(I still have the announcer's voice calling out "DRAGON'S LAIR!" in the attract mode seared in my memory).
> We were staying in a hotel or motel, and it was either attached to or had a small arcade of its own.
For people who didn't grow up during the 80s arcade boom. Arcades where everywhere. It was basically expected that every place that sold anything would have at least 1 arcade game. Grocery store? Check. Tanning Salon? Sure thing. Strip mall? Why, they'll have 2 complete deluxe arcades.
It was a looooong time from the death of Arcades to modern smart phones before we had something to do while hanging around most stores again.
The gathering crowd around an awesome play of a game really did happen back then. It's like the scene from Tron where Flynn is playing in his arcade. It was actually like that.
My older brother could play epic multi-hour long games of some kind of game I can't remember the name to (I think it was Pengo), racking up so many extra men that he could go for a bathroom break mid-game and let some scruffy novice kid (usually me) break in and play at the advanced levels for a couple minutes. The convenience store he played in would be packed with 20 or 30 people watching history happen. It gave every small town a local hero they could cheer for and every local hero felt like a minor god for the length of their quarter.
Well modern games are routinely criticized for any QTEs, even when used sparingly...
And it's a terrible, terrible thing.
That being said, my possibly flawed memory of those fighting games spiritual predecessor was a karate game which had 2 joysticks and no buttons for a single player to use.
Exactly. I usually call all of these recent games "Dragon's Lair ripoffs" especially the games from Quantic Dreams where it's just one QTE after another.
While I'm not really a fan myself I don't think these belong in the same category.
Dragon's Lair is pass or fail, you move forward or you keep repeating the segment until you succeed.
A game like Heavy Rain uses QTEs a narrative device to give different players different narratives. If you 'fail' the story becomes a different story, one where you failed at that particular event. You aren't expected to keep repeating Heavy Rain until you 'master' every QTE, you are expected to play through it once and have a somewhat unique experience that isn't the same as other players.
I had that experience you describe of only seeing certain games randomly, round about 89-90ish I think. 'Sin Star'. I only saw it one arcade on a trip, once, where I played it for 8 hours, it just blew me away. I spent years after that asking around, could never find it again, or anyone who had ever played it.
Another thing that I carry with me from that time is just how mind melting Defender was when it showed up. That game will always be the high water mark for me. I remember just staring at the controls for so long with my friends, just terrified. I remember the day first hearing that someone we knew had actually played it. We didn't believe it, we didn't think it was actually possible. But then of course it became THE game.
Hitting the arcade with $10 in quarters was just like, I can die now thank you very much
Holy crap the internet is AMAZING!!!!!!
I seriously asked everyone i came within two feet of about that game for freakin years, and NO ONE ever know what I was going on about was like I'd seen a unicorn. Realise now must have been 84-85
I filed that away as some sort of weird delusion I was doomed to forever live the memory of alone until this very moment good god a 30 year reconciliation this is last starfighter-level mind blowing shit over here
There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.
> ERIC CHAHI: The polygon idea came from playing the Dragon's Lair port for the Amiga, which was showing incredible big animation on the screen, thanks to Randy Linden. That game's graphics weren't polygons, but were compressed bitmaps directly read from the disk. This was revolutionary for the time.
> I thought it could be done with polygons since the animation was flat. I wrote a vectorial code and programmed some speed tests. The idea was to use polygons not only for movie like animation but also for gameplay sequences. Think of the sprites as an assemblage of vector shapes. This proved to be a major advantage because you had big sprites that were scalable which took up less disk space than traditional sprites.
See this interview: http://eboredom.20m.com/features/interviews/chahi.html
Another World is also one of my favorite games. I still remember the day in 1991 when I played it for the first time.
I too used to love exploring arcades and had a similar experience with a crowd forming to watch me beat Killer Instinct in an arcade in northern Italy. I think he's dead-on that the rush you get from those experiences is similar to what people find on Twitch.
Absolutely.
Personally, I have two periods of magical arcade memories.
First, the completely enveloping, holodeck-esque wonder of climbing into or onto just about any deluxe cabinet[1][2][3][4] as a kid in the smoky arcades of the 80s.
Later, the big communities around the 'quarters on the glass' era of fighting games when the local arcade was effectively a close-knit dojo - storming, challenge matches and all.
Online play has come a long way and Evo [5] keeps the highest levels of comp alive, but the world has changed in ways that make that have likely ended those old, physically rooted communities and networks for good.
1: http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124217270.gif
2: http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/108/1088284893.jpg
3: http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124211046.jpg
4: http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/122/1223249015.jpg
5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_Championship_Series
Something I always thought was interesting from that time (I spent High School on Street Fighter II and a bit too much College on Tekken Tag Tournament). Was how the culture in different arcades was always a bit different. The play-styles, how the impromptu tournaments worked, what was considered cheap or fair play...it always interested me as your home arcade group think eventually set a kind of style momentum and mixing it up or discovering new techniques was always kind of a challenge. If you were really dedicated to the game you'd go over to the next city or wherever they had one of the games and spend a day or two there learning from the group think in that arcade.
I miss arcades.
I hated how people would marvel at the "great graphics!" I hated how unreliable the game was (it was always broken -- the stupid laser disc).
I liked it as a movie... but it was lame as a game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_%28video_game%29
...and it often cost a dollar to play.
Didn't know it was an awful game, but it doesn't surprise me...
My step-father was a full time employee of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, and back then one of the perks was that all family members received a free admission pass for the duration of the fair, which was 20 days.
There was an arcade located at the end of midway and being on summer vacation, I would of course go to the CNE every day and play videogames. Specifically one obscure Atari game called Food Fight.
I spent a solid two weeks mastering that game, which for those who are unfamiliar has a very high twitch factor and a never-ending wave progression similar to Robotron.
For those two weeks I simply could not crack the top five scores on the machine. I spent hours, and my entire allowance, trying again and again to get that high score.
Finally, on the second last day of the fair, I did it. I had been playing for at least a solid 30 minutes and although I didn't get a crowd of a dozen, I had a couple of people watching. When I lost my last man and found I had reached the high score, I felt triumphant - like I had really accomplished something amazing and important. I left the machine aglow.
Then, on the last day of the fair, I returned to the arcade to bask in my glory, only to discover they'd wiped the high scores the previous night. I was so heartbroken I didn't even play to try and regain my title.
I now have a modest collection of videogames and pinball machines, one of which is Food Fight. I'm 30 years older and my reflexes aren't what they used to be, so I will probably never regain that score again, but it's nice to fire it up and return to 1984 occasionally.
I was all in favor of seeing adventure games break out of their text-only mold (this was years before Myst), which is chiefly why I gave the game a chance in the first place, but Thayer's Quest was a poor exemplar.
Myst brought two new things to the genre - quicktime movies embedded in-game to make things come to life far more vividly, and the inability to pick things up - a constraint that generally lead to problems being more logical than had typically been the case for adventure games.
A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in my childhood bedroom.
Wow! Father of the decade for him!
and...
With all of these people watching, I played through the final scene of Dragon’s Lair, but with a twist. I didn’t make the last move of the game (sword button, which kills the dragon) allowing myself to get incinerated by his fire breath four times. Not only did this ratchet up the crowd tension to palpable levels, it also increased my score higher than if I had simply beaten the game on the first try.
Then, with the crowd on tenterhooks — will he win? Does he really know how? — on that last life, I played all the way through to the end. I pressed the sword button then literally turned around and walked away, while the remaining 10-15 (non-interactive) seconds or so of the game played out. Like the nerd version of the world’s greatest hip-hop act dropping the mic and walking off stage, I just walked away from the game. I’d made the last move. Nothing left for me here. Seen this all before.
What a diva!! :) I don't know the rationale for this, but I feel really happy whenever I see these glory moments that unimportant hobbies, usually videogame or sports, provide for children and teens.
That's because you know that seriously applying the "unimportant" to a hobby is bullshit and feel vindicated whenever someone reasserts the original meaning and motivation behind having a hobby in the first place :)
Or at least that's my reason for feeling the same way you do ;)
I employed the tick that makes it so enemies can't fire.
I then proceeded to play to a very high level. Well a bunch of people say me playing and were so impressed at how far I was getting int he game. They didn't realize that I had employed the "trick".
I was cool moment and I felt like a star for just a brief moment.
Quarter, quarter, death, death, death, death, death.
Couldn't have taken more than a minute. I would definitely have been the one standing behind this guy watching in awe.
This is still the case depending on the genre. If you go to a fighting game tournament (street fighter, tekken, soul calibur, etc.) you fight in person because at a high level the lag over the internet is not acceptable for competitive play. In that situation, you have people looking at you over your shoulder and thousands of people watching you on twitch at the same time.
Bonus Justin Wong vs Diago Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung&feature=kp
http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/the-beast-is-unle...
Another explanation of it:
http://www.gatheryourparty.com/articles/2013/03/12/more-than...
I was pretty good at Guitar Hero. I recently checked, and I'm still 8,884th on Guitar Hero II for XBox Live, out of 2.3 million. So when I heard this tournament was happening, I was in. I spent hours practicing extra hard. First round was at a local bar, and you had to be the Nth caller to the local radio station to get a spot. Through some persistence, I made it happen. Lots of the people weren't even that great, one guy had never even played before. I ended up winning that pretty handily. They held a ton more of these preliminary tournaments, and then 16 (I think) of us got free tickets to the tour. Woo!
Showing up, there was a tent where people could play Guitar Hero. We held another elimination tournament there, with the top two facing off on main stage. A friend that I knew from the competitive Guitar Hero forums and I had both brought cheat sheets with the optimal star power patterns on them. Such nerds. We were the only ones who did, and we pretty handily wiped up everyone else.
So, he and I got to play "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine on main stage, winner got a real guitar and to hang out with Korn. Of course, said friend (who now works on C# for Microsoft, actually...) was even better than I was, and solidly beat me. Oh well. It was still super amazing.
From time to time I find an arcade machine (they made them for Guitar Hero II) in the wild, and once or twice I've gotten a little crowd. Mostly from kids. I can totally emphasize with the end of the article, it is pretty exhilarating.
I have heard however that with a similarly difficult and opaque game, Tower of Druaga, it was not uncommon in Japan to find a little box next to the machine where you'd find a collectively created strategy guide. Gamers at the arcade would add to the knowledge of what worked and what didn't in order to pass each level of the game. It was a sort of early strategy wiki.
As I recall, Don Bluth saw these laser games as simply a means to raise funds for his true love, animated feature films, meanwhile the producer Rick Dyer was truly passionate about the laserdisc game format and spent pretty much every penny of his Dragon's Lair and Space Ace earnings on his ill-fated Halcyon project.
A lot of the (currently 30) comments here are about the audience factor in video games. There's nothing quite like drawing a crowd in an arcade. The arcades may be mostly gone, but the effects of an audience in video games is still being studied. I spotted some related work in the ACM CHI 2014 proceedings:
ACM CHI 2014: "Audience Experience in Social Videogaming: Effects of Turn Expectation and Game Physicality"
Thirty Second Demo Video with paper Abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQkCfjWZzc
ACM CHI 2014 Citation (Paper Paywall): http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2556288.2556965
Paper: http://static.squarespace.com/static/52455e03e4b0804b7e27b03...
Good times.
Nowadays I watch people ignore/blowup each other with their eyephones and instead of change-counters its appstore credit...
I remember getting good enough at Dragon's Lair and Space Ace to pull off this rockstar demo, but then I met my match when Cliff Hanger came around the local arcade. I merely bled dollars, without getting very close to being able to beat it.
"A local arcade not far from where we lived regularly put old games up for sale. My dad noticed that they had listed a Space Ace cabinet for $300. To this day I will never forget my shock — my dad bought it and brought it into our tiny apartment. I had a full-size, real-deal Space Ace arcade cabinet in my childhood bedroom."
Important to recognize how much kids love these things and, as a parent, to give in to frivolity at least once in a while...
I prefered Joust.
