Being of the same vintage as the author, I have an arcade story that is somewhat similar.
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 first played Food Fight at a convenience store near my high school. Went back to class after lunch and tried to explain the game to a friend. When I was done he said something I've since called Smerek's Law (named after him): "You can't describe a video game without sounding like an idiot."
A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
(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.
>A lot of people rag on Dragon's Lair (and similar) for being "just a pretty movie with occasional interaction" instead of a game. But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
Well modern games are routinely criticized for any QTEs, even when used sparingly...
Unless you turn them up to 11, and end up with Street Fighter and similar games, where it mixes twitch reactions with tactical strategy and rote memorisation no longer helps if you go into P vs P instead of P vs Game AI.
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.
That's it. Hazy memory is hazy.... I think I played it a bit and came to the conclusion that it was too expensive for me to learn. Most of my pitiful allowance went into things like Ghosts 'n Goblins or vertical scrolling shoot-em-ups. To get back on topic: Dragon's Lair value for money was even more abysmal locally for me - {hazy, contrived memory warning} - I put the money in and before I died, moved the joystick 28 times and hit the buttons 8 times, but I lasted 3 minutes.
That's roughly equivalent to a few seconds of player input for 1942 or Galaga. Pretty, but not particularly fulfilling.
For the young and poor, Dragon's Lair was indeed a great game to watch other people play.
I don't know about you guys, but I want arcades back in full swing. Not only for nostalgic reasons, but because it was damn great. It also forced people to hang out together and forge friendships. I wonder if time is ripe for it to come back or if it will ever be?
> But modern games are full of Quick Time Events (QTE)s which are spiritually the exact same thing.
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.
>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 know what you are saying, but in terms of gameplay it's very much the same mechanics involved. And it's not THAT interesting to play if you remove the story attached to it - there's not much search involved, it's all about the pretty graphics and the story.
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.
> 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 actually have played a video game to a crowd of thousands of people. The finals of a Guitar Hero tournament were on stage at Family Values Tour. I can't find reliable attendance numbers from Pittsburgh in 2007, but the venue had 23,000 seats. Well, the lawn doesn't have seats, you know what I mean.
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.
The story of sending away for a guide to this opaque game is pretty funny. I'd never heard of that.
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.
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.
>'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.'
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.
> 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.
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 remember putting quarters on the glass to signify you were next in line. Sometimes there would be three or four quarters all from different people, and remembering which quarter was yours (your place in the queue) wasn't hard.
I occasionally play Dragon's Lair when I am at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Thanks to the wonders of inflation and my status of being a wage-earning adult, the frustration of "lasting for about 2 minutes before losing all five lives" is no longer a concern. Another quarter? Why not. Still, it is unbelievably frustrating.
If you miss arcades you should visit Japan (especially Tokyo) there are still a few living arcade with very decent collections. But you better hurry, every year one of the old ones ends up shutting down, I'm not sure how many will be left 5 years down the road...
It's possible to rent the entire area and have all the machines set to free play (that was how I first encountered Dragon's Lair; I believe it was a school social event). Probably expensive, though.
I saw Dragon's Lair running for the first time on Amiga when I was something like 9 years old. This was a complete shock because it featured full motion animation and it was running from floppy disks! This feat was achieved by using polygons instead of bitmaps, to save memory space. This gave the idea a few years later to Eric Chahi to use polygons instead of bitmaps for his new me Another World which would become an immediate hit as well... leading to the game Flashback (from a different creator) reusing the same technique, and the adventure game Cruise for a Corpse as well, making the game company Delphine Software very rich in the process.
There are tons of fun stories when one starts talking about Dragon's Lair.
I'm pretty sure Dragon's Lair used bitmaps even for the Amiga version. However, you deserve an upvote just for mentioning the awesome Eric Chahi, whose wonderful game Another World (aka Out of this World) indeed used polygons. Still one of my favorites games ever.
Turns out you were right, it used compressed bitmaps. But the inspiration piece for Eric Chahi was correct:
> 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.
I know your post was tongue-in-cheek, but it's not quite that simple, I think. For one thing the design aesthetic is almost completely different -- if look at the (awesome!) Another World[1] there is very little in the form of shading and such. It's much more like an old-school cartoon than an actual realistic rendering -- which is what most 3D games (and cartoons!) tend to strive towards these days.
EDIT: Btw, IIRC this is the only game that I ever played where I didn't actually realize when it had started. The intro -> gameplay transition is so seamless that I didn't even notice it. Pure genius.
Exactly. I mean an engine that's optimized to render vector polygons with 2D animation. Maybe OpenGL is all you'd need, but it seems like there could be libraries that let you focus on the animation rather than the low level details.
Really? I had it for Amiga too and I can't remember it looking polygon-like. I recall there were multiple disks and the frame rate was very low. The resolution was only 368x567i.
Everybody hated it. Apparently this guy was also an animation fan, so maybe that explains the discrepency. Still, it was better than the worst game every made, which was essentially the same but with actors:
I remember Time Traveler! It used some sort of hologram display, or a similar illusion. I always watched someone else play it, because it was too expensive, and for me that money was better spent in a beat 'em up where I could last longer.
Didn't know it was an awful game, but it doesn't surprise me...
I'm with you. I felt less like I was playing a game that interacted with me and more like I was forced to watch the cool things that animators thought of when they had access to an input device. And then every once in a while they remembered that this wasn't an animated feature and they needed to toss the user a bone so they lit something up on the screen, cause that's fun and interactive, right?
If Dragon's Lair were created today, they would print the commands you're supposed to press on the top of each screen (similar to rhythm games). There is enough difficulty in getting the timing right that it would still be difficult and people would feed in more quarters. Maybe there would be an 'expert mode' to remove the command hints and get an alternate ending.
I remember the Amiga version would flash a light in the direction you were supposed to go, or in the case of the sword, make the sword glow. It was enough of a clue to get through many scenes, but often required too quick of a reaction to pass on the first go.
Great story, never got the chance to play Dragon's Lair on the arcade, but I did get to play Space Ace, the art/animation was amazing as one would expect from Don Bluth, particularly from that era when he did his (imo) finest work in the form of Secret of Nimh, but the simplistic game play mechanics left me disappointed.
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.
What a great story. Dragon's Lair and the other early Laser Disc games
were an interesting advancement; the gameplay was infuriating but the
graphics were amazing. For the price of bad gameplay (and a lot of
quarters), we got a glimpse of the kind of graphics work we would find
in future games.
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"
This story put a smile on my face, even though I'm not of the Dragon's Lair Era. But I lived through the original Street Fighter 2, which was well before the death of the arcade and the prevalence of Internet tipsheets. As much as gaming has advanced since then, I still miss the thrill of having a line of 10 people in our small town arcade waiting their turn to take me on as E Honda.
I love this story I would have been so pumped to have seen that. You were a lord.
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
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
Sinistar is an arcade classic. I played it a few years ago at a retro arcade event and really liked it. You can download it yourself if you grab the MAME arcade emulator—but in all honesty, I think this is one of those games that works much better in its original arcade incarnation. It even had a custom 49-way joystick…
Only tangentially related, but you just reminded me that I got a bout of nightmares after playing "manhunter" (the sierra game) on a demo PC at a store.. Those flying eyeballs...
I spent way too many hours on Defender (never liked the follow ons) and had one in my family room for years. My wife was always amazed at how much sweat I produced when operating at the higher levels. :-)
The Arcades of the 80's were massive computer rooms. I was privileged to have known a few elder programmers/hardware hackers, arcade owners in the 80's, who had no issues with us kids (well, family friends) ripping cabinets apart and being involved in re-programming things. As a kid, they were my guru's. It was a wonderful time to be willing to stay up late, hack on code, and see new things up on the screen .. two battlezone cabs wired up for multiplayer, infinite lives on things, &etc. well okay, the social aspect was terrific as well. The local arcades attracted a lot of people .. so sitting in the backroom with the change-counters and dead/living cabinet bits hacking code could be reprieved with a sudden blast of humanity.
Good times.
Nowadays I watch people ignore/blowup each other with their eyephones and instead of change-counters its appstore credit...
Oh jeez -- Thayer's Quest. That game was a complete money sink. A quarter only bought you time, and there was no such thing as a skip-ahead button, so just getting through the opening cutscene ate up most of your first quarter. I spent so much money getting all the way to the end of that game ... only to discover that it ended at a cliffhanger. A final screen announced that Part II was in the works, but they never actually made it, presumably because the first one did so poorly.
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.
Well, there were plenty of graphics-based adventure games before Must, such as all of the Sierra games, like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. After that, there were all of the LucasArts SCUMM-based games, before Myst arrived on the scene.
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.
It wasn't really the graphics that I was referring to as much as being in a video game arcade. I wanted to see adventure games break out into the mainstream.
I had my own story of glory. I was in college (1996) and I was in the downtown college bar/club strip. It was at the very beginning of my college career and I hadn't made friends yet.
Anyway there was an old Galaga game and I started playing.
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.
> Maybe that’s what streaming games on Twitch is like for the current generation of kids. But even knowing that 60 people from around the world are watching you set new records in Call of Duty, I wonder how it stacks up to an actual crowd of people standing directly behind you, as you listen to them whispering to each other about how good this kid is at this game.
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.
I think the great thing about this story is the crowd. That's a detail to arcades that is forgotten to time. Whatever the game, if someone was good at it, (and the arcade wasn't totally dead of course,) people would stop and watch. You could save your quarters and watch graphics and levels you'd never seen.
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.
I could beat both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcade. Although in Space Ace, I used to skip the rocket boots portion. Space Ace was the rhythm game of it's time ... getting the actions down with the music was the way to go!
Ha. I had that experience in the golden years of arcades. I studied up and practiced pac-man to the point where I ended up in some crazy long game at about age 7? This was still when pac-man had some relevance, so it was in a nice, visible spot in one of the largest arcades in our area. I had a crowd of 12-20 behind me. I ended up freaking out a bit once I realized how many people were there and I had to pee sooooo bad. I ran to the bathroom to a few "Wow! Great job kid!" type things. I pretty much stopped even trying to think after the 7th key.
"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...
never liked Dragon's Lair it seemed to be to be putting graphics and presentation above game play. It was also far to easy to die horribly all the time, better to watch some other guy give it a go rather than pay twice the price of all the other machines (possibly 50p rather than 20p).
Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are both on iOS AppStore. Space Ace was a much easier game to beat in the arcades but I never got far on Dragon's Lair. Now, thanks to the mobile app, I can finish the game while my son watches on - amazed at my dexterity. A so the torch is passed.
But was the iOS version ever fixed? I got it, played up to the point where the giant suit of armor is sending electricity down the tiled floor at Dirk who has to jump several times to avoid it ("Electric Knight Battle" according to some walkthroughs). There was just no way to get through that scene on iPad. Many people reported the same issue.
It's a timing trick to get past it! This scene mirror reverses so you may need to invert left/right but the solution is that once you've gone left-right and then jumped forward you'll have to do something like left-right-left-<press right again IMMEDIATELY after pressing left before the animation stops>. Then a final forward, then sword. Then you go on.
What was really impressive in the arcades was not Dragons Lair but Ms Pacman and scoring over 600,000 points. I've seen some guys doing it and they kept eating all of the ghosts on power pill touch over and over. That's one of the most amazing video game feats ever.
I was part of a crowd gathering around this sort of thing once. The person playing it pulled the same trick of maxing out their score by skipping the very last move of the game until their last life, too. This was one of the local arcades in New Orleans, though.
Oh man, this really brings back memories. I can't tell you the number of weekends that I spent at the local arcade playing Pac man, Donkey Kong, Defender, Robotron 2048, Q*Bert, and countless other games.
We had the (much uglier) NES version of this game when I was a kid. It was the bane of our goddamned lives. I remember me and my brothers trying for several frustrated hours to get past the very first screen.
Ha! I did the exact same thing when I beat Dragon's Lair, had the crowd gathered around, mic drop and everything. A computer gaming magazine had listed most of the moves so I studied up the night before.
It was. That was during my teenage years when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat drew in the crowds. Ah, the days of saving your spot in line by putting your quarter up against the bottom of the monitor glass. Back when you had to put something up to prove your worth more than the effort it takes to push the START button.
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.