It's quite something to get such an insight into the crusty besuited underpinnings of what to us was the birth of an exciting new medium filled with boundless possibilities for the creation of a new kind of art that had never existed before.
@alexr I know the guys at Atari who were making real Atari coinops hated Kangaroo. If you've never read that stash of Atari internal emails from that era you really ought, they are great.
@alexr Goat bless Jed, he seems like a properly righteously curmudgeonly dude, and tremendously skilled with it. Those emails are gold.
I had the opportunity to get quite nicely inebriated with Larry DeMar a few years ago and that was lovely in terms of hearing some stories. I hope one day to do the same with Eugene :D
These old Play Meter magazines are full of threatening WE'RE GONNA SUE YOU! ads. I remember seeing some of them (usually from Atari) in our game mags BITD but these coinop trade mags take it to a different level.
I occasionally see someone use the phrase "put through the ringer" or "dragged through the ringer" and I'm not sure what mental image ought to go with it.
I guess people don't get to see actual wringers very often these days so the phrase has become something else.
Going through these old Play Meter scans is really interesting. Here I found an interview with famous pinball designer Steve Ritchie, talking about a video game he was making for Williams. He sounds super confident about the game and definitely makes it sound like something I'd've enjoyed, but this was around the time of the arcade game crash and the game never came out.
The game has pretty much vanished without trace, and all I can find of it is a blurry promo video from back in the day. Looks quite a bit like 'Blaster' from what I can see of it.
Pity there's probably no chance it'll end up on MAME... mind you we thought the same about Akka Arrh! 🐂
Continuing down this rabbit hole led me to this ridiculous, crazy, beautiful monster that's neither video game nor pinball but somehow half way between the two.
Steve Ritchie is obviously completely bananas, but definitely my kind of bananas.
@dev_ric@ahchay@kiwired@gilesgoat I think it's only expensive there because it's new (at the time of the ad). See also Super Pacman, which most people wouldn't give $850 of somebody else's money for these days.
Also it was a more complex cab being hybrid pinball and video. I actually played it a few times back in the day when I was on one of my first trips to the US.
