When playing Gauntlet I would say “blue wizard needs more quarter power”.
Never thought of a billiard ball being used. When I watched, the ball seemed to be plastic, but a billiard ball makes much more sense. And I agree about the flatter slope being easier to get a billiard ball back to the top. But the strength of those flippers to do that—phew! Must have been much more powerful than any other flipper coil on any other machine.
I recall replacing one of the flipper coils on my own machine (1974 Gottlieb “Out of Sight”), and was surprised at the strength of the flipper when I tested it. Damn near crushed my finger. I can only imagine that the flipper coils on “Hercules” would break my finger if I was careless.
Oh man - so many memories. Of the ones mentioned already:
Battlezone - quite a lot of quarters spent on that. I always enjoyed the bit where the other tank fired at you from a distance and you would just back up and turn and watch the little pyramid go by.
Temple of Doom was a lot of fun, mostly for the voices. “Kali-Ma will rule the world!” < whipcrack > “Aieeee!”
Spy Hunter - mostly I played it for the soundtrack, to be honest. I was never that good at it.
Addams Family Pinball - definitely my favorite pinball game of all the ones I’ve played.
Death Race - I remember that too. The challenge of course was that if you hit a cross/grave, you died, so the more “gremlins” you ran over, the harder the game got.
Tron was fun, but even better was Discs of Tron with the enclosed console and speakers behind you for effect.
Not mentioned:
My go-to game was the scrolling eight-point shooter Heavy Barrel - I usually managed to get to the end boss within 2-3 quarters, and the final battle with the console screaming “YOU DIE! YOU DIE!” loud enough to vibrate your guts really got the adrenaline going. Twirling the directional shooting dial was a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome, however.
Least favorite:
Ghosts 'n Goblins. Start game, count to three, lose armor, count to three, die. Every. Single. Freaking. Time.
Half-remembered:
I’ve been trying to find the name of a game I used to play that used the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto (in delightful 8-bit sound) as the background music and involved cars on platforms. After some searching, it appears to be City Connection (or “Cruisin’”). I know that I played it because of the above but even watching videos of it I don’t remember what it was like to play. Weird.
True 3D meaning that things got smaller in the distance, etc. Until then, games were all 2-D – up/down/left/right. This one let you move forward and back, things were behind other things and shooting at you from the front and back, rather from the top or the side.
It doesn’t have two screens or colored glasses and a two-color monitor or anything like that.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, there are other places around here with lots of classic games – Barcade is a small chain, I think. You all should look in your area – I bet you could get your game on!
Mid-1970’s:
I would play a “Pong” clone with a friend - we both got so good that we would play “first point wins”, which would take about half an hour. We would then pass the machine off to others who would reach the 11-point game-ending maximum within minutes.
On “Breakout” I always got the max, but two or three screens was the limit. “Super Breakout” was more of a challenge.
I could never master “Asteroids”, and I usually got gobbled up in “Space Invaders”.
Insert coin!
I really liked the vector graphics games.
Top would be Tempest.
Second place would be Battlezone
And then there is the OG, Asteroids.
I loved Spy Hunter and played the shit out of it.
There was another game I played frequently at my local arcade and I cannot remember the title. It was a sci-fi style side-scroller where you were piloting a ship that could join up and merge with another piece and then turn into a robot, Robotech-style. Man, I loved that game. Anyone remember anything like that?
When the arcade folded, they sold off their games to anyone. This was not, I think, a popular game, so I had a chance to buy the console for super cheap, but I was a teenager with little $$, so by the time I pooled resources and got the cash together, someone else had already bought it. Teenage me thought if I had been able to get it and install it at home, I would have been the Coolest Kid in Town. Alas.
I also liked the karate games, like Karate Champ:
and Kung Fu Master:
I wasn’t very good at games (still not) so I favoured the simpler ones like Pac-Man, Moon Patrol, or Scramble. Also, I grew up in an area where licensed arcade games were not the most commonly seen, and instead we got almost-exact-but-slightly-different remakes from Japan. e.g. Crazy Kong instead of Donkey Kong, or Galaxian II instead of Galaga.
There wasn’t actually that far to go in Zaxxon IIRC. The whole thing just started over when you beat the robot at the end of the third level. I mostly played the PC port, but it was pretty good as far as PC arcade ports go. It was mostly just a matter of memory as the levels were always the same.
Oh yeah… Spy Hunter was like 3/4 James Bond, 1/4 Knight Rider, and all cool to 11-12 year old me.
We always loved Gauntlet the most, I think. Partially because we were already fantasy/D&D nerds, but also because it was the first co-op multiplayer game we were aware of. Four of us could get on there and play at the same time with each other.
Me and my buddy from back then still make old school Gauntlet comments while we play! “ needs food… badly” is not uncommon to hear out of us.
Outside of that, the single player game I think I liked the absolute most was good old Missile Command.
This thread got me thinking of a lot of old games. Where I lived there were a couple of arcades within 30 minutes that had a lot of the popular games. But then there were drugstores, convenience stores and such that had one or two games, and often these were unusual and hard to find.
A drugstore near me had Tag Team Wrestling. Fun to play and watch:
Another store had Wacko, which I have only seen in the wild there and never again since:
I mentioned Tapper earlier, which was one of my all time favorites. Very challenging at the higher levels, and I was good at it. I liked games with unique controls, and Tapper had a standard joystick and two beer taps. I don’t think any other game used them:
One arcade near me had Super Pac Man, which again was the only place I ever saw it in the wild. I didn’t play it much, but I liked watching some of the sequel games that took something familiar and added new wrinkles.
The only game I was mildly good at was Tetris.
My favorite game to watch other people play was Mortal Kombat.
I would occasionally fantasize about winning the lottery, buying a Lunar Lander machine, and getting good at it.
Honorable mentions:
Spy Hunter
Defender
Tempest
Joust
What was the one where you could play a Tarzan-like character in a loincloth, or a Jungle Jim-like character in khakis and a pith helmet, but they never actually used the names?
One was Jungle Hunt.
Don’t shoot the food
Went down a rabbit hole and found it! Hyper Dyne Side Arms!
Used to play the heck out of Karate Champ (mentioned above) and Yie-Ar Kung Fu
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And I saw Tag Team Wrestling mentioned above. IMHO, a notable improvement was Mat Mania – which was probably the best I ever got at an arcade game.
Pitfall maybe, or the better Pitfall 2? I only played them on Atari and C64 and don’t know if there were arcade versions though.
Damn, the wiki link doesn’t work properly because of the ending exclamation mark. I don’t know how to fix this, but following the link you can scroll to the video games section and click the link for the article there.
DocCathode got the one I was thinking of. Initially it was Jungle Hunt, with a Tarzan-like character. After the Burroughs estate sued, they changed it to a guy in safari gear, and renamed it Jungle King.
Has anyone actually seen a human being playing Toobin’?