Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me:
> Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc players.
Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)).
It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer. There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.
The DEXTER unit has connectors that are compatible with various industrial LD players and was designed as a drop-in replacement. Files containing frame-by-frame data are loaded onto the device. The end user has the option of driving the Dexter LD emulator using a software emulator like DAPHNE, or just it into the original arcade hardware.
Cool. Good to know someone made a solution. After a quick look it seems like a solid offering that's been battle tested. I guess the only unfortunate part is that the code isn't open source and the price may be a little steep for hobby DIYers.
But for operators who want to get a classic LD cabinet working, it seems reasonable enough since it's complete solution, the maker supports it and, with over a thousand sold, it's probably already been made to work with every LD game and the usual gremlins have already been identified and dealt with.
> Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks
They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year.
Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech.
Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted:
I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.
That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding.
The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up.
Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.
Congratulations on a very successful restoration and thanks for writing such a beautiful deep dive.
The work put in here is a perfect example of how motivation can be so much stronger if it’s for the love, done by volunteers, than for any amount of money.
It also evokes the Penn & Teller quote, “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
One of the things I would change if I could go back to childhood is to find the money and the people to play more Gauntlet. When I was in high school I became friends with a guy who knew where all of the co-op games were on the college campus just down the street from our school.
Most of the arcades I knew of were too small to house a beast like this, but I would have watched the hell out of this one.
The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme park for years. Not sure what happened to it.
Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet) and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great arcade machines bitd too.
These days, it seems like one of the best multiplayer arcade games is "Killer Queen" [1]. It'd be nice if there were more games like that. It offers a gaming experience that's more unique to the arcade IMO.
You can feel the sadness from the first picture with the tarp. Such hobbies of restoration will end, the "built-to-last" has lost it's charm and it's sad. We have grown up with such high expectations for an object; "It must have X, Y, Z" turning the future is a blessing and a curse. I guess it was the way for it to be.
You have a pocket device more powerful than Apollo 13 yet to actually preform restoration upon it is near-impossible. That itself will be a skill replaced by AI and as more future devices become completely unserviceable, all of this will just fade in to the darkness. It's broke, throw away and buy anew.
Young folk today are dumbfounded on how to top-up their oil, change their wheel for their car, I do ask is this as intended?
Pocket device? I have more computing power at the moment on my wrist than we ever sent to the moon, likely also counting discarded IUs. And this isn't even an Apple watch...
Dumb question out of ignorance. In electronics when you have absolutely no idea where something is failing is it possible to apply kind of a binary search in the circuit to either spot or discard a failing section? Is this an effective way to search for problems in electronics or are better ways to do it? Perhaps is a very stupid question but I had it in my mind for some time.
Just like with software, oftentimes you can bisect, sometimes you can't. There are some common approaches to roughing out problematic areas (checking power rails, confirming known oscillations, clocks and regular signals…). When you have the schematics, just as with source code you often can make educated guesses. With an unknown design though it is a laborious process akin to debugging a third party binary executable.
It's like every other debugging issue. First you need to figure out what it's doing and what it's supposed to be doing.
Then you work forward and backward until you find a spot where you can see a transition where the inputs are as expected and the outputs are not.
The more you know about the ciruit the easier it is. Arcade circuits tend to have a lot of documentation from the maker as they were expected to be serviced. But machines with small production runs are harder; the manuals may be lost or less detailed. Makers also tend to leave out details of protection mechanisms, some of these have been reverse engineered and documented by the community, but more work happens on higher production systems. In this case, they had three player boards that should work the same, but only one worked, and they were able to narrow it to communication (by using an undocumented test switch). They got lucky finding a missing ground, and then looked at communication with a sillyscope and replaced a standard communication chip.
Expo '90 had over 23 million people turn up. That is a sizeable audience. However, on top of that, one of the themes with the expo was "coexistence" with nature. It wasn't just a gardening show. [0]
For example, Professor Iwatsuki gave the conference talk "Coexistence of Nature and Mankind in Urban Areas Role of Natural Science", and one of the forums was on "The Role of the Science in Building the 21st Century".
It was definitely partly a garden show. But it was also a scientific conference, discussing how to shape the world in the future, in a sustainable way. That meant any technological breakthrough was something to pull the crowd.
That struck me as odd -- I associated only 8080 (Z80) systems with S100 (a very primitive bus). Wikipedia has early Sun systems based on Intel's Multibus (being multi-master capable, a considerably more complex bus).
You are of course correct. The game is neither S100 or Multibus, but a similar cage. And I was misremembering the Sun2 as 68020 when it was actually just a 68010 -- which I could have verified if I only looked at the picture that I posted at the bottom of this page -
Nah, I played it in the 90s. £2 per game, I think. That arcade was also the first place I got to try a VR headset. It had a full scale Ridge Racer too. Looking back, somebody there was quite invested in trying new things.
I have an old Xbox 360, and a projector. Any multilayer games for get togethers. I'm actually building a backyard tki bar soon. Would be fun to add this for parties as well.
Classic Gauntlet in MAME is always a winner at parties, I've long found. Up to four players, complicated enough to be interesting, not too complicated to be fun when you're drunk, easy to pick up and put down.
We are? There are games like this in any modern "arcade" like Dave & Buster's.
If you mean why aren't we building highly specialized hardware like this any more, I'd say it's because most of that complexity has moved into software running on general-purpose hardware, which is infinitely more flexible and maintainable.
Large environmental arcade installations were always pretty rare. The structure makes it more expensive to build and move and harder to find a space to exhibit.
That said, giant space invaders and pac man are showing up a lot lately. I saw a 4 player Halo environmental recently (although it's out of production) [1]. I've got a 2-player environmental fron 1994 that's linkable up to 6 players (the spouse says absolutely not, but I did play a 6-player setup once! and I have two extra system boards, maybe one day I can smoosh them into uprights and link it all. I think two player, but linkable makes a lot more sense for sales; but then it's hard to find an arcade that's got more than one of the units. Some of the modern racers are single player but linkable; you often see them in pairs, but sometimes singles or quads; and very occasionally more.
Of course, modern arcade systems are just PCs, but then so are the high performance home consoles.
Basically, because a modern game console and TV has equally good graphics.
Sony is fooling around with location-based entertainment again.[1] Might work.
There are some one-offs in Dubai and China. But nothing seems to scale.
The Void [2] did some nice location-based VR systems around 2018. A group of people in VR goggles are in a big room, and can move around. The tracking system keeps the virtual and real worlds in sync. There are props you see in VR and touch in the real world. Seems to be inactive now.
Disney tried that Star Wars themed hotel experience LARP. Cost more than a cruise on a real ship. Had to be dumbed down to theme park customer level. Huge flop.
The military has the best immmersive themed experiences. The US Navy has Battle Stations 21, with a convincingly real looking full sized ship in a big building near Chicago.[3] It's the final exam for new recruits, with fires to fight and flooding to plug.
Probably not a lot given the bill of materials and development (although most of the boards seem based on existing boards). These kinds of larger-than-life "event/ride" sort of games were a trend for a while. Sega made quite a few, probably because they owned and operated a chain of large amusement centers in Japan at the time.
The idea was that these would attract more players due to the strong 'curb-appeal' of the size/concept and unique game play, while encouraging groups of friends to play together. Of course, each play was usually double or more the cost of a regular game. At the time, large arcade centers were competing with smaller hole-in-the-wall neighborhood arcades which could pop-up in any empty retail storefront as well as convenience stores who could easily add a handful of arcade cabinets in a back corner. While major amusement centers obviously offered a wider selection of games in one place, having a few of these unique big games differentiated them.
However, these games also had several downsides. Of course, they were extremely expensive for arcade owners to purchase compared to a normal cabinet but they also took up more floor space and often required more maintenance. Ultimately, arcade owners measure value on revenue per square foot vs the total operating cost, including purchase price amortized over the time period a game continues to draw earnings. Since these games remained somewhat unusual, the calculus was clearly a close thing - probably not much different than a carnival calculating the relative value of adding a "big" Ferris wheel or roller coaster. The cost is high and, perhaps, only partly offset by direct earnings but increasing overall traffic through curb-appeal and differentiation are also important factors.
A lot, I imagine, even as a loss leader. It was something like two bucks a play, far more than I could then afford (that would be about $5 now with inflation!) the one time I saw it in person. And consider too, the kind of flagship place that can devote the space and power a setup like this needs, is exactly the one to benefit most from something like this that, as I can attest, drew kids' attention like no magnet ever invented - and even we who had not enough quarters for that game, mostly still had enough for others.
Namco being maybe one of two or at most three leading arcade marques, I think it would work about the same for them in marketing terms.
The arcades these days have almost zero wow factor, stuck in the 90s, I’m sure these machines were nothing short of fantastic if you first play it back then.
I found that the wow factor was friends. You went to these places with mates and enjoyed the environment. Grab a slice of pizza and play some games.
It wasn't so common to encounter arcade places in the UK so I used to dos around shopping centres. Not much of a wow factor but the wow was had having fun with mates and now this has now shifted to online and online friends making such places redundant. It's as we are now allergic to go outside.
very sorry to post something tangentially related but does anyone know what happened to that ridge racer full scale machine? Can't find anything on it past 2022.
Such a wonderful effort to see this rare game being restored as well as being accurately preserved. Of the future actions discussed at the end, this one seems most important to me:
> Investigate a solid-state replacement for the LaserDisc players.
Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks. While laserdisc based games were fairly rare, in the aggregate there were still quite a few notable titles made (led by Dragon's Lair (1983)).
It would be terrific for the preservation community if someone made a solid state replacement based on an SBC like a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately, most of the games used a handful of fairly standardized serial protocols to communicate with the disc player. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard, especially using FFMPEG to drive the actual playback and the serial input could have a scriptable command parsing and translation layer. There weren't that many different commands a laser disc player could do. Basically, the usual start/stop/pause/ff/rew as well as chapter and frame seeking with simple loop.
Someone did it about 10 years ago:
http://www.laserdisc-replacement.com/ via http://my-cool-projects.blogspot.com/search/label/vldp-hw
The DEXTER unit has connectors that are compatible with various industrial LD players and was designed as a drop-in replacement. Files containing frame-by-frame data are loaded onto the device. The end user has the option of driving the Dexter LD emulator using a software emulator like DAPHNE, or just it into the original arcade hardware.
Some games do weird things with sync https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3170 and additional hardware like https://www.daphne-emu.com:9443/mediawiki/index.php/BegasSyn... is required.
It really does amaze me just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and that people have actually managed to preserve these games.
Cool. Good to know someone made a solution. After a quick look it seems like a solid offering that's been battle tested. I guess the only unfortunate part is that the code isn't open source and the price may be a little steep for hobby DIYers.
But for operators who want to get a classic LD cabinet working, it seems reasonable enough since it's complete solution, the maker supports it and, with over a thousand sold, it's probably already been made to work with every LD game and the usual gremlins have already been identified and dealt with.
> Those laserdisc players are cantankerous, mechanical beasts and even the industrial grade ones will likely be a constant point of failure across enough 80-hour operating weeks
They were notoriously unreliable, so much so it killed the laserdisc arcde fad that lasted about a year.
Part of the problem was the way the games used the laserdisc. The games spend most of their time randomly playing different video tracks as gameplay changed (a-la Dragons Lair). The players were designed for "linear" playback -- like a CD, you move the head to a track, then slowly move the head forward play the track. Seeking a new track is a (relatively) infrequent operation -- but the laserdisc games hammered the players with constant track seeks, moving the head back and forth so many times it quickly wore the mechanism out. Player failure rate was so high operators started bailing on the tech.
Funny story is that Atari looked into laserdisc games in the late 70's... Decided the tech was unreliable, but went ahead anyways. As Owen Rubin recanted:
I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) educating myself on laserdisc games and technology in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any games with laserdisc. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. And I was right, but we started several games anyway.
> ...but we started several games anyway.
That's actually surprising. While the early game industry was young and there wasn't much management skill or experience, it still strikes me as an unusually odd error. It wasn't just a subjective difference of opinion over what style of game would be more popular or something similarly unknowable. There was objective data available, they had a smart, trusted insider study it extensively and the actual issue was easy for even a non-technical person to understand.
Rubin's analysis was likely a big reason Atari was late to the laserdisc game craze... They were so late that their first (and only) laserdisc game Firefox shipped at the very moment the laserdisc craze was imploding.
The phenomenal success of Dragon's Lair forced Atari to rethink their position about the technology -- Everyone in the industry was jumping onto the laserdisc bandwagon at that point, not wanting to be left behind on the Next Big Thing. So the execs at Atari figured maybe Rubin was wrong in his analysis, and therefore Atari needed to quickly catch up.
Obviously, in hindsight, Rubin's analysis was spot on. But you can't blame the execs for jumping in - at the time it looked like laserdisc was the future of the industry.
Way back in 2007 someone found one of these, disassembled it(!), transported it(!), rebuilt it(!). Long story but full of great pics. [0]
[0] https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.0
I'm impressed that they got it together, after that adventure.
And then it was moved again:
https://www.dragonslairfans.com/smfor/index.php?topic=231.ms...
I was about to post the same link that I have found while looking where there might be another one in Europe.
I highly recommend to have a look at it, it is incredible and totally fun to read!
Congratulations on a very successful restoration and thanks for writing such a beautiful deep dive.
The work put in here is a perfect example of how motivation can be so much stronger if it’s for the love, done by volunteers, than for any amount of money.
It also evokes the Penn & Teller quote, “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
One of the things I would change if I could go back to childhood is to find the money and the people to play more Gauntlet. When I was in high school I became friends with a guy who knew where all of the co-op games were on the college campus just down the street from our school.
Most of the arcades I knew of were too small to house a beast like this, but I would have watched the hell out of this one.
There’s a modern version of it on Steam with multiplayer which is decent (could be much worse given most modern remakes of classic IPs)
The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme park for years. Not sure what happened to it.
Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet) and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great arcade machines bitd too.
These days, it seems like one of the best multiplayer arcade games is "Killer Queen" [1]. It'd be nice if there were more games like that. It offers a gaming experience that's more unique to the arcade IMO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Queen_(video_game)#
It's a fantastic experience in local play, the perfect fun bar game for folks who don't think of themselves as "gamers."
So far as I know there hasn't been a cabinet in town in ages, but I wish there still were.
you can play local multiplayer on the Switch fwiw.
Yeah, but you can spill a beer on a Killer Queen cab and not even see it drop a frame.
You can feel the sadness from the first picture with the tarp. Such hobbies of restoration will end, the "built-to-last" has lost it's charm and it's sad. We have grown up with such high expectations for an object; "It must have X, Y, Z" turning the future is a blessing and a curse. I guess it was the way for it to be.
You have a pocket device more powerful than Apollo 13 yet to actually preform restoration upon it is near-impossible. That itself will be a skill replaced by AI and as more future devices become completely unserviceable, all of this will just fade in to the darkness. It's broke, throw away and buy anew.
Young folk today are dumbfounded on how to top-up their oil, change their wheel for their car, I do ask is this as intended?
Pocket device? I have more computing power at the moment on my wrist than we ever sent to the moon, likely also counting discarded IUs. And this isn't even an Apple watch...
And that's what I'd call a pocket device. It fits in your pocket.
Well, I can't say you're wrong. Thanks for the laugh!
Dumb question out of ignorance. In electronics when you have absolutely no idea where something is failing is it possible to apply kind of a binary search in the circuit to either spot or discard a failing section? Is this an effective way to search for problems in electronics or are better ways to do it? Perhaps is a very stupid question but I had it in my mind for some time.
Just like with software, oftentimes you can bisect, sometimes you can't. There are some common approaches to roughing out problematic areas (checking power rails, confirming known oscillations, clocks and regular signals…). When you have the schematics, just as with source code you often can make educated guesses. With an unknown design though it is a laborious process akin to debugging a third party binary executable.
It's like every other debugging issue. First you need to figure out what it's doing and what it's supposed to be doing.
Then you work forward and backward until you find a spot where you can see a transition where the inputs are as expected and the outputs are not.
The more you know about the ciruit the easier it is. Arcade circuits tend to have a lot of documentation from the maker as they were expected to be serviced. But machines with small production runs are harder; the manuals may be lost or less detailed. Makers also tend to leave out details of protection mechanisms, some of these have been reverse engineered and documented by the community, but more work happens on higher production systems. In this case, they had three player boards that should work the same, but only one worked, and they were able to narrow it to communication (by using an undocumented test switch). They got lucky finding a missing ground, and then looked at communication with a sillyscope and replaced a standard communication chip.
Perfect reading with an easter long weekend coffee - I love well written and interesting stories like these.
> a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, Japan
Why would an arcade game be debuted at a gardening and greenery expo?
Expo '90 had over 23 million people turn up. That is a sizeable audience. However, on top of that, one of the themes with the expo was "coexistence" with nature. It wasn't just a gardening show. [0]
For example, Professor Iwatsuki gave the conference talk "Coexistence of Nature and Mankind in Urban Areas Role of Natural Science", and one of the forums was on "The Role of the Science in Building the 21st Century".
It was definitely partly a garden show. But it was also a scientific conference, discussing how to shape the world in the future, in a sustainable way. That meant any technological breakthrough was something to pull the crowd.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130314172710/http://www.expo90...
Why not?
Relevance?
Wow! Great deep dive! I haven’t seen S100 boards in the wild since we retired our rack mounted 1980s Sun 2 decades ago (also 68020-based)
That struck me as odd -- I associated only 8080 (Z80) systems with S100 (a very primitive bus). Wikipedia has early Sun systems based on Intel's Multibus (being multi-master capable, a considerably more complex bus).
You are of course correct. The game is neither S100 or Multibus, but a similar cage. And I was misremembering the Sun2 as 68020 when it was actually just a 68010 -- which I could have verified if I only looked at the picture that I posted at the bottom of this page -
https://david-loffredo.github.io/lowcloud/encrypt.html
Have played that (not that cab, a European one). Was, indeed, a world of fun.
Where is the European one based? Apparently there is only one left.
Nah, I played it in the 90s. £2 per game, I think. That arcade was also the first place I got to try a VR headset. It had a full scale Ridge Racer too. Looking back, somebody there was quite invested in trying new things.
I have an old Xbox 360, and a projector. Any multilayer games for get togethers. I'm actually building a backyard tki bar soon. Would be fun to add this for parties as well.
Classic Gauntlet in MAME is always a winner at parties, I've long found. Up to four players, complicated enough to be interesting, not too complicated to be fun when you're drunk, easy to pick up and put down.
Amazing. Why aren't we building things like this anymore?
We are? There are games like this in any modern "arcade" like Dave & Buster's.
If you mean why aren't we building highly specialized hardware like this any more, I'd say it's because most of that complexity has moved into software running on general-purpose hardware, which is infinitely more flexible and maintainable.
Large environmental arcade installations were always pretty rare. The structure makes it more expensive to build and move and harder to find a space to exhibit.
That said, giant space invaders and pac man are showing up a lot lately. I saw a 4 player Halo environmental recently (although it's out of production) [1]. I've got a 2-player environmental fron 1994 that's linkable up to 6 players (the spouse says absolutely not, but I did play a 6-player setup once! and I have two extra system boards, maybe one day I can smoosh them into uprights and link it all. I think two player, but linkable makes a lot more sense for sales; but then it's hard to find an arcade that's got more than one of the units. Some of the modern racers are single player but linkable; you often see them in pairs, but sometimes singles or quads; and very occasionally more.
Of course, modern arcade systems are just PCs, but then so are the high performance home consoles.
[1] https://rawthrills.com/games/halo-fireteam-raven/
Basically, because a modern game console and TV has equally good graphics.
Sony is fooling around with location-based entertainment again.[1] Might work. There are some one-offs in Dubai and China. But nothing seems to scale.
The Void [2] did some nice location-based VR systems around 2018. A group of people in VR goggles are in a big room, and can move around. The tracking system keeps the virtual and real worlds in sync. There are props you see in VR and touch in the real world. Seems to be inactive now.
Disney tried that Star Wars themed hotel experience LARP. Cost more than a cruise on a real ship. Had to be dumbed down to theme park customer level. Huge flop.
The military has the best immmersive themed experiences. The US Navy has Battle Stations 21, with a convincingly real looking full sized ship in a big building near Chicago.[3] It's the final exam for new recruits, with fires to fight and flooding to plug.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLnxV8w1Fq8
[2] https://www.thevoid.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vAkqLY0uvU
It got hard to compete with home gaming setups.
It looks extremely expensive piece of hardware. I have to wonder how much profit this made for Namco or the arcades.
Probably not a lot given the bill of materials and development (although most of the boards seem based on existing boards). These kinds of larger-than-life "event/ride" sort of games were a trend for a while. Sega made quite a few, probably because they owned and operated a chain of large amusement centers in Japan at the time.
The idea was that these would attract more players due to the strong 'curb-appeal' of the size/concept and unique game play, while encouraging groups of friends to play together. Of course, each play was usually double or more the cost of a regular game. At the time, large arcade centers were competing with smaller hole-in-the-wall neighborhood arcades which could pop-up in any empty retail storefront as well as convenience stores who could easily add a handful of arcade cabinets in a back corner. While major amusement centers obviously offered a wider selection of games in one place, having a few of these unique big games differentiated them.
However, these games also had several downsides. Of course, they were extremely expensive for arcade owners to purchase compared to a normal cabinet but they also took up more floor space and often required more maintenance. Ultimately, arcade owners measure value on revenue per square foot vs the total operating cost, including purchase price amortized over the time period a game continues to draw earnings. Since these games remained somewhat unusual, the calculus was clearly a close thing - probably not much different than a carnival calculating the relative value of adding a "big" Ferris wheel or roller coaster. The cost is high and, perhaps, only partly offset by direct earnings but increasing overall traffic through curb-appeal and differentiation are also important factors.
A lot, I imagine, even as a loss leader. It was something like two bucks a play, far more than I could then afford (that would be about $5 now with inflation!) the one time I saw it in person. And consider too, the kind of flagship place that can devote the space and power a setup like this needs, is exactly the one to benefit most from something like this that, as I can attest, drew kids' attention like no magnet ever invented - and even we who had not enough quarters for that game, mostly still had enough for others.
Namco being maybe one of two or at most three leading arcade marques, I think it would work about the same for them in marketing terms.
The arcades these days have almost zero wow factor, stuck in the 90s, I’m sure these machines were nothing short of fantastic if you first play it back then.
I found that the wow factor was friends. You went to these places with mates and enjoyed the environment. Grab a slice of pizza and play some games.
It wasn't so common to encounter arcade places in the UK so I used to dos around shopping centres. Not much of a wow factor but the wow was had having fun with mates and now this has now shifted to online and online friends making such places redundant. It's as we are now allergic to go outside.
increasingly the machines in arcades now are just works-alike physical ports of cell phone clicker gambling games.
Great that this was kept inside and roped off instead of being found in an abandoned warehouse.
I believe Fun World in the article is Fun World Game Center in Nasuha, New Hampshire.
ref: https://www.coastingwithculture.com/2017-northeast-trip/part...
very sorry to post something tangentially related but does anyone know what happened to that ridge racer full scale machine? Can't find anything on it past 2022.
I assume you're referring to this article https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/11/20/the-last-ridge-racer/ contact Tony (the arcade blogger) he's a nice guy to deal with - his book is also great by the way. Maybe he can do a follow up?
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