Does anybody remember this old arcade game? You were a gladiator that moved your sword and shield and tried to get past various armored opponents.
It was a really old side-scroller game, but the fighters were larger than most of the games of that era. I especially enjoyed the fact that pieces of armor would fly off with each successful hit. What happened at the end of this game?
YEAH!! I loved that game, way back when! I don’t know what happened at the end of the game, but I do know that you made it into a castle and had to fight a woman or two. To my adolescent mind, seeing the woman in a bikini was as close to porn as a 11 year old could get. gulp I’d play that game for hours…
Way back when I was working at Le Fun (the arcade that’s been on Guadalupe here in Austin, for decades)…
I came into work at 3pm one day… when I got there, I saw that there was this guy playing Gladiator- I noticed, 'cause he had quite a crowd around him. I asked my boss what the big deal was, and it turned out the guy had been playing since we opened that morning, at 9 or so. The funny thing was, he wasn’t a regular- none of the employees could remember ever seeing him before.
He’d been playing on one quarter. At that point he’d racked up so many extra lives that, when he needed to go to the bathroom, he just went- sure, he’d lose maybe twenty lives, but it didn’t matter.
He stayed there all through my shift. We ended up staying open all night for him.
The next morning, though… he suddenly looked at his watch, said, “I’ve got a test in ten minutes!”, and bolted out the door. We never saw him again.
One thing I’ve always wondered about that game: is it common for the name “Irene” to be pronounced with a long E, like “Eee-rehn,” or was that just a pseudo-ancient-times conceit on the part of the announcer?
And notice that of the three fighters previewed in the game’s idle mode, she was the only one the text didn’t insult?