In 1983 at Showbiz Pizza I discovered not only a game but a band that I quite enjoyed, Journey. Until inserting my token into the coin slot I had never even heard of Journey but considering my musical taste was still firmly set on the Beatles and the Monster Mash I'm not surprised.
The story for the game is that the band's instruments have been scattered to five different planets and you take on the role of each band member as he attempts to secure his instrument. A new feature for the Journey game was that each band members face was digitized and placed on a video rendered body. The technology had been originally designed to take pictures of the high-score holders for an entirely different arcade game...but it was scrapped when a female player flashed the camera.
After collecting up all the band's instruments you took on the role of a roadie who had to stop the screaming masses from storming the stage and stealing the instruments again. Not an easy task. Another nice feature to the game was that is played midi versions of Journey's hit songs.
Looking at Twin Galaxies scoreboard tells me that the world record holder is Joe Maurizi with a total of 10,000,125 points and it was set on 07/07/1983. He also holds the record for Journey: Escape for the Atari 2600, a marathon record of 83 hours and 16 minutes. Cripes!
5 comments:
I would love to play this again...
I would like nothing more than to see you get this wish, lad.
This was THE game at the Skate Place in the early 80's.
Unless you were a freak like me and played Pengo all the time instead.
Journey was a very hard game to play. At least for the 9 year-old version of me. But lot of very cool stuff they put into that game, technology-wise.
Also, how many bands have their own video game? (at least in the pre-Guitar Hero era) Not too many - and a really weird grouping. Journey, Aerosmith, Wu-Tang Clan... am I missing any?
Man...I didn't even know about the Wu-Tang clan one. Kiss had that pinball game.
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