Back to the Arcade - Part 1 - The Games

It's all about the games, isn't it?  Or is it? Well that's just the beginning of the story.  The games are fun but the complete experience is missed without proper sights, sounds, and controls.  In order to replicate the 'real' experience we have to build a cabinet and get realistic controls for the games.

Like I mentioned in the intro, I discovered and started collecting the games  about 1999. At that time, my oldest daughter was about 5 years old; old enough to take interest in these things. All of these games at the time were played on a PC and controlled via a standard QWERTY keyboard which she got very good at.

Williams Defender Control Panel

Atari Marble Madness Control Panel

​That worked pretty well for the games that require a 4-way joystick and 1 or 2 buttons but anything beyond that wasn't very realistic for reasonable game play. Take Williams Defender for example, it required only a 2-way up/down joystick, but also 5 buttons; try that on a keyboard!  Or Centipede which required a trackball, or one of my favorites; Atari's Marble Madness which required 2 trackballs.  These games can't be properly replicated with a keyboard.

So far, I have only talked about games with a 'standard' control panel (joystick and buttons).  There are also many games that use a driving wheel and pedals such as Pole Position and Night Driver, or a flight yoke/stick with buttons, or games that used spinners like Tempest or Tron.  We've just eliminated a few more classes of games that cannot be played on a keyboard. 

Atari Pole Position

Tron Control Panel

Tempest Control Panel

​I've been talking a lot about controls, so I guess that is going to be the next section.  But before I do that, I'll continue talking about the games.  My preference were the games from the late 1970's through the mid 1980's like some that I have previously mentioned.  I was also able to get the LaserDisc games working such as Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. 

I remember when Dragon's Lair hit the arcades in 1983; it was unlike any video game we had ever seen.  Personally I thought it was quite incredible due to the graphics, but I never got any good at it because it was double the price, $0.50 (too rich for my blood) and I was lucky to last 30 seconds after the intro.  I had a friend that discovered the patterns pretty quickly and used to just watch him play.  The LaserDisc games didn't really catch on. I'm not sure if it was due to the video game crash of 1983 or just not the best medium for games. We may never know.

Another genre of games would be video pinball.  I like pinball and if I had the space I would have one in my game room, but for now the video version will have to do.  I have Atari Video Pinball (an example of a reflective screen game that I will discuss in Chapter 6) and Sega Time Scanner as well as a few others installed.  I really enjoyed Sierra's 3-D Ultra Pinball on my PC in the late 90's but can't seem to get it to replicate on the Pi... yet.  I have to admit that I did deviate from the 'classic theme' a bit when I discovered that I could run Pro Pinball - Timeshock! on my Raspberry Pi.  I would really like to have a real pinball machine but for now this will suffice.

Pro Pinball - Timeshock!

Enlarge screen (f) for detail

Before I leave this section and go on to the Control Panel Configuration I wanted to add a little piece about the popularity of video games throughout the early history through 2020.  I found this great (mesmerizing) video on YouTube about the popularity (based on sold units) of video games from 1979-2020.  I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did! 

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Continue to Part 2 - Control Panel Configuration

Intro | The Games | Control Panel Configuration | The Controls | Control Panel Lights | Research | Specific Games | Hardware & Software | Game Configurations | Cabinet Build | Artwork | Bonus | Leaderboard | Summary