Oldtimer vidiots remember Arcades?

[shadygroove]

Odd how these threads come in such a timely fashion. I was cruzing through the old mall I spent many of my childhood days at and ran into my old arcade last weekend. Of course it\'s been barred shut for years now, but it still had that same familiar smell of burnt circuit boards and video nerds. I just stood for a moment and reflected on how much of my Christmas money was blown in Ninja Turtles and the Bear Claw.

[weekapaug19]

Dance Dance Revolution

you actually use this game/machine leith???

[leith]

Dance Dance Revolution

you actually use this game/machine leith???

Oh yeah man. It is soo much fun. I mean the music gets to be a bit much but I like to dance and play vids. Perfect Combo.
 I try to only play @ D&B because it really sucks to lose to a 13 year old girl. LOL

[davepeck]

i\'ve definitely had my jaw left on the floor quite a few times by watching kids absolutely OWN DDR.. it\'s really fun to watch people who are good at it..

[Wolfman]

i\'ve definitely had my jaw left on the floor quite a few times by watching kids absolutely OWN DDR.. it\'s really fun to watch people who are good at it..

I was gonna say the same thing about Zookeeper.

[Rujah]

im a big fan of the original pacman. the one where he eats like different fruits and veggies. I\'m fucking sick on that game. the farthest I ever got was like stage 25 which is almost 2x around.  anyone play this game before, oir know where I can get one? GUess I will just check ebay.

[Wolfman]

im a big fan of the original pacman. the one where he eats like different fruits and veggies. I\'m fucking sick on that game. the farthest I ever got was like stage 25 which is almost 2x around.  anyone play this game before, oir know where I can get one? GUess I will just check ebay.

Puh-leaze.  You are nothing.  Here\'s a real pacman player for you.  A few years ago, Dave, Mike and I were at Funspot before a Breakfast show and found this guy OWNING a game called Zookeeper.  He was going for the world record on that, too.  There were video cameras watching and a crowd of 8 people cheering him on.  It was surreal.  

World Champion - Billy Mitchell

It took almost twenty years, but on July 3, 1999 for the first time ever, a perfect score of 3,333,360 was achieved on Pac-Man by Billy Mitchell at the Funspot Family Fun Center, Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. To achieve this, Billy had to eat every single bonus prize and every possible blue ghost in all 256 levels of the game - a feat which took him over six hours to complete. Not only that but he didn\'t lose a single life. It was the first ever perfect game of Pac-Man.

On completing the game, Billy announced "I never have to play that darn game again". He had been playing for seventeen years. In a recent interview with videogames.com, Billy spoke about how he did it.

 

I understand the behavior of the ghosts and am able to manipulate the ghosts into any corner of the board I choose. This allows me to clear the screen with no patterns. This was a more difficult method for the initial 18 screens. I chose to do it this way because I wanted to demonstrate the depths of my abilities. I wanted to raise the bar higher - to a level that no one else could match.

 

Imagine a world in which Billy Mitchell never encountered Pac-Man. Put to good use his sharp mind, excellent hand-eye coordination, incredibly long attention span and his prodigious talent for problem-solving probably would have led the world into a utopian technological society by now. The human genome would have been mapped by the mid eighties. World poverty would have been eliminated entirely. The air and the earth would be clean. We\'d be living in an age of unprecedented peace. Serbs and Kosovars would be frolicking hand in hand cracking jokes about their ethnic differences. Billy Mitchell would have a girlfriend. Instead, Billy Mitchell played Pac-Man and grew a moustache.

[obsession600]

Another classic example of Man vs Machine.

Marathon Video Gaming Makes Comeback as Portland Man Plays Asteroids for 27 hours
Asteroids world record almost broken, machine malfunctioned!
Posted by Sean Foster on 3/29/2004 7:21:54 AM


It’s been nearly 20 years since a video gamer has played an arcade game for more than a day on a single quarter. In fact, not since Twin Galaxies conducted the 1st Annual Iron Man Contest for the Guinness Book back in July,1985, has a video gamer stepped to the plate intent on breaking a long-standing video game marathon world record.
But, with the Asteroids world record in his sights, Bill Carlton, of Portland, Oregon, lasted 27 hours before his trusty Asteroids machine malfunctioned, ending his run for glory at the Ground Kontrol Arcade – a Portland video game center specializing in classic arcade games from the early 80s.

With 60 classic games to choose from at Ground Kontrol Arcade, Carlton chose Asteroids for his ordeal, with other gamers also signing up for future marathons on other game titles -- a sign that players are ready once again to tackle big ticket records; ones that take days of playing to eclipse, demanding tremendous stamina as much as playing skill.

"Carlton’s 12.7 million points put him in 5th place in the all-time Asteroids rankings, Still, he would have had to play for more than 2 more days to match the 41 million-point record established by Scott Safran back in November, 1982.""

Walter Day, editor of Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records, the industry’s record book.

A comprehensive report on the significance of Carlton’s feat has been prepared by Robert Mruczek, Twin Galaxies’ Chief referee and can be found at http://www.twingalaxies.com

"Long-range, high scoring marathons like Carlton’s were the meat and potatoes of the video gaming world back in the early 80s," says Day, who personally organized many such marathons for Twin Galaxies back in the classic age of gaming. "You were deemed a star if you could take a game for days on a single quarter. It brought tremendous prestige and everybody tried to master their favorite game and marathon it."

During the heyday of the marathon age, Twin Galaxies found itself monitoring as many as a dozen marathons every weekend – with the biggest crop being held the weekend of April 2-4, 1982, when Twin Galaxies organized the 1982 Defender National Championship, which saw Defender marathons going on simultaneously in 23 different cities around North America. "It was a weekend affair," remembers Day. "The kids took off Friday from school and started in the morning, playing straight through until Monday."

Though Rick Smith of Mission Viejo, California won the National Championship that weekend with 33,013,200 million points, he held the title for barely 1 month before Marvin Norton of Thatcher, AZ snatched Smith’s crown away with a 49 million-point marathon.

The most unique marathon conducted during the golden age of gaming, was the 1st Annual Twin Galaxies Iron Man Contest, which offered eight competitors a chance at winning $10,000 in cash if they could keep their game going on one quarter for 100 hours. James Vollandt of California, playing on Joust, lasted the longest with 67-1/2 hours.

To read more about Bill Carlton’s Asteroids marathon, go to http://www.twingalaxies.com