Does anyone remember these? I know that old video games are treasured and remembered well, but before pong and other games there were a bunch of what can only be described as mechanical arcade games on the arcade market. My encounters with most of these were in the various arcades on the Atlantic CIty boardwalk before they were all wiped out in favor of the Gambling Casinos.
Basicly, they would use mathcbox cars painted luminescant colors and attached to rods in a sort of oddball babbage engine. One game had you change lanes to evade other cars on the track (cars glued to individual rollers for the lanes) another had a machine gun you used to try and shoot down ‘distant’ luminescent biplanes (again, small models on rods.). Yet another was a ‘bombing’ game with a mechanical curved earth with various targets.
None of these was particularly memorable except for their clever use of pre-video technology. I was wondering, since there are ‘video game museums’ that preserve the classic Pong and other games, were any of these old games preserved? Or were their cabinets salvaged for the rapidly growing video game market?
Also, I remember a baseball one. But maybe that qualifies as pinball. What you would do is push a button and a steel ball would come out of the middle (the pitcher’s mound), it would roll down and you hit another buttom which would cause the bat to swing. The ball would shoot up and hit a target which would dictate if you got a hit or were out.
That one is either relatively recent (~10 years ago) or was around for a long time. I was pretty damn good at it. It gave out baseball cards for doing well. I had a nice little selection.
we used to ski at a place in Maine that had a baseball game, and one that was a skeet shooter. they would be on rods, and if you hit one the lighting on the (transparent) image would change to show it shattered. I played it when I was really young because I thought you were shooting at alien flying saucers.
One was a racing game with…boats, I believe. It consisted of a single boat you could control by sliding left and right across a scrolling film background. Not that exciting once you’ve been through the scroll once or twice.
The other was called “Chicken Plucker” and was a shooting game. A friend of mine who collects arcade machines had it in his garage. I don’t think he ever bothered restoring it…mostly because it probably wasn’t that much fun. Basically, you had a wooden gun mounted on some kind of apparatus built from rods and hinges which would knock down pop-up targets when you pulled the trigger, if you were oriented in the proper direction. Zzzz.
I remember one, a driving game, where there was a toy car mounted on a bar in front of a rear projection screen. You had a gas pedal, brake and steering wheel, the last of which would crank the car back and forth on the bar. Put in your coin and a film would be projected on the screen with ancient movie traffic scenes including cuts to pedestrians almost stepping in front of the car, trolley cars passing by, and the like. I don’t remember the gas pedal doing much, but the steering wheel would make you miss things and the brake would slow down the projector. There was some kind of scoring involved but I was too inept to achieve one; I remember thinking driving was so difficult that I could never master it (I was like five at the time).
I remember the baseball game also. The Italian restaurant where we went for special treats in the early '60s also had a bowling game, where you slid a puck over some wire sensors, which when hit would cause pins to be pulled back. My brother and I played this every time we went.
I remember playing a very odd one.
It was like one of those wooden marble labryinth games but it was very large.
The marble would race over a sculted landscape that looked kind of like the game board from LIFE with the streets and plastic ramps. It had a steering wheel to tilt the board left and right and a foot pedal to tilt it front and back.
The whole time there was this simulated car reving noise that would speed up the more the board was tilted. Bizarre.
There were several models of the baseball game (known as a pitch and bat) made in the 50s and 60s. Each position on the field led to a different outcome (single, double, etc), and in some models a ramp was located on the pitcher’s mound so that if a ball was hit ‘out of the park’ it would score a home run.
In 1994, Williams came out with a new one called Slug Fest that featured variable positions (the far left may be an out one batter and a double on the next). The ramp was also variable in that it would raise and lower, depending on the batter. It also used the DMD monitor like modern pinballs (and baseballs stadiums) used. Finally, many were set up such that every time you scored a run, you won a free baseball card.
The other game you are talking about is a shuffle bowler. Again, there have been several models made over the years, the oldest using the analog scoring wheels while the newest used the DMD scoring. The good news is if you want one for your home, they tend to be dirt cheap/free. The bad news is that is because they weigh a ton.
Of course I’d like to get one of each for my game room, along with a Chexx bubble hockey game.
I remember something similar to this. A family friend had one in his basement that used balls about the size of grapefruits with a single hole in them. But the “pins” were operated by the sensors, and they folded up under the scoreboard. It was about 8-10’ long and I’m sure was, as TommyTutone says, heavy as all hell.
Makes me wonder if it’s still there in the basement. . .