Im just curious, what games did you MARP'ers play back in the 80's?

Unfortunately I grew up in a small town with no real arcade within 40 km, so I had to play the games that came to a local junk-food store. These are the games I remember playing back in the good old days: Space Invaders, HyperSports, TracknField, SlapFight, PolePosition, Defender, Terra Cresta and ofcourse various pinball games.

Just felt nostalgic today, post something about your childhood ;)

Frode Gjerde

-- Frode Gjerde (frogjer@online.no), December 05, 1998

Answers

In my case we need to go back to the 70's... ;-)

I used to live in a small town called Tinwald, about 60 minutes drive from the only place I knew of that had a Pong machine Christchurch airport. After years of looking forward to picking up relatives from the North Island just so I could play pong we finally moved to Christchurch in 1976. My brothers and I used to get $10 saved up and then go for a day of Pinballing... until that fateful day in '78 when our favourite Pinball parlour got its first space invaders machine. You had to queue up for around 30 minutes to get a go on this new fangled spacies machine. Needless to say I was hooked and over the next 8 years spent virtually all my spare time and my pocket money playing every single game I could. The next big thing to happen was Galaga. After that the next huge game of impact for me was Defender. Everyone I know was absolutely blown away by it. The years rolled on and I spent 2.5 years at University majoring in video games before I dropped out to start earning some real money in the computer industry. Even now, if you exclude the Neo-Geo games there are very few games in Mame that I don't remember playing in my youth, although my top 5 favourites in order would have to be:

1) Bomb Jack (one day I'll do that 10 million+ recording ;-) 2) Galaga (need I say more) 3= Xevious 3= Gyruss 4) Gunsmoke 5) Wonderboy

Ok, so that was 6 and there are at least a dozen more that could have made it into the top 5. With so many great games from this era its just too damn hard to pick a top 5 but these ones will have to do. :-(

There's my brief history in the life of gaming. Oh yeah, and my investment in gaming to date excluding hardware/software purchases would be around $15000 to $20000.... and that's a lot of 20's. (Translation for our North American friends.... that's a lot of quarters.)

Cheers, BeeJay.

PS: My oldest son loves playing 1943 with me now. He's 6 years old and drives the MS Sidewinder Gamepad better than I can. His favourite trick of course is to hit the C button and destroy everything on screen. I therefore have a target to aim for.... be able to score more points than him on any game for as long as possible and be gracious in defeat when he finally starts beating me....... and looking at the way he plays already it will happen one day. :-(

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), December 05, 1998.

Retromemories

The same games you'll see me posting high scores on>:-> Except one that's not currently emulated - Monaco GP - I hear it has no CPU. One of these times I'll have to hit that DK Jr score. I beat the worlds record in 82-83 but never recorded it. It was cool!!! Had about 50 people all around me trying to watch. Score was 864,000. Ahhh! Dem good ol days. Thanx 4 the memories.

-- Randood (Wanny@netboise.com), December 06, 1998.

Good Luck!

Wow! Good score! Billy Mitchell gave you a run for your money huh? He's a really nice guy, I've met up with him here in Fort Lauderdale Florida a few times. He's an exceptional player by far.

I don't think anyone including himself has tried to reach 1M on DKjr. yet. I know he reached a point in the game where it's impossible to clear this one stage. Don't think you may of gotten to it yet because Billy got to it and had around 957K.

Good luck with putting up a monster score! I didn't think I was going to hold my #1 spot for too long. :0

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- Stephen Krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), December 07, 1998.

I remember back when i was 9 my brother in law would take me to the reccenter in grand forks ND and there I would play defender for hours on end every body at the place wondered how a 9 year old boy could be so good at defender I was scorring into the 500,000's and every body would leave their games to watch me play even the people woh worked there would come to watch me play i was know as "kid defender" and every body knew me there. besides defender i also liked to play pacman, mspacman the slow version tapper with that cool tap lever, joust mr do the mr do game had a 35 inch screen :) space invaders, and donkey kong jr.

but we move to england and i havelt played defender until i got my first pc a 386 40 and a 14.4 MODEM and got n the internet and found the shareware version of defender on a bbs but i could only score 50,000 beacuse i had to use the key board.

i didnt hear about mame un till 1997 when i got my pentium 200 and when i found out about defender i was extactic i got a copy from a friend and played it but it still didnt seem like the defender that i played when i was 9 so I bilt an arcade cabinet with a joystick and 6 buttons still not a defender configuration but it was close enough at the time i was back up to 200,000 aand today I am just passing 400,000

now my 4 year old brother likes to play defender and mr dos castle (he likes the music) and he moves the stick but i have to fire for him he cant get past the 2 stage in defender or the 3 stage in do's castle but he can perform every fatality in mortal kombat (although i will admit i LOVE the darkstalkers series, the street fighter sieres and the KOF and SS neogeo fighting games) i dont go to the arcade any more because all you see are fighting driving flying and shooting games

-- richard kev stewart (rayden239@aol.com), April 09, 1999.

I'll agree with BeeJay about going back to the 70's. I think it all started in Woodhaven Queens, NY at a pizzeria on a busy street called jamaica ave around 79'. I went in there twice a week for pizza and zeppolas and one day I noticed some games in the back, they were speed buggy and space gurillas. After scraping quarters for about a week, I went back and played some more. I realized at this point, I was definitely hooked! Less then a year later, we moved to Boca Raton Florida. Here is really where it all started. After finding a Galaga in a convenient store, I played it every day for months. About 6 months after that, a full blown aracade opened up just 10 stores down! Now I new I had to find another means of scraping up quarters then digging in dads coffee can that he had full with change used for poker games. Me and my 2 friends Toni and Desi went scouring the neighborhood looking for money back bottles and cutting lawns here and there to feed our habit. I would say within another 6 months later it all payed off... I allready had gotten 3.8M on Galaga, rolled Defender 7.7 times, got 1.3M on Dig Dug, and finally rolled Robotron over in a bar I snuck into just 2 doors down! (and I was only 12yrs old) Me and my 2 friends were untouchable! Unfortunately, at this very time Twin Galaxies was making headlines all over the place, and I new nothing about it. :( I had records broken left and right. Now, were in a new era of players that are getting smarter with hand-eye coordination and there giving some of the old school players a run for their money! (won't mention any names... BBH) :) One thing is for sure, I'll always have my Galaga Score! that's official! :) We'll see what happens when I go to the New Hampshire Classics Tournement in 3 weeks.

Regards, Steve Krogman

-- stephen krogman (skrogman@concentric.net), April 12, 1999.