Monday, August 31, 2009

Raiding the River.








In 1982 Activision released the classic Atari 2600 title, River Raid. I received this game by trade with a fellow student at my elementary school, a steal since he wanted to trade it for my copy of Demons to Diamonds.
In River Raid your tasked with...well...using your jet fighter to raid the River of No Return, destroying tankers, enemy jets, and helicopters on your way. This was one of the first 2600 games that I can remember where fuel was a concern, luckily you could refill by flying over a fuel tank...assuming you didn't shoot the thing when it appeared on the screen...ahem, not that I ever did such a thing.
You had to be quick with the Joystick as the canyon walls would sometime narrow or even a landmass would appear forcing you to choose a path to fly through. Most often the path I chose would be incorrect and as I looked at my flashing fuel gauge I could see a tank mocking me from the other side of the canyon walls.
Of course the real challenge was obtaining 15,000 points so that you could secure the River Raiders patch, I even heard they let children fly commercial airliners if they saw that patch...that's what I heard. Apparently the highest score you can achieve is 1,000,000 points. Which I can only hope would net you a real jet fighter.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Because Stewed Hamm asked for it...


Loyal reader, Stewed Hamm, made comment that the people behind the Dig-Dug picture a few days ago put too much thought into it...and wondered what they might do with Burgertime. Wonder no more, dear readers. Only cringe as the Egg does as you steel your nerves to look upon this painting.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Supersized Saturday Supercade!




Can you really go wrong with...Pacula?

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Some more Saturday Supercade.


I know I've wanted to say that to Toad a time or two.

Still Saturday Supercade.


Just a really scary picture of Dig-Dug.

Still Supering the Saturday.


M is for Megaman Little 8-Bit Book.
Thanks to I am 8-Bit for the pic.

Saturday Supercade.


Yeah. Contra toys.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Flyer Friday.





Click the pics to make 1977 size!
Hmm, something about those space craft in the top pic reminds me of a movie I once watched as a whelp...can't place my finger on it.
I have not had the pleasure of playing Star Cruiser but both Boot Hill and Desert Gun were at a local skating rink when I was younger. A place that had concrete floors, perfect for young skulls when they lost balance, bellbottoms, and an overpowering stench of the 70's.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

It must be Thursday.


What more can you say?

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Box art Wednesday special.









Over at Intellivision World I found this interesting interview with the lead box art designer for the Imagic Intellivison games. It's kind of long so pull up a chair and get a glass of your favorite beverage and read on:

Inventing the graphic artist
With nearly thirty years of experience in electronic and traditional entertainment, Michael Becker worked with designers, artists, writers, software teams and production houses worldwide. In 1982 Michael created one of the first ever group of artists to work with programmers: a privileged witness in the rise and fall of the Imagic legend.

Mr. Becker, when did you start working for Imagic?

I applied for a job there in 1982. I had been working as a creative director for a small ad agency in the Bay Area and read a Time magazine article about how videogames (coin op games at that time) were going to be a big industry. I was sick and tired of the noise of printing presses and promised to look for a new job as my New Year's Resolution. I saw an ad in the paper and was one of 350 people who applied as Imagic's Art Director. I stayed with them through their entire lifespan, including working on contract projects with Parker Brothers and Bantam Electronic Publishing, and even helped do an unpublished Sherlock Holmes game with Mark Klein after they had closed their doors and put everything into a shoe box.

Was that the first time you got involved in the videogame industry?

I had been involved in designing, writing and illustrating a few board games before that - a fantasy game about Eastern Middle Earth named Sword Lords and a sci-fi roleplaying game called Star Rovers. I worked on these because my hobby was quickly becoming fantasy wargaming and I was lucky I did those projects! Imagic held onto these games for a week, showed them to president Bill Grubb, and before I knew it I had been hired. They also mentioned that the programmers didn't do very good game art, so would I mind helping with that, too? I said yes, how hard could it be? Well, before long Wilfredo Aguilar joined me there (I had worked with him formerly), and we created the first videogame art department. We could usually do all the graphics for a game on a weekend or so, using an Atari 800 with a joystick, driving software that Bob Smith and Rob Fulop wrote for us.

How do you remember the industry of the 80ties? Was that a romantic approach compared to today?
It was real small compared to today. I walked in to interview a couple days after Demon Attack had appeared at their first CES, and the phones were ringing like crazy. We grew really fast and before we knew it we were working on all the platforms of the time, primarily 2600 and Intellivision and then porting to Coleco and Vic-20. I did a couple Odyssey games, using characters instead of graphics (demons were the letter 'V' and the cannon was the letter 'A'. Shots were an I). It was real exciting, helping design our first trade shows, multimedia presentations, and even helping build the booths. But it crashed so fast that the romance ended rather quickly and seeing all my friends being laid off really soured the game industry for me for a while, so I joined up with Rob and we started doing multimedia projects for Apple and other very cutting-edge stuff as a contract design firm (first called Interactive Productions and later pfmagic). By then it was the late 80s and we did some CD titles for Philips but I realized these projects were getting huge and that they required big budgets and teams, so I went to EA in 1992.

Why Imagic decided to use such a different approach from other companies?

The 2600 games were designed to look cool on black backgrounds. That was what everybody thought looked great, so that became a signature look for those screens. For Intellivision, Brian and his guys had created a slick toolset to build those games, so they got a lot of UC programmers and we created tons of Intellivision games relatively easily. Those had a more colorful display and we used it. I was particularly pleased at how my 'searchlight' design for Atlantis on the Intellivision worked out. The big dragon in Swords & Serpents was pretty cool, too. Brian didn't want to keep it because it was so memory intensive, but I made him do it.

How did you choose the subjects of the boxes? Did you test the games still under development to understand the plot of the story?

The boxes just sort of evolved. At first Jim Goldberg's marketing group (one of the two groups I managed art for; the other was engineering) tested a bunch of box designs and one kid took a foil box and hid it on his lap he wanted it so much. They decided 'That's the box we want!'. It was real expensive to print on it because you had to print white ink first, let it dry, and then print color on top of it. But it really gave Imagic a unique graphic look. As for the images, Willy and I looked at the first models (such as the rubber demons with the rockets stuck up their behinds) and said 'We can do better than that! And cheaper, too.' So we built the models in the evenings and on the weekends and had them professionally photographed. As for the stories, we just sort of made them up. I remember talking with Bob Smith. He wanted to do a game that used a play mechanic like jacks, where you used the joystick to sweep up things, and we both loved the Hobbit, so we somehow came up with the idea of Dragonfire. I put a lot of sprites together to make an animated dragon and Bob did all the hard work.
Were other people involved in the process?

Always. We had one other game artist, Karen Eliot and quite a few people in the art department, designing beautiful things. Wendy Zeto was the art director for most of the print material, as I quickly moved to become Creative Director since I knew that making the games was where the action was, but I still managed the Art Department.

Who made the models that you use for making the pictures?

All of them, except for the demons of Demon Attack and the model for Star Voyager, were made either by me or by me working with Wilfredo Aguilar. I still have a few of them in the attic.

What was the technique used to realize the pictures?

We worked with an optical house, Full Spectrum, who did multimedia shows (slide shows in those days). They shot the models on black and used a lot of the same compositing and lighting tricks that were being used by the first Star Wars films, but only on single 4x5 images. I think it cost about $2000 to make a final image.

We know Demon Attack box art was suddenly changed after the launch of the game, making the original version of the box a precious item for collectors. Are you able to finally reveal the truth about this choice made by Imagic?

We didn't think much about it. We were working with a very talented painter and he did a great painting of demons over a moon, so we used that when it was finished. Nobody particularly loved the first box art at that time; I guess it's something that had to grow on you ;o) I kept the last rubber demon and gave it back to Rob several years later. We put it up on the pfmagic Christmas tree for a while. A couple years ago I 'returned' the Star Voyager model to Bob Smith at the Classic Gaming Expo, after a long orbit of the solar system. He donated it to their museum.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Ducks. Really?







See that last picture above this text? Get used to that screen if you decide to brave the soul crushing NES game, Silver Surfer.
Long have comic fans dreamed of wielding the awesome might of the Power Cosmic, rightfully so as it awe inspiring abilities have thrilled readers of the Silver Surfer comic for many a year. Too bad that the designers of the NES game didn't realize that it might upset fans of the character if he were to be relegated to merely throwing white balls of light and that the Surfer's legendary stamina was brought low by a...duck. Yes, a duck. If you happen to connect with anything in the game as you are flying the Surfer is toppled from his board and you get to start the level over.


For Villains you get to go against the likes of the Emperor of the Skrulls, Firelord (Isn't he a herald of Galactus too?), Mephisto, Reptyl, and the Possessor. Now I really do not know who the Possessor is...I will let you more educated readers in the sequential arts fill us in.
Now these aren't really the worse of bad guys I guess but considering that Galactus at the beginning of the game sends you to combat the evil of the Magik Domain...you have to wonder what they have to do with the realms of Magik. I can kind of see Mephisto rearing his head in all of this but Reptyl?


But wait...there is yet another villain that must be conteded with in your quest...the mastermind of all this threat. That villain would be...Mister Sinister. Now how come the powers at be that created this game decided to use an X-men villain instead of the likes of Thanos is beyond me. Further more what he has to do with the Magik Domain is equally obtuse.
The Silver Surfer NES game has the distinction of being one of the hardest games for that system but that title comes from it being a broken game not in the skill required to play it.

Monday, August 24, 2009

It's Alive!




When I first saw this game advertised in Electronic Gaming I was pretty excited for it to arrive at the local Wal-Mart...sadly it never did. Years and years later as the Emulator became common enough for even someone technologically ignorant as myself to install I was able to enjoy this strange little game.
You will start off with a white colored Frankenstein's monster at the top of the screen, as the level progresses and more lightning strikes hit the monster he will gradually become all green and break out. Three levels separate you from the monster and it is your task to carry bricks/stones up to the top level, one at a time, so you may wall up the monster. Of course this would be a little easier if you didn't have to worry about the ghosts upon the top level, spiders and pits in the center, and the need to ride a floating timber in a pool of acid on the first level as well as more spiders. If you make it up to the third level you will be presented with a new screen in which you must run through bats to place the brick/stone in place.
While this game plays basically like a Pitfall clone on the whole it lacks a reliable collision detection system so when you jump on a log to safely cross the acid pit, even though your feet are touching it, you still fall in.
When you lose your three lives you are 'treated' to the monster breaking free and stomping towards the screen. In fact, I found a better player than I on Youtube so enjoy:



Saturday, August 22, 2009

Still Saturday Supercade.


I guess sometimes you just need to build Donkey Kong shelves.

Saturday Supercade break.


Yeah, I know this doesn't have anything to do with gaming but the fact that at one time you could have bought a WKRP in Cincinnati DJ playset just blew my mind. Besides it was in the 80's so it still fits the blog, right?
Oh, one more thing..."Booger!"

Saturday Supercade.


Ah, when video games were blitzing the world.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Flyer Friday break.



It was later than I wanted but I did say I need to review that M.A.S.H game for the 2600.
In this game you are tasked with filling the shoes of Hawkeye Pierce as Chief Surgeon of the 4077th...before he decided to believe a woman had killed a chicken on a bus.
In the first level you must pilot your helicopter in rescue operations of the wounded soldiers out in the field, while avoiding the trees, your fellow M.A.S.H surgeon in the other helicopter, and the North Korean tank at the bottom of the screen firing shells at you.
Once you've brought a soldier back to the camp, it's time to race against the clock and remove the shrapnel from the dying soldier, the controls seem to be a precursor to the Intellivision's Bomb Squad.
There is a third option with this game, a different helicopter game on a high difficulty level where you must rescue Colonel Potter's paratroopers. I don't remember Colonel Potter having paratroopers but its been some time since I've watched the television show so I could easily be in the wrong about this.
I might have to get an Atari Emulator and snag the ROM for M.A.S.H because it sounds like a pretty interesting title.

Flyer Friday.






Of course you should click the pics to make them readable.
Apparently the guy in the last pic, bottom right hand corner, has never played a pinball game before. Just remember...no phone line/full privacy.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

It must be Thursday.






WHAT MORE CAN BE SAID?
I APOLOGIZE ABOUT SHOUTING SO LOUDLY IN THIS BLOG BUT ALL WILL BE MADE CLEAR AROUND THE 20 SECOND MARK!

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Box Art Wednesday.






Movie related box art for the Atari 2600 this time.
I've played Krull and SW: Return of the Jedi on the 2600 but I never had the chance to play M.A.S.H, though I might have to write up an entry on this blog after some research because it looks pretty neat.
I wish I owned the original artwork for that Krull box!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

"The Last Starfighter...


...is 25 years old. The Last Starfighter is 25 years old."
Did you ever notice that next to Grig's head is Xur's flying sceptre?
The Last Starfighter is obviously a huge influence in my life, I mean why else do I still hear Otis's advice to Alex every morning as I get ready to go to work, that man may have worked at a dinky little trailer park selling overpriced candy and soda...to someone...but that didn't make him any less of a prophet!
I rank this movie up there with Tron and Buckaroo Banzai in terms of movies that meant something to me as a whelp and still do. When in the next few months I pass on and my friends gather they'll most definitely say, "God, that guy sure had lousy tastes in movies!" But at the very least they'll check my coffin to make sure that who wrote these words and passed on wasn't a Beta unit...or Xandoxan.

This made me giggle.

Now some of this may indeed be true but with a headline like that, 'Average gamer is 35, fat and bummed'...which really just makes me laugh and laugh.



"Study: Average gamer is 35, fat and bummed

By Suzanne Choney
msnbc.com
updated 2 hours, 11 minutes ago

A new study says the average age of video-game players in the United States is 35, and oh, by the way: They're overweight and tend to be depressed.
Investigators from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory University and Andrews University analyzed survey data from 552 adults in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The subjects ranged in age from 19 to 90, according to the study, published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The hypothesis was that video-game players have a higher body mass index — the measure of a person's weight in relation to their height — and "a greater number of poor mental health days" versus nonplayers, said Dr. James B. Weaver III of the CDC's National Center for Health Marketing. The hypothesis was correct, he said.

The findings, he said in the article, "differentiated adult video-game players from nonplayers. Video-game players also reported lower extraversion, consistent with research on adolescents that linked video-game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status, and to mental-health concerns."
The Seattle-Tacoma area was chosen for the study, researchers said, both because of its size as the 13th largest media market in the United States and because its Internet usage level is "the highest in the nation." The study was done in 2006; the results analyzed in 2008.
While the study helps "illuminate the health consequences of video-game playing," it is not conclusive, its researchers say, but rather serves to "reveal important patterns in health-related correlates of video-game playing and highlights avenues for future research."


Female video-game players reported greater incidents of depression and "lower health status" than women who do not play video games, researchers said, while male players reported a higher BMI and more Internet use time than nonplayers.
The findings "appear consistent with earlier research on adolescents that linked video game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status and mental health concerns," Weaver and other co-authors say in the article.
'Digital self-medication'?One interpretation of the findings, researchers said, is that among women, video-game playing "may be a form of 'digital self-medication.' Evidence shows that women are effective at mood management through their media content choices, so some women may immerse themselves in cognitively engaging digital environments as a means of self-distraction; in short, they can literally 'take their minds off' their worries while playing a video game."
An implication of that, researchers said, is that "habitual use of video games as a coping response may provided a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction."


Fit the mold of the ‘average’ gamer? Or maybe you’re totally fit? Share photos of you and your pals enjoying their favorite games. We’ll publish the best!
msnbc.comAmong men who play video games, compared to those who don't, "male video-game players spend more time using the Internet and rely more on Internet-community social support," researchers said. "They also tend to report higher BMI and lower extraversion.
"These findings illustrate that, among men, the association among sedentary behaviors, physical inactivity, and overweight status observed in children and young adults may extend into adulthood."
Both male and female video game players spend more time than nonplayers seeking friendship and support on the Internet, the study found, "a finding consistent with prior research pointing to the willingness of adult video-game enthusiasts to sacrifice real-world social activities to play video games."
The data, Weaver said, points to the need for "further research among adults to clarify how to use digital opportunities more effectively to promote health and prevent disease." "

The greatest arcade games you've never played!






1) Laser Ghost
2) Buck Roger and the Planet of Zoom
3) Bazooka
Now as tempting as it is to play Buck Roger or a Ghostbusters knock-off I would have to say that Bazooka from back in 1977 is the game I would really like to play.

Monday, August 17, 2009

More Monday Points.

Following on the heels of the last post I now present a few more world record scores for your reading perusal.

Asteroids
Scott Safran
11/13/1982
41,336,440 points

Centipede
Donald Hayes
05/04/2001
7,111,111 points

Pengo
Rodney Day
08/13/1983
1,110,370 points

Zoo Keeper
Shawn Cram
02/08/2004
35,732,870 points

Just for fun I decided to see if they did in fact have a high score for Aztec and they did. It was even mentioned that a referee was present during the play on the Apple II. I assume that Twin Galaxies had a home computer competition one day.

Aztec
Rich Brawley
08/21/1983
1,003,282 points

Monday Points.

Was feeling curious about certain arcade game scores from ye old days so I took a quick spin over to Twin Galaxies to see what stood as the high scores for a few games.

Frogger
Pat Laffaye
07/22/2009
771,060 points

Galaga
Andrew B. Laidlaw
12/21/2007
2,729,350 points

Moon Patrol
Benjamin M. Falls
05/04/2009
903, 580 points

Q*Bert
Drew Goins
06/27/1987
2,222,220 points


Now of course these are the arcade versions of the game, not the Atari 2600 port, or other systems though they have those too. I wonder if there is a world record for Aztec? Unfortunately for you, dear reader, there are more point scores on the way today.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Surprising Saturday Supercade!













Well, http://www.80stees.com/, has made my day. It seems they've gotten in official Dragon's Lair shirts. There are one or two more on the site but I kind of liked the looks of these five, the topmost pic in particular. I'm happy to report that Space Ace is gettin' some love with new shirts as well.

Saturday Supercade Superbreak.

I found this article from the Washington Post, it's a couple of years old but still brings a very large smile to this old face.







A One-Man '80s Arcade Revival

By Mike Musgrove

Thursday, June 22, 2006



Peter Hirschberg caught Pac-Man fever a couple of decades ago and never fully recovered.
He also caught fevers related to Dig Dug, Asteroids, Frogger, Defender, Q-Bert -- and just about every quarter-eating game that used to occupy the afternoons of his childhood in the early '80s, the golden age of the arcade.
It's not unusual for aging Gen-Xers to work through some nostalgia for the old days by playing the occasional round of Pac-Man on their cellphone or Joust on the Xbox 360. The retro stuff has never really gone away; it just gets periodically repackaged on new gadgets or products such as the Atari Flashback, a game console designed to look like and to play games from the old Atari 2600.
But for Hirschberg, 40, who says he spent most of his childhood in arcades, that sort of experience isn't enough. No game-console controller could ever match the sensation of rolling that Missile Command trackball, for example. And that's why he's got an original copy of that Reagan-era arcade hit, along with a few dozen other vintage arcade games, fully restored and renovated and lined up in the meticulously maintained collection in his basement, which he calls Luna City Arcade.
"In my opinion, this is the arcade that should still be around," he said.
My friend Luke and I cruised out to Hirschberg's Linden, Va., home Friday to check out the collection and, dang, but the old games are still fun. By today's standards, of course, they are laughably simple: Where are the storylines, the Hollywood star voiceovers, the hip-hop soundtracks? And what, exactly, is that Dig Dug guy all about?
It's hard to believe that the video game industry, at one time, exclusively put out simple but fun games that didn't require long tutorials. And it's just as hard to believe that this whole collection of games could fit, these days, on a card that could slide into a cellphone or personal digital assistant. There's something elemental about these old games, produced in that cultural window between the pinball era and the advent of Grand Theft Auto, that's as timeless as a Chuck Berry song or an episode of the original "Star Trek."
Luna City Arcade is decorated with arcade-related board games, magazine covers and other such paraphernalia of the era. The arcade's carpet, in one room, glows with a sci-fi pattern of moons and stars, illuminated by overhead black lights. The soundtrack, behind the blips and pings of games including Joust and Q-Bert, is Hirschberg's Internet radio station, Retro Arcade Radio, which plays songs about video games as well as old-school Atari commercials.
Hirschberg says he was never the guy who made the high scores; he just loved the arcades. Sometimes he'll buy a game he doesn't even care for, just because it beeps out a certain soundtrack that he associates with '80s arcades.
The obsession reaches deep into the bonus levels: There's a store space in Winchester, Va., that Hirschberg fantasizes about buying. It was an arcade a long time ago, and Hirschberg would like to put the games back exactly where they once were. He would not open it to the public.
"I'm overly sentimental, in case you haven't noticed," he said.
The collection comes from all over -- some parts come from eBay, classified ads or online stores geared toward arcade-game collecting. For a while, Hirschberg worked for a local dealer, Coin-Op Warehouse, every Saturday; his only payment came in the form of the occasional classic game.

These days, he buys the games. The average machine costs him about $500, he estimates, though he could pay a few times that figure if he weren't willing to do the restoration work himself.
To keep the collection safe, the arcade is rigged with a webcam, equipped with audio, so he can monitor it from afar. There's also an alarm, with moisture detectors concealed around the room in case there's a problem with the water heater.
There are a couple of things you may be wondering about Hirschberg by now.
First of all: Yes -- he has a sense of humor about all of this. "Psychotic" is his description for his hobby, which, he says, just went "exponentially out of control" at some point.
And second: Yes -- he is married, with kids, and his wife, Julie, is more than cool with his collecting.
Peter gave Julie a vintage Tempest machine for their first anniversary, and, she said in an e-mail this week, she still considers that to be the best present ever; her initials top the game's high-score list. She's even a fan of the idea that Peter build a separate building to house the collection, which has by now filled up their basement and taken over the kids' former playroom. The structure they have in mind could fit up to 100 games.
The Hirschberg children, meanwhile, will occasionally humor Dad by spending some time in the arcade, but they'd really just rather play Pokemon or Harry Potter on their Nintendo GameCube. Kids.
You could say Hirschberg misses the '80s, but that sort of misses the point. "People tell me I'm reliving my childhood," he said. "I never left; everybody else just moved on." Most new video games, he says, are too violent.
Hirschberg has never seen an episode of "American Idol" or "Survivor" and doesn't know what "The Sopranos" is about. Don't bring up the new "Battlestar Galactica" series with him; he doesn't want to hear about it. He didn't like the VH1 show "I Love the '80s" because it was too snarky; his affection for the era is, most emphatically, not ironic.
And, really, he loves only about half of the '80s, anyway. There is a stopping point in his collection that he is reluctant to cross. The golden age of the arcade came to an end, after all, and for him, the end was around 1984, when the arcades started to fill up with shooter and fighting games.
"After 1984, there was nothing that interested me," he said. "I kept going back, but the old ones were gone."
His next project is restoring a copy of I, Robot, a hard-to-find game designed by Dave Theurer -- the same guy who once upon a time wrote the programming for Missile Command and Tempest.
Theurer, in a phone interview yesterday, said he agrees with Hirschberg's take on when the golden era of games ended. "I enjoyed the puzzle and strategy games, not the beat-the-other-guy-down ones," he said. "When the kick-punch-type games came along, it sort of lost the thrill for me."
After the thrill was gone, Theurer eventually left the video game industry. He now works for Citrix Systems Inc., developing the user interface for the company's Web conferencing product.
The latest jewel in the Luna City Arcade is Tron, a tie-in with the 1982 Disney movie in which Jeff Bridges plays a programming and arcade-game-playing whiz who, basically, gets sucked into a computer game. And yes, it seems fitting that such a game would be in Hirschberg's collection.
Getting all the pieces for this job and putting them together was a six-year process; at some point, the Tron cabinet had been converted into another game, called Choplifter. Restoring the game to its original pizza-parlor glory involved buying pieces off eBay, replacing a joystick controller and even getting the game cabinet painted at an auto body shop.
My friend Luke and I ended up playing games at Hirschberg's place for about five hours. After a while, our wrists had to take a break. Over potato chips, Peter Hirschberg had a question for the world: If you know you like something, why move on? Why, for example, is disco everywhere one day and then universally ignored or even hated the next?
"I never understood that mentality," he said. "You love something -- then it's a pariah. For me, it's like: 'Wait, slow down. I still like that.' "

Saturday Supercade break.


Just taking a break from the Saturday Supercade madness to see how the saving the arcade drive is going. Feel free to check the earlier posts to see Montgomery Wards catalog madness.
Hmm. Survey says:
60,774,775 for Arcade UFO
41,284, 925 for Starbase Arcade
22,293, 675 for Game Galaxy
21,572,757 for Star Worlds Arcade
This points donation drive will run until October.

Son of Saturday Supercade.


Click the picture to enlarge this offering from the 1982 Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog. While I owned the belt and buckle presented above I thank the stars that my relatives didn't get me those Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man plush dolls pictured in the lower right corner. My God, what happened to them? Pac-Man has bloodshot eyes and his wife looks like she is completely drunk. "Give ush a kissh, Paci-poo."

Saturday Supercade.


I'm sure some kid had to put on their best smile for their grandparents with this gift.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Flyer Friday.







Click the pics to make arcade size.
I swear that in the Millipede flyer that man is whispering really frightening things to the woman, "That's right, Doris, keep playing this arcade game in the woods...little Timmy's life depends on it."

Thursday, August 13, 2009

It must be Thursday.


Now normally this space would be devoted to a weird arcade game I've found...but not today. The picture above is for an online game that is being sponsored by Stride gum, no, I haven't sold out to the man. Well, no more than usual I mean.
This game Zapataur is an important thing for when you play the game, your score can be 'deposited' into four accounts. Stride gum is allowing four arcades about to close their doors forever the chance to hit the continue button. Arcade UFO, StarBase Arcade, Game Galaxy, Star Worlds Arcade. The winner when all is said and done will receive $25,000 from Stride gum so they can continue to stay open. If that isn't reason a reason to play their game I don't know what is.

Copy and paste the link below to find out a bit more info.

http://savethearcades.stridegum.com/

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Box Art Wednesday.




Airwolf
Action in New York
8 Eyes

The Action in New York game was also released under another name, S.C.A.T., which like the other two games presented today were constant shelf warmers at Curtis Mathes.