[Video Game Wednesday] My Adventures at the Arcade Auction
I don’t often write about the things I’ve actually done — I tend to get bored talking about myself — but I wanted to write up a brief piece reflecting on the arcade auction I visited earlier in the month.
As a kid, I was always drawn to video arcades, and I have fond memories of standing in Aladdin’s Castle in the mall, armed with a plastic baggie full of tokens and trying out as many games as possible until my money ran out. Another place that got quite a bit of my money was the arcade just outside the B/X on the military base where we lived — a great place to hang out while my mom was shopping for boring stuff, like clothes and household supplies. These were the days when arcade machines were everywhere, when Chuck-E-Cheese and Showbiz Pizza ruled supreme, when game magazines actually covered arcade games in their regular coverage. After all, arcade machines were a much better value proposition than the home systems — they had better graphics, more satisfying games and custom-built controls. Most only cost a quarter or two to play, and they didn’t tie up your family’s lone television set. I suspect, in the long run, I spent about as much on arcade gaming as I would have spent on a Nintendo Entertainment System with a small library of games. But whereas my Nintendo would have grown outdated and would be worth very little to me today, the memories of hanging around arcades discovering new games with my friends and my brothers are still with me.
As it happens, I live about three blocks from a fairgrounds where one of the largest arcade auctions in the Midwest is held. It happens every quarter (whether or not that’s intentional, it’s hilarious), and it involves people carting in retired arcade machines, pinball machines, air hockey tables and other amusement machines and putting them up for auction.
My wife would murder me if I brought one of these things home, so I have to settle for the next-best thing: the precious hours when they turn on all the machines and let people play them.
The first time I went to the arcade show, I was managing an EB Games retail store, and one of my regular customers told me about his quest to get a Centipede arcade machine. If you’ve played a home version of Centipede, or if you’ve played it on MAME, chances are good you’ve wondered what all the fuss is about — the game doesn’t play well with a joystick, and its gameplay is rather simplistic. That’s because the original arcade version of Centipede didn’t use a joystick — you moved your shooter around with a trackball, firing frantically as you jammed on the button. I caught my friend both at the earlier show and this recent show trying out the Centpede machines that were there — unfortunately, none of them were in good enough repair to deliver a truly authentic experience.
The previous show I’d been to in 2007 had a giant room full of machines, so I was hoping that this show, in 2009, would have a bunch as well. Sadly, the show has turned into a shadow of its former glory, no doubt due to the poor economy and the limited availability of coin-op machines. But as it happens, I was still able to find some great titles to play while I was there.
Probably the best find the entire room was a copy of the Konami game, The Simpsons. The game came out not long after The Simpsons moved off the Tracy Ullman show and into prime time, and it shows — the game makes many references to the first season, and Matt Groening’s Life in Hell characters are included to help round out the cast. The game was very similar to Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, one of the first arcade games I ever saw that looked and played like a high-quality cartoon. The Simpsons was a fairly simplistic beat ‘em up, but it had some neat secrets and extremely fluid animation. Though I’ve played it on MAME in recent years, having the opportunity to stand at a coin-up and experience the game in its intended form was a real treat. (I don’t know what the cabinet went for at the end of the auction, but I’m sure it was a few thousand dollars, since it was in great condition!)
One of my friends challenged me to a round of Donkey Kong, and I was happy to oblige. On a gamepad, I have no problems with Donkey Kong — it’s a fairly simple game once you get the timing down. But what I often forget about Donkey Kong is that the original machine has a fairly short joystick that isn’t exactly precise. It’s very easy to start climbing a ladder without meaning to, or to run past one and wind up getting smooshed by an oncoming barrel. Just beating the first level felt like a major accomplishment.
We also decided to play a round of Frogger, but since there were no original machines around, we had to play it on a retrocade machine. I’m not a big fan of these — they’re refurbished coin-op systems that have something like a MAME box installed in them so they can offer a wide variety of games (of the 1-button and 2-button variety). I guess if you wanted a machine at home that could play the old classics, it’d be a good investment, but for nostalgic purposes, it doesn’t feel right. For one thing, the action on the controller is much more responsive than the classic controllers tended to be, and for another, the cabinet is missing all of the neat artwork and display cards that gave these machines so much character.
When I got bored with Frogger, I tried out a baseball game I’d never seen before called World Series Baseball by Sega. This game was based on the NAOMI board (essentially, the arcade version of the Dreamcast hardware), and looked an awful lot like World Series Baseball 2k1 on the Sega Dreamcast. Given that the Dreamcast game was panned pretty badly for its terrible controls and lack of outfielding ability, I’m guessing it’s the same game. As it happens, the arcade version actually plays very nicely, and it even has a unique analog controller that looks like a bat that you use to swing. Once I got the technique down, I was slamming home runs with ease. I can only assume the home version was ported with very little added, and the lack of this neat controller made the home version much less fun to play. (They made up for it in WSB 2K2, one of the finest sports games on the Dreamcast.)
On the other side of the room, I had a chance to play Soul Calibur II, Tekken 5 and Tekken TAG Tournament on big-screen displays that would have been lovely for home use. Sadly, I didn’t see any Capcom fighters or any of the Virtua Fighter games there, but it’s probably for the best — someone told me that at one of the previous auctions, a working cabinet of Street Fighter Alpha 3 went for $75, so I likely would have tried to bid on a good Capcom cabinet. The Namco cabinets are nice, but the home versions of the games are identical to the arcade versions, so there’s really no reason to own one.
I was very annoyed that I didn’t get a chance to play the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade machine because a 10-year-old boy monopolized it for the 3 hours I was there, and his dad stood there giving the evil eye to anyone who tried to insist upon a turn. That was one of those games that came out when arcade machines were getting too expensive to be worth my time, and I never got a chance to really play through it. Ah well.
There were several “gimmick” games on display, like a skiing game, a 3D helmet game (like Beachcomber 2000, but a different title) and some Area 51 and Maximum Force machines. Sadly, they didn’t have any of the Time Crisis or Crisis Force games, nor any of the Silent Scope games. My friends and I did discover a really unique game, however — Rolling Extreme: Street Luge. It’s a game where you lie in a sled and rock side to side as you roll downhill. You can clobber your opponents Road Rash-style, and the game has some truly insane stuff going on in the background. At one point, I rolled past a T-Rex and under a Pterodactyl.
I really wanted to give the pinball games a try, since there were many I’d never seen before. I was talking to an arcade collector about my fond memories of the arcade/pinball hybrid Baby Pac-Man, and he pointed out that there were two hybrid machines at the show — Star Wars Episode I and Revenge From Mars. The Star Wars game had you helping Qui-Gon Jin in his lightsaber battle with Darth Maul, while Mars had you blowing up alien ships. Both looked pretty awkward to play. The lines were long enough that I didn’t get much of a chance.
All in all, the show was a neat experience, and it allowed me to remember some of the best times I had as a kid, wandering around video game arcades with a handful of quarters or tokens, hoping to find an exciting new game. I’ll post some pictures later to give you an idea of what I got to see.
[Video Game Wednesday] | SeanJJordan | 
April 15, 2009 12:31 am
1 Comment
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Subscribe
By Jesse, June 8, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
Hey Sean,
That sounds really cool. As a kid, I always figured that one of the signs that I’d “made it” would be a genuine arcade cabinet in my living room.
Surprisingly, I never really got into arcade games until Street Fighter II came out. Sure, I’d waste a few dollars here and there, but Street Fighter marked the beginning of my fighting game (and video games in general) addiction.
Now that I have all the newfangled game consoles, I don’t really feel like I need an arcade cabinet. But if I ever “make it”, I might just have to buy one for kicks.