Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 116: Arcade memories feat. the Retronauts community

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

Jeremy, Ben, and Benj reminisce about the experience of living through the golden age of arcades, with many additional memories coming in the form of an hour-long listener mailbag segment.

This week in Retronauts, we're not talking about the worst X-Men villain. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a Retronauts East. I'm Jeremy Parrish. this week, we're talking about the classic days of the American arcade, which is something we've kind of covered before, but this is going to be different. It's going to be a loose, free-form approach. For example, I don't know if this is going to be a full episode or a micro-episode. We're just kind of winging it, but I do know that we're not going to talk about arcade from the X-Men, because that guy sucked and all of his stories were stupid, and he was in a bad video game. So, instead of talking about that, let's talk about the good stuff about arcades,

like going to coin up machines and putting quarters in and hanging out at pizza joints and watching weird, scary robot animals sing. And here to talk with me about these things this week, we have Benj Edwards. And also Ben Elgin, who is fresh from Eclipse Land. And I can see the crescent-shaped scars burned onto your eyes. Totally, totally. You did a trump, didn't you? looked directly at the sun.

Mostly managed to use the glasses. Oh, okay. Well, that was good thinking. Clearly you're unfit to be president. Yeah, yeah. So this episode is the first that we're recording in something that I hope will be kind of a loose tentative series of sorts of episodes really based around recollections and not so much about hard facts and info.

and research and that sort of thing, but more about our personal experiences, playing video games, and the, kind of the processes that we went through, the things that have vanished now, like the things that we did in the past, and you can't really do now, because those cultures and those technologies are gone. And this was kind of Benj's idea. Yeah. So I do a lot of writing. Take credit for it. Well, thank you. I do a lot of writing about the culture of technology and video games, because I'm interested in preserving not just physical artifacts, but also the stories of how people use the technology. And I think that's important. Yeah, I think, you know, someone who is maybe 20 years old listening to this

podcast wouldn't necessarily know what it was like to go to an arcade back when people actually went to arcades and the games there were fresh and amazing. And, you know, to know what it was like to see Dragons Lear and be like, wow, there's a cartoon on my computer screen. What's happening? Yeah, just, you know, life is different. The experience that my elementary age, nephews, and cousins have playing video games is very, very different than the ones that I had. I mean, they still love video games, just the way that I did. But the one that they love, and the relationship they have with those games is very different than, you know, I didn't have YouTube when I was in elementary school. So I did not want action figures of my favorite

YouTubers. Whereas my nephew does. He thinks it's really cool to have a toy version of Krobe Kat or whoever his name is. And that's great. I mean, I'm, you know, congratulations to Crooket or whatever his name is for, for helping to, you know, create that kind of culture. And I'm happy for my nephew that he has like aspirational heroes playing video games that, you know, he can look up to. That's, that's kind of cool. That's something I didn't have as a kid. The best I had was, uh, Kevin Flynn. I don't know. Billy, Mitchell. He wasn't, he wasn't really around doing that thing until like the late 90s. Yeah. That's true. I never heard of him until, yeah, early 2000. I mean, we had the, the people in,

in the magazines were like the only kind of personalities. Yeah, there you go. That we'd be conscious of, I think. Yeah, I mean, there were the kids who like won the Nintendo Power contests and I would be like, damn you, I wanted that to be me. But they never liked my submissions. I was never I never went on to become the author of Danger Girl. That's my loss. And the worlds.

Aren't there some game shows where kids played video games and competed? Oh, yeah. But none of those really, yeah. Like those, those didn't have any appeal to me. It was more the, you know, the stuff that I could directly relate to. Like, here is a contest to come up with a

video game story or a video game concert. I was like, oh, that's cool. I want to win one of these, but I didn't. Get your design in Mega Man. Yeah, did they ever, they did one of those in the U.S., I think. Wasn't there? I'm not sure if U.S. ones made it into that. Man, I want to see one of the Mega Man's six robots came from the U.S.

I think you're right. Galaxy Man was later. That was eight. Yeah, nine. Nine. Okay. I'm mixing up with someone else. That's okay.

If only there were a Mega Man 20, but no. Although you could, you could get your envelope. art printed in Nintendo Power, if you were lucky. That was almost... Yeah, I didn't even get that. I don't know if I ever actually had one. Actually, I don't know that I ever sent an envelope of art to Nintendo Power, but I did send one to GamePro.

Yeah. Like, at the very, very beginning, I drew a really cool picture of bloody mouth from Ninja Guidon, and they did not print it. Oh, man. Alas. Although, speaking of GamePro, I feel like kind of like some of the GamePro, like, wacky columnist personalities might have been the closest thing we had to these YouTube guys.

There were actually action figures of... GamePro persona. I think that was the early 2000s. I don't think it was in 90s. Yeah, it was a little after you. I believe Scary Larry. I believe Scary Larry did have an action figure. Wow. Don't quote me on that, but I know that there were game pro action figures. And I think there were some IGN action figures. Weird. Yeah, I don't know. Is it like Sushi X too early for that? No, this was I think later. Yeah, too late for that. Also, Sushi X was EGM. That was EGM. That's right. That's right. So who was Sushi X?

It's a secret. Sushi X was, well... Ten different people writing under. Yeah, I can't remember the guy is the original guy who did it, but after he left, I think his name was Ken something. After he left,

sushi X just became like a thing that was sort of like assigned to people. I don't know. Sushi X was before my time with EGM and I was never actually on EGM staff. I just contributed. So I don't know all the full scuttle, but someone

like, I don't know, Dan Shue could tell you, but I could not. Mark McDonald, Chris Johnson, you know, these guys are out there. I'm sure they've talked about it on their respective podcasts. Yeah, I think I read about the identity of sushi X, but I just forgot. Yeah, I mean, after a while, it was pretty much just like, okay, you're the guy who's going to write sushi X this one. Yeah, it became a column rather than a person. And that was kind of the same thing with Quarterman also.

Yeah. It was a guy at first, and then, you know, after. What's that? Kevin Quarterman. Was it? Was that his name? But it was with two ends. Yeah.

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Well, if you want to talk about arcades first, I have a question for you. Okay, okay. Which is that I was born in 81, so I visited arcades. Yeah, I visited arcades in the 80s from when I was really little, you know, mostly in the late 80s, though. But the golden age of the American arcade was around 82, I'd say, or 81. And you were probably old enough to go during that time. Can you describe what it was like? I was just starting to be able to go to arcades at that point.

That was about when you started seeing the proliferation of things like Chucky Cheese. Yeah. We didn't have Chucky Cheese, but we had Chobis pizza. We had Chobis, yeah, same. And then there was a place called Pistol Peets that was like a local Texas and New Mexico thing. And my memories of showbiz and Pistol Pets are, I did some reading on this recently. And it turns out that the reason my memories are separate is because showbiz pizza went out of business in Lubbock, Texas, and they sold all of their machines and their animatronics to Pistel Piz, which is why Pistel Piz had all the same stuff that showbiz did. And they were just down the street from each other.

It jumbled your memory forever. It kind of did. There was like this brief period of overlap. So I want to say like 1983, 84. It gets kind of nebulous for me. but yeah for a while there were a couple of those restaurants those pizza places that had the the big amusement areas and what was your original question I was just the golden age of arcades what was it like to step into an arcade then did you go to one that wasn't chucky cheese yeah well they were all not chucky cheese because as I mentioned we didn't have chucky cheese okay well yeah there wasn't choked yes there were there were arcades that were not just you know at junk to pizza places with bad pizza. And those were mostly in the mall when I was very young.

There were a couple places. There was one called Tilt. And I can't remember the other one. I think we had a tilt. Yeah. Yeah. But they, they were very sort of dark, cavernous spaces that went sort of, you know, they were like a narrow storefront. And they went a long way back into the, into the store. So, yeah, it was very dungeon-like. And this was when you could smoke in malls. So you would go into those arcades and I remember them being very smoky. And it was mostly like, you know, quote unquote big kids. It was like teenagers who when I was six, seven years old were like, wow, scary. It's so intimidating. So I didn't really go to those a lot until I was older and they had started to get a little brighter. They banned smoking. But there was definitely

a sense of like, this is not a friendly place for kids in the mall arcades. And that's, I think, why most of my memories are, you know, adjunct to the pizza places. Yeah, so the biggest one I remember, I think it might have been a tilt at one of the local malls, was actually, I think, under the food court. So it was actually kind of basement. So there was a big food cart, and then there was a big, like, double stairs down, and there was one of those tilt arcades. And, yeah, very dark and neon.

This is St. Louis. Okay. And so we had, we also had showbiz pizza, not Jackie Cheese. So I went there for parties and stuff. But yeah, there was definitely a tilt or two or things like that in some of the malls. And, yeah, like Jeremy said, it was definitely we were a little young for that in the early 80s because, you know, we were grade school. So, yeah, a little bit intimidating. Yeah, I'll say a point about the smoking because I remember going to an arcade where there was an ashtray on every single machine.

And a lot of them had, you know, burn marks, scorch marks from cigarettes, you know, on the plastic vessels on the control panel. Yeah, I remember those days, too. a few months ago when I was in Japan. Yeah, right. You could still smoke in Tokyo arcades. So, yeah, there are a lot of, I mean, they, a lot of them have, like, smoking and non-smoking spaces now, but you can definitely go to arcades and just sit there and take a drag on a cigarette while you're going for your highest score in Darius Twin or

whatever. Yeah, I had that experience in Japan in the late 90s also. That whole, that whole scene where the arcades were unfriendly to kids is one of the main reasons why Chuck E. Cheese was founded. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, video games kind of got their start in bars. I mean, if you look back, you know,

space war and Pong and that sort of thing. Little tabletop cabinets. Yeah, I mean, they spun out of pinball and other similar amusements, which were meant for you know, like adult spaces. So it took a while for them to sort of shed that

sort of seedy vibe to them and because friendlier to kids. And things like Pac-Man definitely helped because they were bright and colorful and they appealed to kids and they appealed to women, not just like drunk middle-aged dudes. So I did an article about Chuck E. Cheese a few months ago for a fast company about the 40th anniversary. And I was doing research on arcades in the early 70s to see what the press thought about them. And it was always like roving bands of evil teenagers go there and smoke weed and do interracial dancing.

And, you know, everything that was awesome. Yeah. That sounds good. Everything that was a concern in Middle America in 1970s. So, you know, Nolan Bushnell had the idea to change the venue for his games and their, his company's games. And that's how Chuck E.C.J. is born. Yep. And, I mean, it was a success.

And I have some tokens here from my Chuck. When I was a kid, you want to see him? Just think, each one of those is a lost opportunity to play a video game. You missed out. What's that inflation rate? If one is 25 cents, 1980. So they're probably worth like 80 to 90 cents. Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, like getting towards a dollar. So I could put it in a modern machine and get a dollar play. You could play one play in Japan because they're 100 yen. They're all a dollar. I've got some more, but I was interesting because I went to at Chuck Cheek's when I was really little. There's one near my house in Raleigh. And I didn't know what year opened. I was researching it for my article, but I've got a token here that says 1980, so it was pretty early.

That's just when they were minted. So that doesn't necessarily mean that's when the one here opened up. But yeah. Well, no, it says Raleigh N.C. on it. Oh, does it? Yeah, there you got a thing. Dang. Look at the bottom.

It says, in pizza we trust. Yep. Not that pizza. No, that was terrible pizza. I've eaten chunky cheese pizza. It's all right. It's not. You definitely went for the video games and the creepy singing bear.

I mean, you went because you got him. I guess he was a singing mouse. The bear was showbiz. I've got a showbiz token, too. So the rock of fire explosion, that was showbiz. That was showbiz, yes, I had that, definitely. But, yeah, in my experience, you mostly went to showbiz because he got invited to some kids' party. Yeah, because it was a cheap place to entertain a lot of kids for a few hours.

Listen to all these tokens. I'm rich. Just think of how many games you did not play as a kid. You missed out. Yeah. I got... Think what a better video game journalist you could be if you'd spent those the way you're supposed to.

But I'm better because I saved them. Is it Donald Trump's Shobba's token? This is 45? It's one of them, Zid. It had 45 written on it. Maybe it's 45 cents. That's a play in... A play in four-fifths.

This one's an ancient Roman token. Yeah, clearly. Clearly. You could probably use that as a subway token in New York. Aladdin's Castle. We had an Aladdin's... We had that at Crabtree in my college time. So Crabtree Mall used to be, like, kind of low rent then, as opposed to the upscale, like, go-buy a sports car kind of place it is now?

It was, the Crabtree was the upscale mall in Raleigh. North Hills was all right. It was just one sort of simple indoor mall, and then we went there all the time. I guess this is kind of getting to be inside pool. But I do feel kind of sad that I missed out on the days when this city had arcades. Yeah. Well, there's one on Hillsborough. Borough Street called Starcade that was legendary because they had some of the early 80s games like Tempest and stuff or what year was Tempest anyway.

That was 19, I want to say 80, maybe 81. Yeah, they had those, you know, up until the 90s or in a lot of other places churned through their games and would switch them out with newer ones and stuff. And there was an arcade, there were some at these strip malls in various places that would pop up and go. but there was one at Crabtree in the food court. I think it was this Aladdin's castle. So yeah, you used to be able to see arcade games pretty much anywhere you went. Like I remember, I've talked about on the show before, my first memory of playing an arcade game was in the middle of the Sears lawn department

where there was a brand new Ms. Pac-Man machine just sitting there by itself amidst the lawnmowers. And I was like, can I play this mom? So they gave me a quarter and I died before finishing the first stage. But I was excited because I made one of the fruits appear before I died. I thought that meant I won or something. And, like, you would go to convenience stores, and there would be, like, in a carri warriors that the crank mechanism on the joystick didn't work anymore. Or you'd go to, like, a drug store and out in that sort of mudroom area that you go to, like, you know, in between the store. Yeah, it's not a lobby.

I don't know, like, the ante room. Sure. A breezeway sounds good. I feel like the last bastion. Like, there would be a couple of those. Those eventually were replaced with, like, electromechanical, you know, riots. for the kids. Like the last bastion of that set up now, I think, is like,

see that in the theater still, where, like, out in the lobby, there's a section. Yeah. This little room with, like, three sad, sad arcade games and, like, Deer Hunter and maybe a couple mechanical things. Yeah, we used to, there was usually an arcade game at the movie theater near my house, and we'd play, like, Marble Madness there. I remember waiting for me.

It was, you know, a two theater, really tiny theater. I'm, you know, two, whatever, two screen theater. That jogs my memory. I have played Marble Madness stand up before back in the day, yeah. What about Pizza Hut? Do you guys ever play? Pizza Hut did have a couple some video games. We never went to Pizza Hut.

We always went to a local, like, Texas chain called Pinocchio's Pizza. I've talked about that because that was, it was big. It was big, thick pan crust pizza, like Chicago style. It was really good. Pizza Hut's was that thick. Yeah, whatever. Look at that. I think I've played, I think I played Pac-Man Pizza Hut in St. Louis.

Pac-Man Pizza. Well, at my local Pizza Hut, there was always a Cocker, machine in the little, there's a little room with a payphone and the cocktail machine going to the bathrooms. And, you know, while we'd go as a family and my parents would sit at the table and order a picture of beer or something and just start drinking it. And then me and my brother would go to the arcade game and play Miss Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.

And there were always cocktail machines, the kind that look like a table. For those of you who don't know what that means. You should know, though. Yeah, so you can get a two-player set up where the screen's in the middle and you have two sets of controls on the table, yeah. Yeah, each place is on each side. I always wanted one of those, still don't have one. In hindsight, I really feel for adults who took us to those pizza place arcades

because, like, the pizza at showbiz and turkey cheese was not good pizza. And they had to sit on these, like, uncomfortable benches in this room with singing robots and bad lighting and, like, I know my parents avoided it at all costs. They really, like, my parents loved me. They would suffer through that sometimes. And I think mostly we went after report cards came in, because I think that was one of those places that was like, if you get all A's, then you get, you know, $2 off of pizza or something. So we would make the rounds to all the places that had report card rewards. And that was, that was definitely more of them.

We had free Pizza Hut rewards from the Scholastic Book Program. Yeah, Booket. Booket. Yeah. Booket did Pizza Hut rewards. So that would be a lot of the times we were at Pizza Hut. I never hear about stuff like that anymore. I don't know if places still do that.

Is that like back when the economy was good? Reading isn't cool anymore really fast. It's fundamental, though. It's fundamental. Totally. But yes, like, one of my biggest memories of show is, is unfortunately not the arcade games because I would go to other people's parties and I would end up trying to figure out how to game the tickets as best I could.

And like, the best way I usually found was to get good at ski ball. So I ended up spending a lot of time on the ski ball at showbiz. I love ski ball. Try to convert my coins into. of tickets and get the cool, completely useless crap from behind the counter. Yeah, we should talk about redemption arcades a little bit because I was trying to research. That's one of the things that still exists. Yeah, they are the only profitable arcades these days, supposedly.

The business model that survives was the redemption arcade because people pour, you know, $20 into finding, you know, trying to get a 75 cent plastic, you know, cheap thing from China or something. But I think that I'm probably. wrong, but Chuck E. Cheese was the place that at least popularized the redemption model. And I don't know if it was the very first. It's usually hard to say that. Certainly the biggest one.

I feel like the redemption model existed on, you know, in like, electro-mechanical arcades. Yeah, it's quite possible. Yeah, other places had ski-ball, but... So, like, I look back, I don't know. There's probably a carnival thing, actually. Oh, yeah, yeah. You definitely have those at carnivals. But, like, I think back to, you know, like, boardwalk arcades where there

aren't any video games. It's just all electromechanical machines. Like, there's still some of those around, like Santa Cruz and California. Like, you see those and, like, there are just lines of ski ball tables. I didn't think to look up any info on that because I didn't know we were going in that direction. Yeah, well, I bought, I brought a long ticket. Speaking of Redemption Arcade, I've got all my tickets here from, I guess, I found some. I think what kind of junk you could have gotten with those, man. This is this. It says Fanny Farkel, Indiana ticket. That one's from Gatlinburg.

I've mentioned my Gatlinburg arcade exploits on Retronauts before. These are the original Chucky Cheese tickets, see. They're gray. I did these as a retro scan of the week a few months ago on my blog. It's great, just like the pizza. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think I came across any showbiz ones when I was cleaning out my closets. I must have spent them all. This is from when showbiz and pizza time were combined.

Oh, wow. I didn't realize they teamed up one big pile of meat. Chuck E. Cheese went bankrupt in 1984 or something like that. You read my article, you'll find the details. But they, you know, showbiz came in and bought it. And so for a while, they were, they would maintain separate locations. Eventually they merged into one and Chuck E.C. Cheese brand took over. Even though showbiz was the profitable one.

Yeah. Well, it's complicated. You got to read that article. you know, Nolan Bushnell tried to turn Pizza Time Theater which is the Chucky Cheese company name into a diversified

leisure company for a while and he was turning it into something that would make its own arcade games and invest in animation technology and all kinds of different things that he wanted to do and it just put too many eggs in one very weak basket that was based on a gimmick with those robots

that got over saturated and copied a million times. And when the economy turned sour and there was a tech crash in 83, you know, just the bottom pulled out and he couldn't get any more credit to run those things, you know, all of his ventures that he was doing. I see. But, you know, even though they were a financial failure, those robots live on with Five Nights at Freddy's,

which is based very much on the experience of being very young and going and seeing those robots and being terrified. They were pretty terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, they were originally intended to be entertainment for the adults. So in the beginning, Chuck E. Cheese was like a rat with a derby hat and a New Jersey accent and smoked a cigar. And he was like a wisecracking guy who had insult his bandmates and stuff. That was the character.

And then it just got more and more watered down over time until it became a Earth Day Party place. Yeah, saying that they were meant to appeal to the adults does make a lot of sense because there was, I vaguely remember some sort of risque humor and they were singing songs that kids wouldn't necessarily know, like, secret agent man and stuff. It was like, you know, a little, a little. skewed a little older than the kids. There was a hippo named Dolly Dimples that was by herself, and you could put a token in it, and she'd sing songs and sort of flirt with you. That was. Okay.

But this is the greatest thing about the 70s is they were just brown and dark. Everything was so dim. That's my memory. Yeah. It was everywhere. I mean, I wasn't alive then. I just remember, I just remember a culture left over from, you know, in the early 80s things were just getting out of that.

It's so like ultra-modern gray and minimalist stuff, but we still had carpets that were shed carpets. You had the leftover avocado and golden rod. Yeah, and the wood grain pan all the walls. Everything was really dark and dim sort of like in the early 80s. There was this whole

I don't know what it would get carried forward from but yeah, like when I think back I think like lots of sort of earth tones and lots of very low lighting. And that was actually advantageous for the arcades because you don't want bright lights in the arcades. But on the other hand, like brighter spaces are more inviting. And I remember when our putt putt putt golf, local

putt putt putt golf really did sort of an overhaul and installed a big arcade. And it was very like open and bright and clean and, you know, very just inviting space. And it didn't really badly affect the video games. I still wanted to play those video games. That was probably like 85 or so. because I remember it was right around the time that I was hearing ads on the radio for the Transformers movies so whenever that happened like I remember going to a birthday party

for a friend at Putt Putt playing a bunch of video games and then hearing a commercial on the radio for the Transformers movie so that's kind of how I'm cementing that in time in my mind I think the biggest small arcade I remember was kind of in that transition period

because it was still very dim but they had like lots of neon up and stuff it was trying to like look very futuristic And so it was a little, it was transitioning away from like the dark smoky bar aesthetic into something that was trying to be a little future hip and a little more light. Yeah, I don't know that Put Putt was trying to be future hip, but the overall design of it was just more like kind of like a very clean gas station with, you know, like big glass walls and metal posts and railings and that sort of thing. And then the actual arcade space was very open instead of being sort of like narrow corridor. Yeah, like the early mall arcades tended to be, you know, because they were such narrow spaces,

it was basically like arcade machines lining each wall and then a row of arcade machines back to back in the middle, just descending into darkness. 40 feet back and 12 feet wide or something like that. Pretty much. Whereas, whereas, you know, the put putt putt was, it was like clusters of machines scattered around. So there was a lot of walkability and you could kind of more like what you see in sort of retro style arcades these days. If you go to a barcade, there's, you know, like ground control and quarter world, I think, in Portland, Oregon that we have retronauts events at. And they're very much in that sort of style, although they are, you know, arcades, so they're a little darker inside.

But there's still that sense of, like, openness. It's not all claustrophobic. I kind of miss the Tron aesthetic that we got for a while, though. Sort of like, neon stripes everywhere. Texas just wasn't up for that. I just had an idea. Maybe arcades were dark because there was less glare on the monitors or something. No, I think that definitely played a factor there, but in general, everything was just less brightly lit back then.

You would go to the mall and the central corridors would be sort of airy and open, but then the actual stores tended to be a little boomier inside. Yeah, well, just thinking about the Chucky Cheese in the early 80s when I was really little. I mean, I have some memories probably like two years old going into Chucky Cheese and it was dark, really dark. And then this giant mouse, and a guy in a mouse suit came up and terrified me. And then you created Five Nights of Freddy's. Yeah. No. No?

No. That was got coughing, I think. So off to the left, there was a dining area with these robots that were like torso up singing stuff. And then off to the right, there was a maze that kids could crawl into a cheese maze and get lost. Oh, man, we didn't have a maze. It's scary. You're describing this. in such a terrifying way.

There are singing animal torso and also a maze where you may never be seen again. Yeah. It was scary. For a two-year-old. All of that was horrible, but the arcade part,

at least at showbiz, was really good. There were so many games. And a lot of the, sort of the classic game experiences I remember came from those arcades. Like, you know, you'd see the common stuff like

Popeye or dig-dug, but they also had, you know, kooky, weird, obscure stuff. Like I saw Konami's Locomotion Oh, wow. The sort of, what is it, Katangatang-Tang clone. It became Blotia on Game Boy. Yeah, we did a retro nuts on the Sega.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was... No, you're thinking... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. We did mention that briefly. Then there was also the... Oh, actually, it was Locomotion, the Konami, the Sega game that had the Yellow Magic

Orchestra music, I forgot. There was another one by Konami that just did the, like, move the thing around the tracks. But anyway, like, that's where I saw that game. And so I remember seeing it and, you know, stuff like Time Pilot, just a really random motley assortment. That's interesting because I remember the first time I saw a lot of arcade games and where they were. You mentioned Dragonslayer earlier. And I first saw that in an arcade in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a sort of a tourist trap town in the Great Smoky Mountains, you know, kind of close to the border of North Carolina, not exactly, but, and people were gathered around

this machine. Like, everybody was waiting in line, and I had to, you know, sort of push my way through to see what it was, and there was a, you know, a machine with a real cartoon on it, and a guy was playing, it had this giant glowing button and a thing, and it cost a dollar to play. Yeah. I was like, how could this possibly work? It was like, witchcraft. Pretty much. Yeah, I remember the first time I saw that, which was at a unit,

Texas Tech University, because my father was going after his doctorate. And so sometimes, you know, he would go up to do some research or something and bring me or my brother and sister along. And as sort of a reward for our patients while he, you know, did his computer work on the big shared mainframe. Wow. Yeah, that's a long time ago. He would take us over to the, to the University Arcade and let us spend, you know, a few minutes there to play a couple of video games. And I remember seeing... babysitter. No, I mean, he didn't just leave us there. That would have been irresponsible. It was more like when he was done researching than he would take us over there. Okay, cool. And I remember seeing Dragonslayer with just all these, you know, again, big kids gathered around it. And seeing that and being like, wow, I can't wait to play that.

But then eventually they got it at the Pistol Pete's Pizza and I had the chance to play it. And I was like, this is a dollar. And it doesn't actually look like it's that fun. Yeah. It's really cool. but it doesn't seem good. So I never actually played Dragon's Lair in the arcade.

I did. It was a big rip-off because it was impossible. If you, like, miss the first single flashing light, you die and you lose your dollar. Dragon's like crazy. It was basically all of our first time

being disappointed by QuickTime events. Pretty much. And yet they're still alive in games. What the hell? Yeah, and it was based on laser disks, which is... Yeah. So it looked really cool,

but, yeah, there's not a lot of game there. We finally have the two. technology to do a real-time Dragon's Slayer that looks like a cartoon, I'd say. Yeah, don't you think? But... Will it be any better

as a game? No, but I think it's funny that it took that long, because it was just essentially a ruse. Just having, you know, pre-rendered cartoon clips that play and change on command like a tree.

You'd want to adapt it to something, if you did it these days, to something with an actual, like, you know, sword play system that you could control for real, which you could probably do now. We can make it like Dark Souls. That'd be really cool. There's that Xbox shooter coming out that's very cartoon. Oh, Cuphead?

Cuphead, yeah. Yeah. It's at least done the style. It's totally different kind of game, but it's doing that style where it looks exactly like a cartoon would have looked on TV. There is a very cartoon-looking Dark Souls-ish game coming out called Momodora 5. It's nothing like any of the other Momodoras so far. It's not, like, the animation is not quite as good as Dragon's.

Lair, but it's really getting there, and it is much more substantial as a game than Dragon's Lair was. Yeah. But you have to admit, Dragon's Lair was very impressive. It made a good impression. Well, so speaking of things that look good in arcades, this would have been later. But one of my memories of one of the first times I remember being, like, really blown away by graphics is when I walked up to Altered Beast in an arcade.

Oh, yeah. I love that game. Which, yeah, I try to go plaque and play it now, and I'm like, this game's not that fun, really. It was exciting because of the way it looked. The graphics were really damn good at the time. The huge sprites were just really amazing. And the transition where he turns from a human, you know, it gives a screen where you're blinking

and turning into a wolf or whatever. Although the other disappointing thing going back to it today compared to your memories now is I actually was reminded of this because Kishi on the forums did screen caps of it. But so the first time you do the human-to-wolf transition, there's this really detailed full-screen sprite art. transition. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Right. But then all the other animals, the transition is like two or three frames. Oh, really? Yeah. It's like, they like cheaped out on all the, like,

they do this really cool one for the first time you see it. That's this great animation. That's the one everybody sees. That's the one, the one you remember. And then all the other animals you can transform into, it's actually a really simplistic, like splash screen that you get for the transformation. Yeah, that's a really sort of common cheat that a lot of game designers have always used where they like front load really cool stuff. And then maybe the very end is really cool. But Everything in between is just kind of like, man. They do that in music, too. Like on the albums.

I'm not kidding. It's a strategy. You know, the best songs first and last, especially the last thing you hear is supposed to be something good that people remember. So then you want to, like, play it again. Or buy it or, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, a lot of arcade games definitely had that, the really cool stuff up front.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I see. You made a list of things you remember, like punchout and arm wrestling. Those are worth talking about because those were awesome. We've had a punchout episode, but we didn't really focus that much on the arcade. It was more about the home console ports. But that was like, to me, those games were a lot more impressive than Dragonsler because you actually played them.

And they were not, you know, just like, here is a cartoon that we created and you can press a button and maybe die. But, you know, like you were actually getting in there and punching a guy. And there was an announcer saying, body blow, body blow. right, right, body blow. Yep, yeah. I remember that. Well, that was during a period where, I guess, you know, home console started replicating the arcade experience of the joystick.

And so the greatest thing about arcades was that you could make these interesting interfaces, like we've kind of talked about before. That's a Santa Monica bus token. I don't know where that came from. Okay. Yeah, we talked about the, yeah, like sitting in a cockpit or, you know, like the punchout or you can you have a joystick for each hand you're physically pushing them forward like you're punching and the arm wrestling game is was that a Nintendo game I don't remember who made it but it was just crazy it was based on the plastic hardware and uh was it uh was it was it was it uh was it was it uh was it was it uh was it was it uh was it was it uh was it's like it's it's gonna break my arm wrestle it like it was a guy i don't think i think i was too yeah i don't know if i ever i think i tried to play it once but it scared me it's like it's it gonna break my arm I'm off because it's a machine, you know.

I had no idea. And that was a getting that transition. That much force feedback. Yeah. It was in that transition from bar games because it was really like a test your strength kind of thing. They kept that right next to the love tester machine in the pistol piece. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. The Punchout had a dual screen thing. They had a, you know, upper and lower monitor, which is neat. I believe that game was designed specifically because they had a surplus of monitors or something. They wanted to use that. We need to use all these monitors.

Wow. That could be apocryphal, but I believe that's where it came from. And that was something that they lost in the, you know, in the transition to the home console, but they still kept that design when they created the Play Choice 10 because you had, like, the game monitor below, and then you had the system monitor above. And you could, like, swap between games on your three minutes per quarter and kind of, like, cycle through if you got, you know, 30 seconds into Castlevania were like, Where's Dracula? This is stupid. I want to play Mario instead.

Good swath. Yeah. You can do that. Short attention span. But I'm kind of jealous that because Japan still get some of these weird physical game set up. So like there's a fist of the North Star game that came out not that long ago that, well, it probably was a while ago now. But where it has like six different targets for you to do your wata-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tas on. And then there's the table-flipping game is amazing. The table-blum where you have an actual thing.

There's almost nothing to it. You pay a dollar for like a 30-second experience. But they really milk it for everything. I can do that right here. Do not flip the table. Yeah. So have you ever seen this T-Table game? I, you know, Chris Kohler told me about it when I was in San Francisco.

I was like, are there any cool arcades in town? He's like, well, there's one in Japan town that has the table flipping game, and I didn't get a chance to go there. Yeah, I don't really know exactly how you can tell when you're supposed to flip the table, but the controller is just a table, and things happen on the screen, and at some point, you, like, flip the table, you, like, throw the actual table controller up, and then everything on screen slows into slow motion, and things fly off the table and it, like, creates combos as the stuff. I think it's, like, measuring the force you flip the table.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. There's almost nothing to it, but it's very satisfying to play once or twice. That's cool. Yeah, there's some other cool games. There was a recent Galgo 13 game where you actually, are looking, it was kind of like silent scope in the arcade where you are like looking through a rifle site and trying to take out specific targets with certain goals and things. So yeah, you still see it like, oh, there was elevator action death parade. Did you ever see that?

I haven't seen that. That was, that was, that was probably been like 10 years since that came out. But there's like this crazy elevator door element to it where like the doors open and it's kind of a first person shooter. And when the door is open, you have to like gun down dudes. So it has like physical doors. Yes, it has physical like doors that move away from. from the screen. I don't want to be in that parade. But it's the fun parade. You can be the Marshall.

Fun death parade. So recently there have been these app-based arcade games. I don't know if you've been to an arcade recently, but I take my kids to them. There's a flappy bird. Where are there? I heard about that. Well, at the beach, we go to the arcade. You know, that's about it.

That's a beach. So there's a flappy bird machine. Actually, I've seen him at Chuck Echise and Raleigh. there's still a Chucky Cheese here. Where's there a Chucky Cheese? It's on Capitol Boulevard. Oh, okay. So it's the same.

That used to be a showbiz when I was a kid, and then they turned it. But a lot of these games incorporate gigantic LCD TV, you know, that's, or monitor that's vertically oriented or something. I even saw a Fruit Ninja with a touchscreen that was like this big. Oh, I've seen that one. Wow. So it's interesting what they're doing these days. And everything, just about everything is a tick. Redemption game and then there's one

like 60 and one poor, gutted, Miss Pac-Man sitting in the corner and like, why would I play that? You don't get any tickets. So if you're really good at Flappy Birds, you can get a million tickets? Yeah, you can. If you keep going, you have to push a button, but man, it's hard. I try to play it. Yeah, there's a roller rink I've been to here in town that has a pretty decent selection of arcade games and redemption

games, some, mostly older games because I think it's meant more for the parents while their kids skate. So the parents have something to do that doesn't involve, you know, breaking their tailbones. That's a good idea. Yeah, my last time actually just organically running into arcade games here in Raleigh was very sad. I posted the pictures from it. I just went to some, like, bar restaurant, and in the back, there was a room that had some games in it.

And the biggest thing there was this, like, you know, 100-in-one arcade game. There was clearly some crappy emulator that was just set up in a box. I see there's a lot. They do a horrible job. They rip out all the guts, and they put a new panel in, and nothing matches, and there's an LCD. monetary and one of those Chinese boards that you can buy on Amazon for like 30 books. It had like dig-dug and stuff on it and other things,

but it was all very sad looking. So that's actually probably the biggest threat to arcade heritage today are those conversions. People are gutting actual cabinets. Some people have done, you know, I've read horror stories about, you know, actual really rare games that have been ripped out and converted. There is a barcade downtown, the box car.

Yeah, I've been there. I haven't been there because I lived like a block away, but they hadn't opened it yet. And then they opened like a month after I moved here. It's fun. We should go record an episode there, see if they'll get us. I keep meaning to go to the one in. There's one in Chapel Hill, too, the Baxter barcade that I keep in. I've been like right next to it and haven't actually managed to spend time there.

Arcade has a really good Mario Brothers machine. So I love Mario Brothers because it's one of the best co-op arcade games, in my opinion. And it's semi-competitive. Yeah, I just played that at a Long Island Retro Expo, like the original arcade game. And after so many years of playing the NES version or like the Game Boy Advance rendition of the NES version, it was nice to play the original arcade game. I think I love that.

See all the little details that didn't make it into the NES conversion. Yep. Like the turtles flipping over and the cookie animations on the fireballs. Yeah. Yeah. And the fireballs have this weird glow to them or something, don't they? That's different. The coins, too.

Yeah. There's like this really subtle effect that they have, something with the palette cycle. It's really cool. Huh. It's amazing. Just a very, very subtle. A box car is great. I should try that again. We should go there.

So that does seem to be kind of the state of things for arcades these days. Alcohol. Redemption. I mean, it's kind of going back to its origins. Yeah. Redemption machines and stuff for drunks to do. Yeah. It's fun, though.

It's so much fun. So I'm just looking at Benj's list if we want to, like, jump back in time again. Yeah, I think maybe we should take a pause here and then make this a whole episode. go back into it because there's still the whole 90s and DDR and all that crazy stuff. We didn't even talk about the X-Men thing with three monitors or however many. I think it was one. Yeah, we'll talk about that after the break. Two.

Three. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry.

That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

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And that's awesome. So we're going to do listener mail. So from Yarkers and Renner's in the mail, We're going to read them to you now. I'm from Yakov-Grenberg. I spent a lot of time in 89 to 90 as a little kid going to the local arcade in Leningrad in the Soviet Union, where the only real video games, the ones that weren't electromechanical, were barely out of the Atari 2,600 graphics gameplay era.

When we moved to America in 91, and I went to an arcade the first time and saw Street Fighter 2, it was like I had stepped out of a time machine. I never experienced the slow progression into that kind of graphical fidelity and sound, so it was this jarring, amazing experience. For the next few years, I ended up spending as much of my free time in the arcades as I could.

That's awesome. That is really cool. From Jacob Proctor. The closest thing I had to an arcade when I was a kid was a couple of cabinets in a pizza place. They had Rampage and Gauntlet Dark Legacy, which remained two of my favorite games. So this kid is pretty young.

These were both two-player games, and it was great spending all the quarters I could get a hold of playing with my sister. A few years later, we would go to a laser-attack place that had the Holy Grail, at least for me, Time Crisis 3. Man, that game was so good. Back when I was living in Michigan, my girlfriend at the time and I would go to the Pink Elephant Arcade in Lansing and just play that game over and over. Time Crisis 3. That was the good one. Because that was the one where they added the automatic weapons and stuff. It was more than just, like, the regular guns.

And did they shake when you shoot them? They did have, yeah, they did have, like, the solenoid or whatever. Yeah. I don't think I played that one. I remember putting a significant amount of time into Rampage back in the day. I think actually one of the Pizza Huts had Rampage. This may be the new Rampage remake. If he's talking about Dark.

Yeah. It's probably, like, the 3D. Yeah, okay. But, yeah, so the original Rampage, like, there's not a lot of game there, but it's just so satisfied. I love decking. I would put quite it just to knock the buildings down over and over. That was one that was fun to play with another person

because you would be dicks to each other. And then you could even eat the other person when they lost. You could turn back into a human and make it human and slink off the screen and you could go over and grab them and get them. It was just like such an insult to someone, but it was really fun. I love that game. And Gauntlet is one that, not Dark Legacy. I don't think they've ever played that.

But the original gauntlet is one that I remember from, that put-putt I was talking about. The first time I played, that was at that birthday party that I mentioned. So, 1985, 86, I guess. And, yeah, just, I wanted to play that, but it was very expensive because it kept eating my quarters. Yeah, your health ticks down. Everything attacks you and your health ticks down on its own. I love the theme.

Gauntlets, one of my favorites. Definitely. Anyway, back to the letter. I recently got set up with a PVM, a, you know, it's cathode rate two, television, primarily so that I could play light gun games, and I can always play this one for a few minutes. I need to set up more light gun games on my system, for sure. Every game I had an arcade experience with became one of my all-time favorites, and I wish there were arcades close to where I live. It would be, I would like to build an emulation arcade cabinet at some

point, and I know exactly what my first three games would be. What do you won't tell us? I'm pretty sure it's going to be the games that he mentioned. Oh, this is the same letter. We stopped in the We got distracted, but that's okay. From Chris Bruce, when I was about 10, around 1995, my parents took me to Disney World. My best memory from the trip with Sega's Inaventions Pavilion at Epcot. It was a giant arcade with kiosks for the Genesis, possibly early Saturn, and the company's whole lineup of arcade games.

The one that I remember most was a giant Formula One game set up with multiple players competing at once and a live announcer calling the race. I remember briefly being in first, but eventually, falling back to third. My dad cheered me up by telling me that in a real world F1 race, that position would still have been worth $500,000 in prize. I just looked it up, and the game was apparently Virtual Formula, an expanded version of Virtual Racing.

Wow. Wow. So I've never heard of that one. Yeah, haven't played that one. I can't imagine that, like, Formula One, no one in America really cares about it. So it was probably huge in Europe, and there's people who are like, oh, yes, I remember playing virtual formula on my... Zetex Spectrum, but that's not me.

It's like everybody thinks Tomb Raider is the greatest game of all time in England. Are they getting angry if you don't say a layer off? Yeah, I didn't, well, that's a story for another time. But that letter reminds me another place I did go to arcades when I was little is a few times at Disneyland, because I had relatives out in California, so we'd go to Disneyland. And they did have a pretty big arcade there back in the 80s.

In Disney World? That's why it was the happiest place on Earth. Yeah, yeah. uh from mila i thought i'd share my favorite arcade memory it's probably later than most submiters in that it happened when i was in high school in the late 90s my parents had decided to go see michael bay's pearl harbor while i being ahead of the crap sensing curve saw something else at moors town mall moors town mall's movie theater there was about an hour's difference between the movie's run times so i decided to spend the weight at the now gone arcade near the food court

i've always been a sucker for fighting games especially two d ones from capcom and s and k and i was extra delighted to find a New Dark Stalkers game. It was the third one, so apparently there had been one I missed. Around this time, there was only one person working in the arcade, a bored-looking man around college age. As I started playing and trying out a few of the characters, he just sort of milled around and would occasionally peek over to my shoulder to see how I was doing. After a few rounds, I decided to try the last of the new characters, B.B. Hood.

I knew a character who looked like Little Red Riding who was going to be interesting to play, but the moment I attacked and this character whipped out a machine gun, I burst out laughing. I'm usually pretty shy about stuff in public, so it was a completely random reaction. Next thing I know, the employee is next to me, giving me free tokens and laughing himself. I apologize for my outburst, but he just laughed and told me to enjoy myself. It's probably not as fun as other anecdotes you'll get, but it was a key moment for me getting a little self-conscious about myself and finding a favorite game in the process. From Dan Fight, I could talk about arcade memories for hours, but perhaps my favorite moment from

the arcades came in 1994. I was playing Mortal Kombat 2 at the Sawmill Multiplex on Suburban New York, and I was putting on a show. I was never very good at Mortal Kombat, too, but when I was lucky enough to have a string of weak opponents, I could dazzle spectators because I knew all the characters and fatalities by heart. So I could choose

Shang over and over and just perform lots of showy, gory moves over and over by morphing into every other fighter. At some point after my win streak reached double digits, I was stunned to see that the tiny crowd of spectators included famed comedian Robert Klein. In the 90s, Klein wasn't exactly a star, but I was

a kind of kid who watched tons of stand-up on cable, so I recognized him even when most my age would never have. Presumably he was there with the son. He was just waiting for him to finish, playing, but he'd definitely watch me and play and said, you're pretty good to me when I left. When he left, I can never recall another time in my life when a parent praised me for playing a video game. And this was a famous person. That's nice. Cool story. He kind of mentioned in here, like, the fact that movie theaters tended to put you up against a very random succession of opponents, usually not very good.

And I definitely have memories of like playing Street Fighter 2 and just wanting to play solo and little kids coming over and putting in quarters to play against me. And I'm like, you know, I don't want to just destroy you. But on the other hand, I was playing like on my own and it's kind of rude to just walk up. But on the other hand, you're like nine years old.

So there's always this kind of conundrum. Like, do you just destroy the kid? and be a jerk or do you let the kid have a round? Do you let the kid win? What do you do? Arcane etiquette. Yeah.

What is the etiquette there? I think you've got the right idea. Just don't destroy him so they can feel happy and then beat him. Yeah, I mean, that's what I did. I destroyed them in one round. Then I let them have the second one, just barely. And then the third round, I basically played hard to get and tagged him a few times. So I won with a timeout.

I feel like that was probably the nicest way to do it, but at the same time, I didn't feel like too much of a jerk about it. He wasn't happy, but his mom was like, whatever, kid. Whatever, kid. From Jeff Byram. I remember going to our exhibition center

with my parents for the various home and garden shows. What always made the trip worthwhile for me was the tiny arcade setup they had in the middle under a giant Ferris wheel. It was the only time I got to see her play killer instinct on the real arcade hardware. I was never very good at it, but it sure helped pass the time. So, yeah, that's one of the things that it's really hard to get across is just the fact that arcade cabinets were everywhere back in, like, the 80s.

Yeah. Yeah, they were. Amazing. Everybody wanted to make money on them. There's a time when they would pull in like $10,000 a week or something like that. I read in the early 80s, so people wanted, you know, they wanted that extra income. convenience stores and everything and the operator would take a cut or whatever you know whoever had to own the machine and put it there but then the store owner could get a certain

percentage of it which is cool it's a lot of money yeah how many machines do you have to have to bring in $10,000 a week just one machine could do that what I'm not kidding like the perfect location 1300 when they were new yeah I mean you how many quarters is that that's that's That's almost 5,000 quarters. It's a lot of quarters. I'm not talking the golden age. I don't know if that's actually physically possible to do. 5,000 games in 24 hours.

Okay. It was a lot of money, though. You can have me do it with a handful of machines, though, like at their peak popularity. But I just know, they were raking in the dough. I mean, when they were new arcade games, you know, were novel and interested. late 70s kind of They must have really hated people who like knew the Pac-Man pattern

or who could play Defender for 10 hours on a single quarter Well that's the reason why You know the Miss Pac-Man guys came into being Who create a hack of Pac-Man to make it So you couldn't play the whole game on one quarter Because it has random elements

And the mazes change and stuff So it doesn't have the pattern There's a big market for those after-market modifications and I've done Miss Pac-Man article on Fast Company too Other play Not surprised to hear that. Uh, from Adrian Piper.

My favorite memory of the arcade is the sound of it as a whole. When I was growing up, it's something that I took for granted, walking into this noisy room with hundreds of sound effects going off at the same time. As arcades disappeared from where I live, my only source for this piece of nostalgia is a contending retro gaming conventions like the Midwest Gaming Classic. Yeah, they had their own sound. That's definitely true.

From Joseph Kuhnig, um, I was a total arcade rack. growing up and saw the decline of the industry firsthand by the time I was going through high school. Still, I love reminiscing about those days and hope you'll enjoy my rambling, even if those stories don't make it to the podcast. Beating the six-game, six-player Konami X-Men game with a new group of strangers every Thursday evening when my dad would tip me to the local arcade. Of course, there was no shortage of beat-em-ups around, but none of them had the novelty value and cultural cachet of playing six mutants at once, including the best,

Dazzler. Dazzler was awesome. Yeah. I know you wanted to talk. about the game. I love that game. I mean, there's one, the six-player one was, it has at least two monitors, right? Two monitors? Yeah. It may have been three. I think three was exclusive to Taito. I think they did that with Darius and Ninja Warriors. I don't know, but either way is awesome. I mean, it's stretched across, I think it was three screens. I'm not, I'm pretty sure. The biggest one. Someone will write in to correct whoever was wrong. Well, we could look it up right now. We want to. Could. But whip that. Why, why break the flow of the conversation with Google?

Yeah, well, we can edit it. Okay, 10 minutes is past. Speak for yourself. You're not the one doing the editing. No, that game was great. I mean, it's just, that's probably the greatest beat-em-up arcade game. There's just something about it, the way it flows, the way, you know, it has these appealing

characters and appealing enemies, and there's also the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. It's really good. Yeah, we've talked about the X-Men game on the show before, and the consensus is that it was meant to tie in with it came out around the same time as Pride of the X-Men, that cartoon. Yeah, yeah.

And that's why you get that very specific mix of characters because by the time the game actually came out, those characters were not the active roster for the X-Men. Like, Dazler had banished a long time before that. Yeah. So you had like Wolverine, Colossus, Dazler, Nightcrawler. Cyclops. Cyclops and Storm, right?

Storm, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So, and Storm was in her like, like, like the sort of silver outfit. She, she had, was that after the punk phase? I think it was. I don't know, but it's a great game. It took some liberties, though.

Like, Wolverine shooting lasers from his claws. Yeah, that doesn't happen much. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't know X-Men at the time when I first played the game, but the game got me interested in X-Men. So then I started reading the comics, and I went back to the game and it was like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What's going on here? Wolverine can't do that. Bub?

I played, you know, we were talking about Boxcar. The last time I was a box car, I played, you know, through that two-thirds of that game on one token. I got bored, and I had to hand it off to somebody else because it's just taken from it. So it's a game you can play through. They may have had a difficulty setting, you know, dip switch changed or something. But anyway, it's a cool game. For some reason, the fantasy, excuse me, Fancy beat him up in that vein that I remember playing most as Simpsons, which is weird because I never actually watched the Simpsons. Yeah, I didn't like the Simpsons.

But the game was great. Yeah, it was very eye-catching. You just had a whole lot of really great animations. That's a good game, too. Yeah. Bob has talked extensively about all the Simpsons games. I'm sure he has. I've heard about that.

So I wouldn't even dream of adding my two cents because I have nothing valuable to add. It's extensive novel. Although I do remember it has the thing where if you electrocute Marge, you see the bones in her hairdo. No, you see the rabid ears. The rabid ears, that's right, from the old designs. Yeah, like when she was going to be a life and hell character. Yeah, that's right. Cool.

Back when Simpsons was weird and fun. So back to whose letter was this, Joseph's letter. Seeing Street Fighter 2 for the first time and becoming immediately obsessed, then growing to love fighting games even more as Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter appeared, culminating in a Marvel versus Capcom 2 habit that could have paid for a year of college. I do remember the first time I saw Street Fighter 2. I was on a school trip to San Antonio and was just like walking around the riverwalk with some classmates, and we stopped into this small arcade, and I was just like,

what is this? It's crazy. I remember seeing a fight in Dalseum's level and there were like elephants doing stuff in the background while I was fighting and these huge characters beating the tar out of each other. It was amazing. I was instantly obsessed with that game. They had one of them, Street Fire 2 at a video rental store near my house and at the time Street Friday 2 came out. I remember thinking arcades were done at that point. They were not very popular and it definitely gave a new lease on life. one-on-one fighting genre. I guess I didn't have that sensation that arcade games were not popular, but that could just be because my friends and I went to arcades a lot, and there was no shortage of, you know, new games coming out around then. You had a lot of the, you know, the beat-em-ups like Final Fight, and you had stuff like Magic Sword, which was kind of like a beat-em-up, but kind of not. And you had shooters, and you had fighting games. And so it's just based on my perception, because it must have been during a period where we didn't go to arcades

anymore and we were focusing on home console. No, I think you're right. I think arcades were fading. And then, you know, Double Dragon and Final Fight kind of gave them a lift. And then Street Fighter 2 gave them a huge lift, but it also changed the makeup of what arcades were like. Double dragon. There's this, we moved

into, we moved to a new house in 87. And there's this kid down the street. He said, hey, over at the Hopin, which is this gas station, they've got this new game called Double Dragon. It's so awesome. You've got to play it. And I was like, whoa, double dragon. So, yeah.

Can any game contain the coolness of two dragons at once? Double dragon. Yeah, I wanted to play it, and I never, I don't think I ever played that in the arcade, except maybe recently, you know. Yeah, it was one of those that I did not see in arcades until after I had wrong the NES version and signed out. I loved it on the NES. Yeah, and the arcade version was so weird to go back to after, you know, mastering the NES version, because everything looks different.

Yeah. And basically all you do is elbow smash people, and you've got two people playing at the same time. But the frame rate is like crazy bad. If you ever go back and watch that video or that game in action, it's like super bad frame rate. It's like that sounds like not something that normally bothers me in a game, but it's so choppy in this one that it feels almost like, you know, a slideshow or something. Like a really badly loading animated jiff. It's funny. I was playing another old game recently.

I don't remember what it was, but I was just thinking it had a really bad frame rate. So I guess we're getting spoiled with these modern, fluidly animated platformers and things like that. Well, for me now it's, you know, going back and playing old hardware on a PVM and being like, oh, look, everything's so smooth.

After seeing years of old video game footage on YouTube, where it was always 30 frames per second, going back and when I switched my video projects from 30 to 60 frames per second, And people were like, whoa, this is weird. Game Boy at 60 frames per second is blowing my mind. And it does make it different. It just makes everything look more convincing.

It's weird because 3D games, I'm okay with a lower frame rate. But when it comes to older games, I really want that perfect 60 frames per second. If you don't synchronize the frame rate of the game or the output of the monitor with video, you know, it's not going to, there can be missed frames there. Yeah. They'll have like, well, like, NES games, you'll have. flicker. And if you have things flickering, alternating frames, then if you're only 30 frames per second, you're basically going to have huge chunks of graphics missing. Like, I can't imagine Gratius at 30 frames per second. That would be a disaster because I was trying to put together

the latest NES works book. And getting screenshots of Gratius that work was really hard because that game, even though it looks great in motion, like when you look at it frame by frame, it's constantly cycling through sprites because there's so. so much on each line. Yeah. And it really pushes the NES beyond its capabilities. It just has to cycle through them, yeah. Yeah, so.

You have to composite a couple of frames that you... No, I kind of found places where there's not a lot... You know, the NES is limited how many frames or how many sprites you can display on a single horizontal scan line. So I just had to find things where stuff wasn't all stacked up on a single row. So like, ships are coming from above and below and your options aren't lined up with the Viper and that sort of thing. But it was kind of tough.

Yeah. So, like, you know, you don't notice that at 60 frames per second. but how do we even get on to this? Double dragon. I don't know. This has become a micro episode. That's fine. Whatever.

This is free form, telling you. Back to Joseph's letter. You'll like this one, Ben. When the first DDR machine in the city showed up, DDR USA, and caused the formation of a whole social circle, including teams, competitions, both score and freestyle, and intense teenage rivalries. For the record, my handle was freefall, and our team name was Zero Gravity. our website still lives on through the internet wayback machine. Nice. So this is a thing you did, right?

I never really got into the, like, team scene or anything in DDR, but I did play it. I played it sometimes in the arcades, and then I got home versions later on, mainly because I could play video games and get exercise, which was kind of a revelation. But yeah, yeah, the arcade versions of DDR were great, just the sort of tactile feedback of the big buttons to step on. Yeah, and that definitely. was kind of re-vitalized, added a whole new section to arcades, but drew in a whole new crowd.

Yeah, that's true. That was something that I was never able to do because I've never played it. I know better than to make an idiot of myself. I'm too shy to dance. I can't even play Parapa, so forget about it. Yeah, you got to kind of not care. Or be really good, but mostly not care. But I am grateful that DDR happened because it really did kind of keep the arcays alive,

you know, after, it was kind of like Street Fighter, like, it kept them alive for a while longer. It's a whole new scene that sort of sustained itself for a one. Yeah, so, so there were still, you could still find arcades pretty easily up through like 2006, 2007.

So like in Lansing and San Francisco, you know, wherever I lived, I could find an arcade and it was mostly, you know, like kind of dominated by the DDR scene, but then they would have other stuff. And that's what I cared about. And it's long as it was like, you know, the sort of

the loss leader. Anchor it. What's that? Table flipping game. Sadly, no. As long as they have that, I'm happy. Yeah, I mean, there was a whole, I mean, more so in Japan than over here, but there was a whole, you know, Bimani explosion, all kinds of rhythm games with different controllers.

They had the, like, the Parapara ones where you, like, break the light beams with your hands, and it's supposed to be kind of like a dance. Wow. All right, so let's move on to a different letter. That one was kind of long and there's still more, but that's okay. George Mathis says, I was born in 1987 in rural southeast Michigan, So let's see, that would be south of Detroit. So arcades were few and far between, mostly far away.

There were the Western-themed restaurant near me, the Golden Nugget, with an arcade inside of a caboose attached to the building. My two younger brothers and I loved going into the restaurant and pumping our parents' quarters into the random smattering of machines. They got to eat and drink with friends peacefully, and we got to lose at 1943, Double Dragon, and Pinball. As I got older, and the Golden Nugget closed-up shop, the go-car track became the high school destination for DDR.

a few friends and some locals would crowd around on the weekends. I was never that good, but it was more about the social aspect, the experience and watching people sweatily glide through the hardest difficulties. Wow. So I thought the whole idea of video games is you didn't have to move your physical body to play them. Well, this is why it's a whole new crowd. Yeah. I'm joking, though.

I do miss when, you know, like, there would just be dedicated rooms for the kids to go off to and play video games. Yeah. They still, don't they, you know, bowling? alley still have arcades. That's the last time I went to an arcade in Raleigh other than Chuck E. Cheese, I guess. They took the bowling alley out of UNC. There used to be a few arcade machines down there. There was a bowling alley in the, below the student union. And there was, yeah, there was a smattering of machines down there. There's a bowling alley on Hillsborough Street that was legendary. I think it's gone and it's going to become a target. So, there you

go. So, you know, I graduated from high school in 1993. So you could still find arcades pretty easily back then. And the very, like the last, I guess, two weeks of my senior year, the school was kind of like, you guys are done so you only have to go half days, which was amazing. Like, I don't know if every school does that, but ours did, and it was the best. So for like the last two weeks of our school careers, they were just like, all right, it's lunchtime, go home. So my friends and I would go over to, there were a couple of bars that had arcades. And during the day, they didn't really, you know, it was fine for kids to go. And it was like 21 plus at night. But, in the afternoon it was just like come on in and play video games and so there were a couple of

different locations around town the copper caboose is what it was called and so most days my senior year like my last two weeks of high school my friends and I would just go and play magic sword and pit fighter and whatever else street fighter obviously whatever was popular in our kids right around then and we weren't the only ones with the same idea like friends that I'd had in elementary school or junior high who went to different high schools than me I hadn't seen them for years. They showed up too. They were all like, I was like, hey, what's up? I haven't seen you since sixth grade. Let's go play Street Fighter together. Hey, Jeremy, your voice has changed. All of us had, you know, changed voices by that point. But yeah, like, I miss that, that sort of, you know,

the social scenes. Yeah, that's true. Just the random, like, here's a magnet for people would like interests. You don't get that with arcades anymore, because there aren't anymore. Yeah. Reemption. Who can redeem the arcade? All right, from Noah Piasik. I have many fond arcade memories. Finishing six-player X-Men with friends at a birthday party. Encountering a super early version of Mortal Kombat 2 at a hotel in New Hampshire. Finding Super Mario Brothers 3 on a play choice machine in Mount Kisco.

Man, like, I have that experience. Not in Mount Kisco, but seeing that game before it came out on a play choice, you're like, why are the turtles so big? I saw it on Wizard, the movie. Yes. Yeah, well, before the release of the Wizard. Before the Wizard, David. Wow.

And my first encounter with Dragonslare in Space Ace at a mini golf course in Connecticut. It's fun to think about. But my favorite memory is my first finding and playing a Pac-Mania in 1987. Huh. Pac-Mania. That's not one you can really hear people talk about. Well, there was a Pac-Mania machine in Gatlinburg, and I played it every single time I went to, we'd go every spring. break to visit my grandma who lived in

Eastern Tennessee. So we'd stop by Gatlinburg, and I played that game a lot. Okay, refresh my memory. Which one is Pac-Media? That's the isometric version. Yes, C2O3D kind of... You can jump, whatever the ghosts. Yeah, you can jump. But when you hit jump, everything jumps. No, you can jump without

It's not everything. When I played it, like, I press jump and everything goes like all the bad guys jump too. That's some other hack you've played or something. That's the Namcoe Museum version. Okay, well, that one's screwed up, because nobody at NAMCO remembers what the original game is like. I saw that for the first time at the same trip to San Antonio that I encountered Street Fighter 2. That's cool.

When were you in San Antonio? I've been there once. Oh, I was probably like 1992, 93. It was late in high school. Yeah, I was there at the same time. There's this guy. It's kind of like you. Was it around spring break?

No, it was actually like 97. I was there because I'm a nerd for a math and science competition. Okay. That's how I spent my birthday that year. That's great. Very cool. But yeah, I remember seeing that in the arcade and being like, what the hell is this? Pac-Man is weird now.

Yeah. I love that game. That would have been 1991 or 92. So by that point, Pac-Mania was pretty old. So I didn't even know it existed before that. I guess it didn't make it true. I like it because you can jump over the monsters because you can have an escape. You don't get cornered.

Right. It's not as cerebral. But also, you can't see the whole thing. You don't like the cerebral games. I know you. Not competitive. Nothing that's actually hard. No challenge.

That's fine. That's fine. We're going to hack a custom dark souls for you. I like walking simulators. Look at a bad guy and they die. I like walking simulators. Dim souls. Dim souls.

I haven't actually played any walking simulators. I just got windows set up on my laptop. So I think I'm going to start playing more Windows games. Have you played? Okay. Go on. What's that? The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

I haven't played that. I love that game. I played everyone's gone to Rapture. I'm sorry. I haven't played that one. But anyways, that wasn't in an arcade. In two years, we can do an episode on those games. Okay.

So you're then. All right. So finding and playing Pacmania. I grew up in Connecticut, but would frequently visit my grandparents just outside of L.A., and there was this monstrous arcade in their area. It was in a building shaped like a castle with three mini golf courses surrounding it. Was that an Aladdin's castle? I don't know.

Sounds weird. This place blew away all of my East Coast arcades in terms of selection. As a huge PAC fan, seven-year-old me in 1987, was blown away not only by Pac-Mania's isometric-ish POV, not just by the jumping, not just by the way more than four ghosts per level aspect, but it was the music. Whoever ran the arcade ensured that the speakers on the cabinet were turned up to the max. That pack-quarter insert sound was loud as I dropped in my first quarter and had and my pack expectations bar totally raised.

Your pack expectations? Pack expectations. That's good. Great pack expectations. I remember that classic novel. Bring me the tokens. I would like more quarters. I think that was all over twist. Never mind.

All right. After a few plays, I had the song to the first level memorized and then whistled it for the rest of the day to my older cousin's annoyance. She still holds it against me. The song to the second level had more of a cool vibe as compared to the playful, easygoing song on level one,

I couldn't whistle that one as easily. This is without a doubt where my love for game soundtracks was born and my fandom for all things pack was truly solidified. I cannot remember the songs. As many times I played Pac-Mania, I didn't find it memorable enough to remember. I didn't know it had a second level. It has a Lego level that looks like Lego blocks. I think that might be a second level.

It's really cool. I think I've seen that. My favorite Pac-Man game is Pac-Man collection. No, not Pac-Man. It's the Pac-Man, on the Pac-Man collection on the Game Boy, and it originally came out in the first Namco anniversary arcade thing. It's one of the rarest, neatest thing. What is that game called?

Pac-Man Collection for Game Boy Advance. You can get that on Wii View Virtual Console, actually. I have it on the Game Boy Advance, too, but I'm just saying it has a port of an arcade remix of Pac-Man called Pac-Man Arrangement. I think it's one of the two Pac-Man arrangement games, and it's just, that's my favorite version of Pac-Man. I need to go check that out.

Yeah. All right. From Nathan Hill, two favorite memories. Going to the mall with my father, mother, and little sister. My mom and sister would head off to the hair salon, and my dad and I would walk up to the arcade. He and I would take turn after turn playing the Star Wars sit-down arcade cabinet. Yes. What can I say about that game that hasn't already been said?

It goes without saying that it is awesome. However, what makes it stick in my head is my father and I playing it together, trying to beat each other's score, just the pure happiness of the experience. My father and I always shared a love for Star Wars, and this is just a happy memory. My second is not as emotional, but for some reason it stuck with me. We were camping at a resort near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and of course, they had an arcade near the camp store. All the campground kids could be found either there or at the pool every single day. Anyway, one particular summer I can always picture as my playing two tigers and time pilot

in the arcade while Madonna's Lucky Star played in the background. What is two tigers? Is that a shooter? I have no idea. I'm not familiar with that one. It sounds like twin tigers should be the real name. I don't know. I don't. It's like a to, no, it's Tiger Helly.

A total plan shooter. I don't know. You stump the rich on that. Dang. Wow. Good job. You win a no prize. Somehow the music got me into a groove, and I always played better when that song was playing.

It got to the point where I would head to the jukebox first and queue up Lucky Star before dropping my quarters into the machine. Even now, more than 30 years later, whenever I hear it on the radio, My mind flashes back to the 80s, and that summer spent playing arcade games, checking out the older girls, and just being in a kid. But Star Wars, man, that was one of the things I wanted to go back to. That was an amazing game. It was an amazing game.

Voice samples. And that whole era of like, of like, vector graphics, just the amazing things they did with vector graphics. Yeah. That was another game that I remember from that San Antonio trip. It was like, and these were all at different places. There were all these different little places where you could play video games all along the boardwalk. So all throughout the weekend that we were there doing the math and science competition, we kept bumping into video games.

So this was like 10 years after that game came out. And I was like, wow, look at this old game. That's crazy. So I dropped into a quarter and was like, this game is still awesome, even though it's like super primitive looking. It's crazy. I think this is actually one of the ones I ran into at Disneyland when I was a kid. They had it in their arcade there. And yeah, it's just like the trench run on that.

So amazing. You know, I went to middle school with a kid whose father worked on that game. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And it was in Raleigh. And his, I can't remember his, Desney was Owen something. It wasn't Owen Rubin. Was it Uncle Owen?

Uncle Owen, Aunt Baru. Oh, my God. Don't go back home, Uncle Owen. Bad things will happen. But that blew my mind because I was in seventh grade and I was already big into Atari collecting and stuff back then. This is like 93, 94 or something. So I couldn't believe someone else knew what the Atari 800 was at that time. We talked about it.

But his dad had worked at Atari. Oh, go ahead. Oh, it was just in the other one from that area that you had on your list. It's Tron, which was also amazing. And it's cool. And it had this whole variety of different subgames in it, but all done in the same aesthetic. All of them were like rip-offs of other games. And none of them were actually that good.

Yeah, the light cycles game is, the light cycles is unique. It's snake. It's not exactly snake. It's competitive snake. You're collecting things and you get longer and longer. Right. I mean, you're creating the trail behind you. Light cycles, you're just trying to cut off the other guy and make them crash into your train.

Right, but competitive snake does that. Okay. Well, light cycles is just. It's good. It's just good. No, so the thing is like none of the games were original and all of them were a little on their own, but the presentation of Toronto was so good.

Discs was a really good air hockey club. Translucent blue joystick. I mentioned that I have one. I have a home Tron joystick that was meant to look like the arcade game. Nice. Can you use it for your NES? It's an Atari thing. I mean, you could always build an adapter if you really like you. You should. You should use that for everything. Like

Xbox 360. I think it's not good. To a party. Yeah, I'll just pull out a case. Oh, that I brought. A maple wood case. Yes, like a, like a with latches. Like a haliburton. a caliber in case It's all metal Pardon me guys

It's gonna be Red Velvet lined Crushed Red Velvet Pull out my trache That would be so nice You should I also remember the end being Really frustrating though

The like Master Control Showdown Where you have to like Yeah I only beat that like once or twice Yeah that was really frustrating That whole game experience takes like Two minutes

It's like They have that in box car You go through those things really fast And then you die They have that Boxcar That's last time I played it

All right well We're gonna go We're recording an episode We should Let's bring one of those Field Recorder thanks. We just need to

bring this whole setup and be like hey guys hope you don't mind set up on an extra power pug plug or three that's just two

just two just too. Um, yeah. Okay. So Tron was, was very cool. Doesn't have like a high resolution screen? Like 5.12? Yeah, because it wasn't because it was doing like, if I'm remembering it. Like it was doing a vector graphics aesthetic, but it wasn't actually a vector machine. It was drawing these things in Raster. And sometimes you would get games that had like 512 pixel resolution as opposed to 256. And you kind of needed that to have smooth looking lines drawn in Raster. Otherwise they'd everything. would be super chunky. Yeah, one of the kind of weirder ones that I didn't realize until recently was Nintendo's Popeye,

which has these like super clumsy looking blocky backgrounds, but then all the characters are drawn in 512 resolution mode. So they look very detailed and very precise like cartoon characters.

It's possible that they were drawn by different boards and overlay. Probably something like that. The NES version does not compare because it's just like standard resolution. But the arcade game... That's what I'm thinking.

Mario Brothers that effect on the fireball is so weird. It feels like it was generated outside of a computer. No, I think it's just pallet cycling. I remember noticing that and being like, oh, that's really cool. But I think it's just like the use of palettes. Whereas, yeah, I think you're probably right about Popeye is like there's two different graphical generators or something. Because the backgrounds are so chunky and like super low resolution, like Atari 2,600.

But then the characters are like double resolution. Oh, we were talking about that on the Sega episode where they're, like, could just keep adding boards and processors to make the game more complicated and just overlay the signal, which they couldn't do on a home console. I mean, they kind of could with, you know, with add-on chips. You know, like remapper chips and that sort of thing.

Or, you know, lock on technology or whatever. Most people didn't do that. You only really hear about it with Nintendo stuff. Yeah, the FX stuff. But, but yeah, it, you know, like basically putting a

co-processor in a cartridge and letting it do the heavy lifting for you. I mean, it's super off the things like the... Hey, I did the slideshow about game co-processors. Did you? Was it on past company? Oh, PCMag.

Other one. It's all about the chips. In the, like, the Sega, there's a Sega 3D chip for... Do you have, like, a central repository for the stuff you talk about? Benjedwards.com. There's a gigantic list that scrolls down five pages or whatever, 10 pages of everything I've written.

I don't know. I feel like I need to start categorizing things by a theme or subject, because there's just so many things that... I started putting together articles that are just like, hey, here's stuff that I referenced in the latest retronauts. I think I need to do that for you. Yeah. That would be, like, you keep talking about all this stuff you've done, and then there's no way for people to just casually find it. Yeah.

I think I'm going to start doing that, like, a mega post on everything I've written about, whatever. Good plan. Okay. All right. Here's another letter. We're going to, this whole second half is basically just letters, but that's okay, because this is all about, like, yeah. Yeah, it's all about experiences. So I'm really happy with the way this is turning out, honestly.

from Kyle Overby I went to high school in North Texas in the late 90s and while a local mall featured a sizable tilt arcade with a giant pirate ship shooting gallery the real treasure was knowledge no wait it was a place out past

all the DFW suburbs called Tornado Terry's out in Keller, Texas across some railroad tracks in a metal corrugated building that could generously be called a shed with me and my friend's favorite arcade tornado Terry's business model

was charging a flat entry fee and inside all the machines were set to free play. They did have some machines that required tokens like ski ball. And you can never leave. That's right. And you just pink champagne on ice all the time.

But basically anything that wasn't designed to dispense tickets was covered by the initial fee. The machines varied from classics like Pac-Man and Gallagher to full sit-down cabinets for games like Cruze and USA. But even the newest ones were a few years old and not in the best condition.

Terry's may never have had the latest and greatest, but it did have all the essentials you'd want for a group, including four-player versions of Konami's TMNT, X-Men, and Simpsons cabinets, and a few others that supported three players, like the Alien vs. Predator Brawler by Capcom. Never heard of that. Oh, I saw that once in Nakano Broadway in Tokyo. Like, some dudes were playing it, and it's, it's like, you know, Street Fighter 2 level

quality graphics, but in a brawler version, you've got a, you know, you play as one of two predators, or you can play as one of two humans. One of them is Dutch Schaefer, you know, Schwarzenegger's character. And one of them is a Japanese girl named Lynn Kurosawa who has showed up in a few other things. I've seen videos of this, but I haven't played it. And you

are just beating the stuffing out of aliens. Like final fights kind of thing? You scroll around and like final fight. But like dozens and dozens of aliens coming after you at last. And you can get like pulse rifles and I think the predators can turn invisible. Like it's, yeah, it's like each character is very distinct and very

cool. But it's very like hyperactive, almost like shooter levels of tons of enemies coming at you and you just... Yeah, I saw that for the first time a few years ago and it was just mesberized. I was like, how did I miss this? It is. It's by Capcom. Let's see. Tornado Terries also had a number of NeoGeo MVS

systems which featured great co-op games like Metal Slug. Even with this bounty of fighting, racing, and brawler games available to us, there was no question about my group's favorite game at Tornado Terries. It was bust a move. The game was set up in a sizable arcade cabinets featuring a large screen and seating for two players. We'd spend hours of this one machine playing

rounds of verses with players rotating in and out, occasionally wandering off to play something else for a bit before returning to go for another few rounds. It was our tradition to play this game anytime we went out to Terry's, including the last time a sizable group of us made the trip out during our first college winter break. I haven't been to tornado Terry's in more than a decade, but every now and then I get nostalgic to see if they are still in business, and every time I check, I'm a bit surprised to discover they still are. They haven't been swept away by a tornado yet. Not yet. The price of injury has gone up from $8 to $15, but their very 90s website proudly declares they've been in business for 27 years and are still going.

I hope they never go. They never close. That's great. That's not bad for all that stuff on free play. Yeah. I would be a good business model. I would freaking go there and spend $15 for an afternoon of being awesome. It's not bad at all.

Also, I love Bust to Move. I love that game. By what you mean, puzzle bobble. Yeah. It's great. Especially in the original version and not snood. Yeah, not snoo. Although Snood is one of Steve Wozniak's favorite games.

He always talks about that. He just is like, oh, you can play that one on a Macintosh. I mean, I discovered Snood before Puzzle Bottle. I talked about that on a Puzzle Bottle episode, actually. But Puzzle Bable is definitely the best. The best, yeah. I never played it in the arcade. I feel like I may have seen it once, but I just...

Yeah, I saw it once in the arcades. You know, I've played just about every other version. I mean, I've played it on an emulator, arcade emulator, but I just love it. All right. Finally, one last letter from Rick Moya. The greatest thing about arcades in the 80s was that you didn't necessarily have to go to a dedicated arcade. I did most of my gaming in a bowling alley with my father bowled in a league.

We didn't have a home machine until almost the 90s, so this was my first taste of a lot of games, especially when they brought in the PlayChoice 10. In a way, this foretold the shift to Nintendo as the home powerhouse and away from arcades, as people left the pinball table alone and lined up their quarters to get three minutes of Super Mario Brothers or the Goonies, too.

Wow. I prefer the multiplayer experience. Gauntlet, heavy barrel, and quartet were my primary rotation as long as I could team up with someone to attack. The beat-em-up wave was hugely attractive, and when an NBA jam hit, I couldn't get enough of it. I'd walk to the movie theater near my house, not to see a movie, but just to play NBA jam on arcade hardware, rather than my less impressive Genesis version. For me, it was always about the communal aspect of gaming. As the arcades went away, so too did my enjoyment of playing. Aside from the occasional session of Golden Eye or Mario Kart 64, we just weren't playing together anymore.

Actually, the best thing about the arcade might be the buffet-style offering of different games. I thought I miss playing with others, but when I went back to Japan right after college and found that they still had arcades, I got already back into it, even if I was there by myself. When you buy a game and sink hours into it right away, there's not much chance of being surprised by something different. But in an arcade, especially the multi-story ones in Tokyo, you might turn a corner and see something you never imagined. And for the minimal investment of 100 yen, you can try it and learn new things.

Those 2001 Drummania sessions were how I knew I needed to buy Guitar Hero. Wow. You know, I always felt to play Choice 10 was a bad deal, because I had an NES at home. Why would I want to play it at the arcade? I don't know why anybody did it. It was there as a way to check out new stuff. Check out games you didn't have. Although, although I sort of had the same feeling, I would gravitate to the SNK multi-game caps because I sure as heck didn't have a NeoGeo at home. So that was always fun. Didn't they have a memory card slot? You could take your game, save game home and put it in your NeoGeo console. I don't know. They did. Yes. I don't know if it worked for every game, but yeah.

That was one of the big selling. NeoJez were ridiculously expensive. Yeah, they were. I was never going to have one of those. In 1980, whatever, nine, whatever. So, yeah, getting to play like, what am I thinking of?

Dark Stockers and, no, that's kept. Samurai showdowns. Yes, the samurai showdowns and metal slug. I played that at Putt Putt. I actually played that. I actually finally played all the way through. I think it was Metal Slug 3 because they had

a cabinet on free play at the game room at Animazement here in Raleigh a couple years ago. That's cool. Yeah, it's a great series. Metal Slug. I'm not very good at it, but it's great. But if it's on free play, everyone's good at it. Yeah, everyone's true. Although you do kind of lose

a little something when you're just responding every 10 seconds, yeah. Yeah. I made it through a lot okay. Towards the end, I was responding a lot. As soon as I, in the early two, 2000s, I bought an arcade home stick that has real arcade buttons.

I had two player things. And I set up a maim, you know, a computer with maim on it. And the first thing I did is invite my buddy over and we just played through every game we could never get through

all the way. Like we did X-Man, we did Simpsons. We did Incheon Churals. We did, you know, Metal Slug, all the metal slug games. It was just fun.

And then we never played them ever again. Yeah, I mean, we just wanted to see them all the way through. Yeah. just basically brute force my way through Final Fight for Super NES, and I

don't ever actually want to play that again. I don't think I've ever seen the end of the Simpsons Arcade game. It probably involves Mr. Burns doing something. Yeah, isn't it like in a mecca or something? I don't remember, but if you have infinite credits. He's inside Crades, robot body. Crings, sorry. Wow.

Cray's. Anyway, so I think we're kind of winding down here, but there are a few things, Ben, you put in the notes that you haven't talked about yet, Kung Fu? Yeah. It's not the I-RM game? Wasn't it done by I-R-M or?

It was, yeah. Okay. I just remember seeing it. I always wanted it on the NES, the port of it, I think, is published by Nintendo. It was actually co-developed by Nintendo. It was, okay. Yeah, they did some work internally on it. I saw that the black, in that black player's choice book or whatever it was called for the Nintendo, the Kung Fu.

I was wanted. Official Nintendo players. So when I saw the actual arcade. game, I just, I thought it was awesome. I don't think I'd ever actually seen the original arcade game until like two weeks ago. And there was a karate champ, too. Karate champ, Data East at that same place. Yeah.

And while we played a copy of it called World Karate Championship by Epix on the Atari, which was really good. And so when I saw Karate Champ, I was like, oh, it's just like the other game. But it was, yeah. You know, there was a lawsuit about that. Yeah, I think so. I remember that. No, I know there was.

It was a kind of a look-and-feel sort of thing. It helped shape the future of video games. Yeah. Well, that's cool. That's karate champ's one contribution to video game history. Because it's not actually that great. Yeah, there's a weird little ref guy in the middle who's like an upside down you. He's just like really squat.

He does look weird. Yeah. I don't know. It has a weird control scheme where you use like dual sticks as opposed to buttons. Yeah. So it takes a lot of. It was hard to. Couldn't play. I haven't played that one. All right, let's see.

We've also got like After Burner on here. After Burner. We talked about these in Sega. We did. Afterburn. Yeah. We're going to talk about Golden Axe in a future Sega episode. Okay, cool.

But you can, you can spoil it a little now. I mean, it was, I love the fantasy setting. The graphics are good. It seems like altered beast level era graphics. And it's a great co-op game. That's how I love the most about it. Yeah. To play with a friend.

And it's just, It's just so well done. I don't know. It's the feel of it. There's always this about games the way the graphics and the sound and the execution of how you play it come together just to make a cohesive experience. And that's one of those games that has that, you know, if you took any one of those elements out, obviously the graphics. But if the sound's not good, you know, and everything else is great, it's just not a perfect game. But if it's got great sound effects that are satisfying, it's like the coin clinging and,

Super Mario Brothers. Yeah, that's one that has a lot of sampling in it. So there's like the little gnomes who come in and steal your stuff while you're in between stages. I think that's a lot of what it has go for it. Because you play, I mean, I played GoldMax with people in college. And you play it a bunch and you start to get to the point where there's just not that much to it in terms of the actual game. But it has such a, but it looks good and it sounds good. And yeah.

Yeah, if you play it for five minutes with a buddy, you know, at the arcade until you die, it's fun. Right. And that's why those games are front-loaded with content like that because they just aren't really that's substantial. Yeah. So you're only going to play for like five to ten minutes. But you can hop on a dragon

and smack things on its tail. Yeah, I forgot that. Yeah. You see everything in the first ten minutes, but it's okay because that ten minutes is like, oh, it's so fun. Yeah. And then you lose interest.

Well, and then you get one more, one more hit when you, like, finally fill up your magic bar all the way and can do, like, the top level magic attack, and it fills the screen with gravity. Yep.

I remember that. Great game. You got joust on here. That's good going old school. Well, I love, I always love joust at home, but, But I saw it finally in an arcade in the early 90s in Gatlinburg, and I was just so hard to just go flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, all the time.

I thought, oh, I'm so great at Chels. And, of course, I did that on the button. Like, I don't know what I was playing it on, Atari or something. But just in the arcade, it felt impossible for me to do. Yeah, I can see that. It does get a little tiring. I played Defender, too, at that same place. I remember that.

I just played Defender in the arcade for the first time in decades at long. Long Island Retro Expo, and I forgot that every control is like button-based. Yeah, every single one. It's like, you don't have a joystick. You're like, there's a reverse button, there's a thrust button, a fire button. I'm like, I can't wrap my head around this. Jazz Rignall is like apparently some sort of defender savant. You can play for dozens of hours on a single quarter and just like melt down the machine.

Like he literally melted the machine once. I just, I cannot wrap my head around that. the control scheme. And now I look back and I'm like, oh, that's why I never played this when I was a kid because the control scheme is just so difficult. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, the home ports kind of

normalize it a bit and probably break the game in that sense because, you know, if you control it with a D-pad, then it's different. Yeah, everyone can do that. Or a joystick in my case. There is, I think, you know, asteroids is all buttons and

Lunar Lander. Yeah. I'm a Lunar Lander. I tried playing that in arcade once. It's so touchy. The vector. Yeah. Precursor to asteroids.

Yeah, I just did a Lunar Lander video on Game Boy. Right. And they tried to keep it authentic, but they added some weird stuff to it. Like you, you know, it's kind of based on the Atari game. It's not licensed from Atari, but, you know, that was kind of like a public domain concept in the way because it started out as an academic game. But they add like a section where you lift off on the shuttle and have to take the orbiter up to orbit and then you release the shuttle. And then after you do the lunar lander part, then you switch to a top-down perspective and you walk around the moon digging for ore. It's weird.

Does it become like Hanyanko alien? Yes, it does. Actually, I made that comparison in my video. Wow. Well, in 2009, I did a whatever 30th anniversary of Lunarlander, and I discovered the guy who created Lunarlander Jim Store, and I contacted him, and I got his source code and everything like that. And I wrote this long article about it on Technologizer.

It's one of my big in-depth features where I was looking into the origins of games. And I talked to him and the guy who did it on a GT40 deck system, and then Howard Delman at Atari saw the GT40 version and did it at Atari, and I called Howard and talked to him about that, and it was just fun. Nice. So that's another less. I need to check that out. Yeah.

Yeah. So I really need to put together a list of these things we talk about. Any of these, anything you read about Lunar Lander usually goes back to my article. That was like the first one about, talked about the origins of it. Okay. I did not realize that. Cool. Yeah.

You're sitting in the room with. Damn. A Lunar Lander guy. The source. Yeah. The font of all wisdom. Fonter of something. All right.

You've got a mention of Donkey Kong three here. No one likes don't think of all three That was one of those things that showed up at Pizza Hut When they kept they changed out their machines every few years And it was in a cocktail version And it's you know You play what is it Sid the Bugman or something Stanley Stanley the Bugman yeah

You're spraying Donkey Kong So he doesn't and he's dropping bees Beehives on you and stuff Just The lack of Mario really I wonder why they didn't make Mario the guy with a sprayer You know I put some thought into this And what I noticed is that Nintendo's early protagonists all use a different mode of action.

Popeye punches, Mario jumps, and Stanley shoots. And I think because they wanted a shooter, they didn't want to put Mario in that role. They kept each protagonist character distinct in that sort of mechanical way. So I think that's, and also they were spinning Mario off into Mario Brothers. That game shipped within months of Donkey Kong 3. And Donkey Kong 3, by the time that came out, Mario wasn't like a little. legendary property, you know, at that time. It wasn't like...

No, but he was familiar and popular. Like, people liked Mario. You know, when Mario Brothers came out, they had that weird Mario Brothers car 54 parody commercial. Or I tried. You don't remember that? No. Mario, where are you?

Oh, wait, no, okay. I have seen that, yeah. I've probably seen it on YouTube. But the thing is, is it wasn't anything close to like it was by the time Super Mario 3 came out for example. Of course not. Nothing was. Like Pac-Man was. Yeah. Donkey Kong was. But they recognized that Mario was kind of like his own thing. So they started to spin him out. Stanley is not a jump man. He's not. He's a bug man. He's always pointing up, isn't he, with his shooter. A little shooter spray. I guess it just wasn't a dignified enough role for Mario, shooting a monkey in the butt.

Maybe not. One last thing on your list on your list that you need to talk about. It's one last perspective on it. It's a different perspective on it. It's rolling thunder. Oh, yeah. I talked about it a little bit on Sega things because you compared it to Shinobi. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. I don't know why, but I loved Rolling Thunder just because of the graphics. The sprites were big and it had a lot of detail and it just seems so cool to run around and shoot guys with a gun, like a real person and a real thing. Shooting Klansmen. Yeah, neon Klansman. The neon Klansman with the hoods. Doesn't it have some kind of like, close-up of the guys with the hoods, like, there's a, in the beginning, like, they kidnap

somebody or something. Yeah, they kidnap Agent Lila, who is the playable character in the Length Under 2. Oh, yeah. And then there's, like, a green guy named Malmob, Marbo or something like that. Marbo, Marbo, Marvo, Marbo, Marbo, Marbo. Something like that, yeah. But he's like this lumpy green, alien-looking guy who apparently is the leader of the hooded Klansmen guys.

But have you ever played, like, more than just the first stage of that game? The further you get, the weirder it gets. It starts to kind of go a little cookie once you get to this area with pits of fire. And there's like men made of fire who jump out and attack you. And then you get a little further and there's these man bat things that like swoop down. They're like giant vampire bats with human faces. So they're bat supremacists? I don't even know what they are.

It's a, it gets weird. I can't make it past that part because the last. time I played in an arcade, the machine did not work all that well. It was a Long Island Retro Expo also. And it was not a well-maintained machine. So kind of didn't go left when I needed to. Also, you don't get, you don't get continues in that game, just one quarter. It was a game where at the time I did not know of any home ports of that game. I didn't have it. But so we would, me and my brother would always really look forward to playing that game and we went to the arcade for some reason. We just,

thought it was awesome. I don't even remember why. Just the graphics. Yeah, it's a cool looking game. It's got style. It's got style. And they did, they did bring it out for NES, but it was a Tengen unlicensed game. So you couldn't just go to Walmart and buy it. You had to find one of those shady rental stores that would offer it. Yeah. I feel like my, like, this is amazing. You can't do anything like this at home game was it was afterburners. Yeah, after burner. Oh, they did that one at home too on NES from Tengen. Yeah, we talked about that. Yeah. You could not do that at home. Yeah, no. No, that just

didn't work out. Yeah, but not the one where you could go up and go down. I talked about that and I'll say. No, I mean, the ADS version proved that you could not do this at home. Yeah. It was a sad attempt. Anyway, yeah, sorry. Did I write anything else in the notes? I don't remember. Oh, I've got right here. I was just like, I printed it out on paper.

Not about arcade games. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think we're good. I think we're good. I think we're good. There's this big skateboarding boom in the late 80s, 89-ish. And, um, these skate shops started opening up. They always had a 720 machine, 720 degrees, you know, Atari games game.

And that was a cool thing. And I think it had a trackball, right? In the middle, trackball. It might have. It could explain why the NES port is so bad. Yeah, but I love the NES port, which I have a very small story about that NES port. I'll never be able to tell anywhere else, which is that. Go for it.

My brother bought 720 for the NES, and he loved it. And he was going to take it to a friend's house. So they put it on the back of my dad's car, like the hood or the trunk or something. And they went to a friend's house and he's like, where's my game? You know, where is it? And then they realized he left it on the car and it fell off in the street. And they went back to look at it on the street. And it had been run over.

But we took it home and it still worked. We put it in. So I still have this cartridge that's all cracked up on the top part. Because, you know, the circuit board is down at the bottom. We had no idea at that time that there was so much empty space. most Nintendo cartridges. Yeah. And so it was crushed, but it still worked, so we played that for years. So the season finale of Silicon Valley was based on you.

It was? I don't know. I'd never seen it. What is Silicon Valley? It's a TV show. Yeah, but what's it based on? What is that? It's based on the fact that Silicon Valley is full of assholes. I'm just kidding. All right. Well, I think with that, we've talked for quite a while. this was a full-length episode, by golly.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in, you padded this. I mean, you greatly enhanced this episode. Jogged our memories. I have one more thought. Okay. I was just thinking, this might be a good place to add this, which is that, you know, we were talking about some of those early people who wrote in that were younger than us. And the babies?

Yeah, and there's other people who probably listen to this, who are 20 and stuff. And I want to say to them that, you know, you should be welcome and share. this history and heritage because when I was a kid and I tried to get into things that older people did, a lot of them would be like, oh, you're too young to like the Beatles.

You know, you weren't there, but that's how cultures die and histories die if you don't pass it on to the next generation. So I hope we can pass on our love of retro gaming to you so you can pass it on to others. Yeah, I mean, when my nephews come over

and they're like, I just want to play NES games, yes, by all means. Yeah. I mean, last time my seven-year-old nephew came over, he just wanted to, like, sit there and go through all the ROMs on my analog NT. And I was like, yeah, go for it. He was just basically, like, looking for games that had interesting names. And he picked stuff that wasn't very good. He was like, Mystery Quest, this sounds interesting.

It turns out Mystery Quest is, I'd never played it before. It's not good. Very good. Is that a Mickey Mouse game? No, you're thinking a magical quest. Magic Quest, yes. Mystery Quest is just kind of a clumsy-ish platformer. It's okay, but it's not great.

But no, it was just, it was fun. And, you know, he's like, he wants to play Zapper games, even though he doesn't quite get the fact that you actually have to aim. He's just like, I'm shooting at the screen. I'm like, well, yeah, you have to shoot at the ducks. You have to, like, look, there's a site on here. You use it. And it's okay.

He's still young. But, I mean, he's enjoying the video games. And he contextualizes NES games. through Minecraft. He sees them and he's like, you know, these are, these games look like Minecraft. They're blocky and boxy,

just like Minecraft. And I'm like, okay, if that's what it takes for you to take an interest in this, that's fine. Like, play these old games and, you know, experience something other than just

what people are YouTubeing. That's great. Yeah, it doesn't matter if you weren't there originally. I mean, no one alive has witnessed the original Beethoven, for example.

And someday all the people say, oh, you're too young to enjoy this. Mitch McConnell has. Yeah, maybe. him, but everyone else. He was angry about it. Yeah. So there you go.

Kill the arts. All right. So anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks those of you who wrote in at the last minute. It was great of you. You made the show better. Benj, Ben, thank you both for coming in.

You're welcome. This, of course, has been Retronauts with me, Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts on iTunes, on Podcast One's network on the podcast One app. Retronauts.com on Twitter and Facebook as Retronauts. That's R-E-T-R-O-N-A-U-T-S, not Retronauts as in Zero. That's not it. Anyway, that's where you can find us. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite, making bad dad jokes and video game references and retweeting angry political screens. Benj? I'm Benj Edwards. I'm a writer, and you can find me at

Benjedwards.com and at Benj Edwards on Twitter, and I've got a Patreon, patreon.com slash Ben Jedwards. And I need your help to keep going with this history stuff. And... I'm Ben Elgin. You can find me as Kieran on Twitter. That's K-I-R-I-N. And I also have a blog of old stuff at Kieran's Retro Closet on Tumblr. Only one N in Kieran there. And yeah, that's about it. And finally, Retronuts, I forgot to mention, is supported through Patreon as a post. As in addition to the advertisements that you heard at the break, we're just greedy. We want all your money. I'm sorry.

That's just how it is. Podcasts are not cheap. They take money to make, especially all the gin that I keep getting these guys. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. And it's good stuff. Like, a bottle of chartreuse is 60 bucks. My God, that came out of my own pocket.

I shouldn't have dropped the whole thing. It was good, though. It was worth it. It's very tasty. Anyway, so, yeah. You can find that at Retronauts.coms. Or no, patreon.com slash Retronauts. I do that every damn time.

And for $3 a month, you can get early access one week ahead of everyone else for each episode. And also, you get the episodes in higher bit rate quality. So it's a great deal. Anyway, we appreciate your support. Even if you just listen, just tell your friends how much you enjoyed listening to these old people talk about old video games and saying that it's okay for young people to like them too. because that's what it's really all about is sharing the love of video games.

And we'll be back next week with more talk about old games and again soon with a micro-episode and we'll keep doing more of these loose personal recollection episodes because they're fun. So please look forward to that. And caller,

for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire. was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue. Thank you.