June 5, 2013

Missed Opportunities for my Own Stand-Up Arcade Machine

Cool Old Arcade and Console Artwork at Arcade Artwork
There have been a couple of times in my life where I had the opportunity to purchase a stand-up arcade game and I didn't jump on it. Both times were for games I loved playing, but they weren't very popular, so the sale price was low, as was the wear and tear.

Of course I cannot remember the name of either game.

The first one was an odd "cartoony" game where you were a hero trying to save a damsel that had been kidnapped by a mad scientist. I want to say it had two joysticks, one for moving and one for shooting (like Robotron) and the levels were stacked vertically such that you ran from the bottom of the screen to the top and when you got there the whole thing scrolled down. I remember it was kind of campy and you could fall off the edge of the screen. When this happened your hero would grab a hold of the edge and kick like mad until he managed to pull himself up.

The second game was a top-down scroller where you were always firing your gun and never-ending hordes of enemy soldiers. As you moved along you picked up parts of a large gun. I believe after the 10th piece you'd find your self armed with a giant machine-gun bazooka of sorts and would get to absolutely annihilate everything for a short period of time before the gun exploded and you'd have to find the pieces again. I have no idea why I liked that game because it doesn't sound so exciting now.

Earlier this week I came across another miniature stand-up arcade game that a guy built for his daughter. While it isn't as tiny as the GarBade, it is pretty fricken cool on its own. I wish I had the resources to pull off a build like this.


One of these days I might get off my duff and make something using my "old" Toshiba Thrive. I doubt I'd go into the extra effort to make a cabinet so I could instead travel with my game machine, but it might be cool to design something for home use.

If I could just figure out the names of those games I could be convinced to look for the appropriate marquee and signage from Arcade Artwork.

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