Over the last few weeks, we’ve been following Dave Palmer’s exploits at the 1985 Video Games Masters Tournament, where, you’ll recall, he established six world records, left heartbroken motherboards all over the place, and failed to meet any ladies. This week, it’s time for the Death Star to tremble like a jelly as Palmer fires up his X Wing and takes to the skies.

It’s the end of A New Hope, and it’s all gone right off. Skywalker’s hearing voices in his head and has turned off his targeting computer, which looks like an error. Princess Leia, one of many characters who spends the whole film in a dressing gown, is looking nervous, knowing that unless Skywalker, with whom she feels a strange connection – which in the end probably turns out to be nothing – can do the business with the photon torpedoes, the franchise is over. No one really knows what happens after that, but it’s this scene that forms the main chunk of Atari’s 1983 vector graphic bonanza Star Wars.

Read more

We’ve been looking at
Dave Palmer’s high score obliterating weekend at the 1985 Video Game Masters
Tournament over the last couple of weeks, and it’s been illuminating
stuff. This week, we take a look at Firefox, which, before it was search engine, was a film
with Clint Eastwood in it, and a not very exciting arcade game.

Mention laser discs now and people will laugh
and throw iPods at you. The format was beset with developmental
problems and by the time it finally lumbered into the marketplace it was
entirely unable to compete with either VHS or Betamax, and
faced growing opposition from within an industry to whom it had promised
much and delivered little. This offering, then, represents Atari’s
only dalliance with laserdiscs, which – considering that at the time all
lasers were owned by global terrorists living in mountains being pursued by
James Bond – were a great deal less exciting than they sounded.
That didn’t stop Atari from making what was, for 1983, the most technologically
advanced game then seen.

‘Most technologically advanced’ is also a fitting description of the stolen
fighter plane to which you have just been handed the keys in the game
itself. The film Firefox,
in which Clint Eastwood stars as your character in the arcade game, supplies
actual footage, which demonstrates just
how wizard-like laserdiscs seemed in world
before technology.

Read more

Last time, if you recall, we looked at Dave Palmer’s girlfriendless
heroics playing Battlezone at the 1985 Video Game Masters Tournament, where he
managed to break six world high score records in three days. This week, we
examine Red Baron, another of Palmer’s conquests during that epic weekend of
joystick waggling, transparent soft drinks and Goonies
merchandise.

You just don’t see iron crosses, Teutonic lettering and
general symbols of German military expansionism on video game cabinets like you
used to. Atari’s Red Baron, released in 1980, was so festooned with
this sort of thing that it resembled a Nazi phone box. It was also remarkable
as the very first first person flight simulator, and honest Tommies everywhere
will be relieved to learn that the player takes to the skies on the Allied side
for a crack at the Boche. This is rendered with the same vector graphics at
Battlezone, and required an auxiliary motherboard to work out all the 3D bi
plane to-ings and fro-ings. An easier way of spotting similarites between the
two was to peel back the aforementioned German martial themed cabinet
decorations, which would often reveal a Battlezone cabinet lurking
underneath, although this would usually see you beaten up fairly rigourously by
contemporary arcade owners.

As we all know, Fritz does not understand
the notion of fair play and gentlemanly behaviour. However, Red Baron
attempts to address this somewhat by striving for an average playing time,
tweaking the fiendishness of enemy fliers based on the average length of the
previous 32 games – known within the trade as ‘adaptive difficulty’. This
interesting feature was present on many early Atari games, and while it was
doubtless well intentioned – preventing excessive game times – one cannot help
but speculate that it inevitably lead to some Red Barons being more difficult
than others.
Read more

A Dave Palmer once played Battlezone – Atari’s iconic vector
graphic tank combat simulation – for 23 hours non-stop. Despite having no previous military
experience, Palmer clocked up a high score of 23 million points. This not only offers a neat million points
an hour scoring rate: 23 million is also the largest score it was possible to
get, and, in 1985, the biggest number in the world.

This was just one of six high scores on various games that
Palmer, who was single at the time, managed to achieve in the three day long
Video Games Masters’ Tournament of that year. We’ll be rummaging through the
motherboards of his other arcade conquests over the next few weeks, but for
now, Battlezone’s under scrutiny, so dust off your combat trousers and climb
aboard.

Read more

In almost any context, it is usually a good idea to avoid
trapdoors. They are the sort of thing
that just sound like trouble, or else they would be called welcome gates, or
warmth ways. Or cuddle ports.

Two brothers – Tom and Chris Stamper – certainly understood
the tacit malevolence of trapdoors in 1983 when they decided to invent a
sprawling maze of a game set in an underground castle, into which the player
stumbled after falling through a – yes – trapdoor. The game itself, Atic Atac, was excellent, combining
a tangible sense of doom with several key gaming innovations. It was, for example, the first game in which
the player could choose a character class – wizard, knight or serf – with
differing skills and tactics. The
aforementioned sense of doom was provided in no small part by Tom Stamper’s
artistic understanding of the ‘less is more’ principle of suspense building –
which is handy, as with only 48k of memory around, Doom was a very long way
off.

Read more

The ideal place for storing state secrets in the post Cold War era is on laptop computers, which are then placed in briefcases and left in random places upon the public transport networks of Southern England.

In the Eighties it was a very different kettle of coconuts. With the ever present threat of nuclear oblivion and massive ideologically exclusive armies poised to hurl themselves at each other across the European landmass, things were rather more watertight. Obscure software house First Star Software decided that the best way to represent this global powder keg was by having a couple of pointy faced fools chasing each other around a split level video game. For those of you who might want to introduce a trick question into a very dorky indeed pub quiz, it definitely was Spy Vs. Spy that has the accolade of being the first split level game. Motor racing trailblazer Pit Stop 2 usually claims this title; however, while its split screen was certainly the first in development, Spy vs. Spy was the first to mix it up in Woolworths with the Thompson Twins 12 inch singles and Return Of The Jedi trading cards.
Read more

If you don’t have the space for a full sized arcade cabinet, this could be the answer.

It’s a familiar story. You desperately want an arcade cabinet running Mame with the best custom joystick parts… But either you’ve got no space, or more often a wife/girlfriend who strongly disagrees that the spare room should be used as a games room. (Honestly… I run a company selling video game t-shirts, you knew what you were signing up for!)

Well this desktop sized cabinet could be the answer. Combining top quality parts, with a small build, this is a truly beautiful piece of kit – and importantly, can be easily hidden in a cupboard.

We were lucky enough to get chatting to the creator of this awesome cab in a pub recently, so we’re hoping to eventually get them for sale on the site, but you can get your hands on the prototype right now over on eBay. And for a mere £350, you’re not going to find a better deal, anywhere, ever.

Desktop arcade cab eBay auction

Read more