an arcade (video arcades were just coming into existence then), he handed me and my sisters about $20 in quarters.
It was THE beginning.
The arcade had Lunar Lander (with that big ol' engine-throttle handle) and Space War (one of the ships looked a leeeetle bit like the
USS Enterprise).......and my journey toward the dark side was complete.
Later, I played the hell out of Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe, Defender, Scramble, Xevious (lord I loved that game), Galaxians and Galaga, Tempest, Colony 7, Gyruss, Boskonian, Missile Command, Omega Race, Rip-Off, Vanguard (with music from
Flash Gordon, or maybe Queen got it from the game?), Star Trek (that cool sit-down version), the first and second Star Wars coin-op games....shit. Lots of 'em.
Remember the kid in the Rush "Subdivisions" video who hung out at arcades? That was basically me.
I never got too much into 'pattern' games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.
I liked watching some of the laser-based games like Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, but never really felt a desperate need to play 'em. (They were always kinda expensive for what you got.
)
I was particularly good at Battle Zone, which I could play for about four hours on a single quarter (or two).
And then there was this really cool sit-down game called
Space Tactics, where you had to defend five missile bases in the foreground from waves of ships approaching from the distance, which would then drop bombs on your bases. You had a shield that you could erect over your bases, and falling bombs would take a 'chink' out of it.....two bombs in the same place would penetrate, so it got tricky. As a last-ditch defense you could launch the base's missile and destroy any infalling bombs, but in the heat of panic you'd usually hit two or three of those buttons at once.
It had a complex gymbal-mounted screen and control yoke and was found only in the largest arcades (usually in malls, like Gold Mine here). I could play it for two hours or more.....but for the last 90 minutes of that, this loud klaxon horn would sound, indicating that you were down to one base. (This was actually a good thing, since now you only had to defend the airspace directly over it.) Let's just say it tended to draw a crowd.
I actually have one of these games -- possibly the only one in Georgia -- out in the garage. Sadly, it isn't playable. It's lonely and depressed and needs some company...so I wanna open an arcade in my garage or something.
Oooh, Galaga and Xevious? Me wants!
I already have one of those with Galaxians and -- be still my heart! -- Boskonians on it. I love how they use the original ROMs. (Proof? When you nail the flagship in Galaxians, the falling ships STILL quit firing in shock.
)
Oh, hell yes! I almost won one from an arcade that was giving theirs away to the highest scorer....not that I was that great at it, but it wasn't getting too much play at the time. I
did win an Omega Race game at that arcade with a high score.
