4 ms·

If you haven't seen this doc yet, rent or buy it: https://youtu.be/BRnzBFM0BvY https://youtu.be/BRnzBFM0BvY

ddingus 5y ago
Just watched. Yeah, great film. Sure glad you mentioned it. Hearing from those guys is a real treat. Lol, Eugene: Crush the Player, but make them want and pay for more. To the Williams team: For a time, I had Playstation, Dreamcast, in one corner of a living room, and MAME loaded up with the best of Coin OP in another. It would ebb and flow, but the Coin OP side always saw a lot of play. At the time, MAME was running on a pretty great PC, big ass SONY Trinitron CRT with solid keyboard, mouse, other controllers. Sometimes I would make one if a game proved compelling enough for the kids, not just mine. Neighborhood kids. They would come to play on the killer MAME setup. In my bedroom, during those times, I had an SGI Indy that I built XMame on, and it would just play Smash TV, when compiled with aggressive optimization. That was my machine to play classics on, Defender, Asteroids, Smash TV, Robotron... To be fair, the console side was on an even bigger, like 200 plus pound SONY WEGA. Might as well make the most of the tech at the time. Those Coin OP games worked even when it was not about hard won quarters. And we (family) toured the local arcades as long as we could. And did drive in movies too. The Internet did a similar thing at home. It encroached on gaming time, then became gaming time. Quake 3 Arena displaced all of it for quite a while. Networked FPS is amazing, as we all know. Cell phones had an impact too. Suddenly young people could talk away from parents, without having to have a place to meet up. This aligned roughly with the Internet, and maybe gets missed. Text was huge. I used to teach other parents how to read all the shorthand lingo. Many parents had no idea. SMS and chats of various kinds were as intoxicating as the best video games were, Coin OP or not. As an 70's and 80's era kid, I saw the arcades from later pinball (which I still find amazing and fun), to old black and white arcade games, vectors (another experience worth having if you can on a CRT in an arcade), through Defender and all that we see in this film. For a little while, arcades felt new again when the bigger machines and more body movement games, Dance Dance and others, got people moving in many ways, not just flogging controls and a few buttons. I liked that time as much as I did the often smoke filled arcades where I could find hard core, Star Castle, Rip Off, Defender, Tempest, and many others. At the arcade, we could play, talk, live out parts of ourselves, share that, and do it away from parents. Same goes for cruising around in cars, until that was made illegal... networks were a concept many knew about and few experienced. Phones had wires and or were an expensive resource, often including watchful eyes and ears. Cell Phones, home consoles, Internet really did take out the arcade, but for a few today able to exist reasonably. Also, see those 1up cabinets? People really like them, even when the game experience is sub par. Seems like the arcade experience is still relevant, but with poor economics. And annoying ticket / prize schemes. It all was a fun time. Glad I was there. Sometimes want to go back.

Just watched. Yeah, great film. Sure glad you mentioned it. Hearing from those guys is a real treat. Lol, Eugene: Crush the Player, but make them want and pay for more. To the Williams team: For a time, I had Playstation, Dreamcast, in one corner of a living room, and MAME loaded up with the best of Coin OP in another. It would ebb and flow, but the Coin OP side always saw a lot of play. At the time, MAME was running on a pretty great PC, big ass SONY Trinitron CRT with solid keyboard, mouse, other controllers. Sometimes I would make one if a game proved compelling enough for the kids, not just mine. Neighborhood kids. They would come to play on the killer MAME setup. In my bedroom, during those times, I had an SGI Indy that I built XMame on, and it would just play Smash TV, when compiled with aggressive optimization. That was my machine to play classics on, Defender, Asteroids, Smash TV, Robotron... To be fair, the console side was on an even bigger, like 200 plus pound SONY WEGA. Might as well make the most of the tech at the time. Those Coin OP games worked even when it was not about hard won quarters. And we (family) toured the local arcades as long as we could. And did drive in movies too. The Internet did a similar thing at home. It encroached on gaming time, then became gaming time. Quake 3 Arena displaced all of it for quite a while. Networked FPS is amazing, as we all know. Cell phones had an impact too. Suddenly young people could talk away from parents, without having to have a place to meet up. This aligned roughly with the Internet, and maybe gets missed. Text was huge. I used to teach other parents how to read all the shorthand lingo. Many parents had no idea. SMS and chats of various kinds were as intoxicating as the best video games were, Coin OP or not. As an 70's and 80's era kid, I saw the arcades from later pinball (which I still find amazing and fun), to old black and white arcade games, vectors (another experience worth having if you can on a CRT in an arcade), through Defender and all that we see in this film. For a little while, arcades felt new again when the bigger machines and more body movement games, Dance Dance and others, got people moving in many ways, not just flogging controls and a few buttons. I liked that time as much as I did the often smoke filled arcades where I could find hard core, Star Castle, Rip Off, Defender, Tempest, and many others. At the arcade, we could play, talk, live out parts of ourselves, share that, and do it away from parents. Same goes for cruising around in cars, until that was made illegal... networks were a concept many knew about and few experienced. Phones had wires and or were an expensive resource, often including watchful eyes and ears. Cell Phones, home consoles, Internet really did take out the arcade, but for a few today able to exist reasonably. Also, see those 1up cabinets? People really like them, even when the game experience is sub par. Seems like the arcade experience is still relevant, but with poor economics. And annoying ticket / prize schemes. It all was a fun time. Glad I was there. Sometimes want to go back.