"Star Fox was inspired by I, Robot." Well, I can see a little inspiration- *Sees a giant floating head made of polygons as a boss* Oh. Okay. Yeah, now I see it.
I remember seeing it when it first came out. I'd been playing arcade games as a child right a the beginning of all this. There was something different to I Robot which just didn't sit right for the time. It may sound strange, but even then bitmap graphics, the larger and more colourful the better - would win attention.
I think the problem with I,Robot was each level tried too hard to be completely different to the one before. If it was 'paint a level, shooty bonus round, paint a level, shooty bonus round' it would have been more playable; you could practise and develop how you play the two different types of round. Instead it kept doing crazy enemies like those massive rolling balls or the giant head, or sharks zig-zagging back and forth that almost turned it into Frogger. Each new level was just so random it nearly always killed you the first time you got there as you had no idea how to play it.
The bullets and ship explosion in Defender still look and sound fantastic today. Can't believe that the CPU that drove my humble Dragon 32 was also at the heart of the defender board.
Pretty much all the Dragon needed was more RAM and a wider color palette. As evidenced by the transcode of Defender to the Tandy Color Computer III: th-cam.com/video/jLdAvNj8HNI/w-d-xo.html
This is basically a history of advancements in Golden Age arcade games and I'm completely fine with that. The title just makes it more algorithm friendly. I think most people will get that.
I agree. But since he called this "arcade games," I wish he would have talked about the earliest games which go back to 1930s. There is a jet-fighter game that came in 2 formats. One with a built in "screen" and one with a projector where it projected the jets onto a wall. You used your machine gun to try to shoot the jet out of the sky. Very cool game. Then there was the 1930s and 40s baseball games. Then there was the "set" games of the 60s involving driving on the moon and attack helicopters and such. Then the lightgun and racing games of the early to mid 70s. I have only the vaguest memories of those electromechanical games (I was 8 years old when Space Invaders came out), but I've always liked them. There were out of the way places where these games were still available to play when I was a teenager. Some of the pre-videogames were right in the arcades still in the 80s.
@@tarstarkusz These games are what really kicked the industry in high gear by leaps and bound. The old mechanicals never real reached that level. Add to the fact that CPU's and logic chips were cheap enough to bring these to the home, did not hurt that industrial explosion. The older games you mentioned would not be in anyway cost effective to become consumer level by any stretch.The title should have read "Games That Pushed The Limits in the Golden Age of VIDEO Arcade Games". To most people, when you mention arcade today , the first thing coming to mind would be most likely be video games. Us old coots think of mechanicals and pinballs as well.
@@GORF_EMPIRE Digital Derby, Hit N Missile and Marx Shooting Gallary (I had that growing up. I loved that game) are examples of bringing the electromechanical arcade home. Chutes Away is an example of one of the "set" games being brought home. I do agree though that many of these mechanical games were just too big and complex to make available for a toy to give to a kid, though the above mentioned games do bring it home at a smaller scale. I was always more fascinated with the electromechanical games than video games, though I played video games a lot more. Video games never seemed all that mysterious to me. The ideas did (like who dreams up these games), but they never seemed like a black box to me the way the electromechanical games did. I never really wondered, 'how do they work' mostly because i got into computers at an early age.
@@tarstarkusz Of course you can site some examples but they never reached the power house consumer level of the likes of Atari and Nintendo. If it were not for Atari, I would have maintained my non-interest in computers I had as a kid since in school they were not games but more school work..... I suppose you can blame the education system for that since they never really explained just what a computer really was or what it might one day be able to accomplish. They seemed like a glorified calculator. The really odd thing is that nowadays, today's computers are boring.... the average person has no clue what they really are and just how to talk to them on the CPU level. They do everything for you. They are just appliances today, as powerful as they are, they leave little to the imagination like the old 8 bit home computer era. With the old school machines to make them useful other than playing games on them, you'd have to actually understand their internal workings. I abandoned Windows a couple years ago and went to Linux just to get back that command line feeling of being the master of the machine and not it's slave. I think you get what I mean.
@@GORF_EMPIRE Yea, I do. I had to be dragged screaming and kicking into Windows. The phones and tablets are especially bad. They are loaded with spyware and largely a total black box to 99% of people. An appliance, as you say.
Gun fight was my game as a little kid back in the mid-70s. Five year old me standing on a bench at the pizza place destroying my 13 year old brother repeatedly and he just would throw a fit. So many great memories from back then, I could go on and on. One thing to mention (at least in the U.S.): the Golden Age of video games was so great because video games were a genuine fad at the time, right along side Rubik's cubes. People of all ages were playing video games (for lots of people, video games like Pacman were the first interaction they ever had with a computer) and video games were everywhere. Arcade machines in every gas station and supermarket, along with each decent-sized town having an arcade or two. Hit songs on the radio, coverage from TV, radio and newsprint, fast food promotions, cartoons, cereal...all so exciting. The crash of 1983 was due to many things, but one major driver that never gets mentioned is that the fad was over. Videogames lost their limelight across generations and everyone (except for kids and a few die hards) moved on. Excellent video!
Scary to acknowledge that the best 3d you could (hypothetically) find in an arcade in 1983 was Blaster, but just two years later we had Space Harrier running at 60fps. That may be the single fastest evolution of graphics hardware that has ever or will ever occur.
Not much. Space Harrier had the same technique in simulating 3d than 17:25 Pole Position (that was runningin 60fps too). That is sprite/tile scaling.They just bumped more colors and sprites. People and technology wasn't ready for real 3d videogames (with not just abstract wireframe graphic( in the 80s. It returned to be a thing in the mid 90s with the Sega VR series and Namco Rail shooters but if you watch them...they were't very different than I Robot. The real evolution began when they used the texture mapping to fill the poligons instead of just plain colors or techniques like gourad shading to simulate the shading of surfaces (like in the first Sega VR series coin-ops like Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing)
Tempest was a much bigger deal than Star Wars, I think. But both were pretty groundbreaking. Novel controllers (the yoke and the spinner) along with color vector graphics and speech. Tempest brought that full color experience 2 years earlier.
But at heart, Tempest was a fairly standard early shmup, just with a novel viewpoint. It was Space Invaders in a pit, basically. What made the Star Wars arcade game so mind-blowing was in how successfully it recreated the final battle from the movie. There'd been plenty of licensed tie-in games before, but it was the first one to really FEEL like the movie it was based on.
Tempest was trippy and cool and very fun, but it was also very abstract. You couldn't relate anything on-screen to any actual object. Star Wars was a full "you are there" experience depicting objects and scenarios you could likely relate to from the film. Much more immersive, especially when you factor in the cockpit style sit-down versions of the machine.
The hardware used in Turbo Buck Rodgers and Subroc used a bank of 8 voltage controlled oscillators to provide the clock pulses to the the object ROMs as they were read out and drawn to the screen as the beam moved across the CRT. The slower the VCO frequency the longer the pixel data took to be read out and the larger the object would appear on the screen. Essentially the hardware raced the beam like an Atari 2600 when drawing the sprite layer.
I noticed a change in audio later on. I've developed a couple of techniques to help with this. 1. Wear the same top & position your mic in exactly the same way (pick a standard way to do it for every video so you don't forget how you did it). That's only if you're using a lavalier mic though. 2. If you process your audio, make sure you keep an unprocessed version of the original cut of the audio. Then if you need to make corrections with new audio, add this new audio to the existing audio file (at the beginning or end, it doesn't matter), then process the whole lot again. Now take the new audio part and just save that part. By processing the old & new audio together, you get a very similar processing to the original processing, and so the new audio sounds remarkably similar to the old audio. Hope that helps! Love the vids. Keep em' coming.
Well spotted! I do try and do the voice over in one session usually to avoid this problem but as you noticed I had to rerecord some parts a few days later to correct some problems. I have a mic on a boom but I think the same thing applies, slight movements seem to make a noticeable difference in the sound. This is something I'll have to be more careful about in future. As for the processing, that's a really good idea. I've just been slapping the inserts over the top of the top of the tracks in my video editing package. If I need to do this again I'm sure think redoing it in Audacity that I usually use to record will probably help too. Thank you for the constructive criticism!
My favorite story about Space Invaders is about how it's technical limitations led to emergent gameplay. The original reason why the aliens speed up as you defeat them is simply that the hardware was slowed down while having to change the graphics for a large number of them, which Nishikado decided to keep as a feature rather than compensate for in the programming.
Crazy Kong is in fact a Nintendo sanctioned product licensed out to a third party as a converstion kit for Crazy Climber. Where it is illicit is that it was authorized only to meet the demands of the Japanese market and no where else.
I still remember the first time I played Galaxian at an arcade on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Md. Couldn't believe how advanced it was over previous generation of arcade machines. Galaxian was one of the first ROM's I loaded onto my Super RetroCade and I still enjoy playing it today.
Can you do a video on the pre-video game arcade games. Many of them greatly pushed the limits. Without them, there never would have been the video game arcade craze of the 80s. The history of coin operated machines is pretty fascinating and goes back MUCH further than anyone would imagine. In Ancient Rome there were coin operated machines, usually connected with worship. There were natgas vending machines in peoples' homes and apartments in the UK into the 20th century. Put a pence in the machine and you got 5 minutes or whatever in naturalgas. There were mid 19th century "jukeboxes" that played music box music at train stations in the UK. But in my humble opinion, the first true arcade games that were not just novelties like the flipping cards or talking wizards came in the 30s. That's the period (from the 30s to the 70s) I'd love to see a video of.
A little advice from someone who stretches canvases... When stretching fabric, it helps to put one tack/staple in the center of each edge. Attach one side, go to the opposite side, stretch, and affix. Next, go to the other set of opposite sides and repeat. Work away from those middle bits towards the corners, stretching as you go. This prevents slack, wrinkles, and bunching if your fabric has a little stretch to it.
Here's what stands out to me about Arcade games. The first popular game i remember was Space Invaders in 1978. In 79 you had Asteroids and Galaxians. But if you look at 1980 to 1982 you had so many incredible arcade games come out. Just look at the games that came out between 80 to 82. Pacman, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Mrs Pacman, Galaga, Moon Cresta, Defender, Scramble, Robotron, Frogger, Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, Joust, Dig Dug, Vanguard, Zaxxon, Qbert, Pole Position, Jungle Hunt, Tempest, Moon Patrol, Moon Buggy, Cobra, Berzerk, Gorf, Phoenix, Burger Time, Battle Zone, Mr Do, Star Castle, Tron, Pleiads. On TH-cam, i've found some amazing looking space games that i didn't play back in the early 80s, but these games look great. Just look up any of these games on TH-cam. Space Cruiser, Condor, Space Firebird, Speak and Rescue, Astro Fantasia, Astro Blaster, Space Fury, Battle Cross, Sky Base. This Catacomb game looks great. It's looks like a combination of Moon Cresta and Scramble. Here it is th-cam.com/video/ZUAqxPUXHnk/w-d-xo.html
Excellent video as usual. There is an urban legend that 500 I Robot cabinets were dumped into the ocean. You could do a whole episode on I Robot, or perhaps Dave Theurer games in general since you missed Tempest and Missile Command. Tac scan would be another limit pushing vector game to cover. Hell, you should do a whole vector episode.
So as a person who experienced all of this here is my take on it. When Space Invaders came about you either knew about the 'counting shots' method for 300 point top ships or not. As games moved on there were people in the arcades that just excelled at them. I remember putting my first 10p into a Defender machine and it lasting seconds but then replaying it straight away! What a game, along with Missile Command were games that were hard, they also felt like they rewarded you upon repeat plays. For me all this ended with the C64, followed by an Amiga thing and finishing with a PS1 that I could spend my money on.
This is so much more interesting than I expected. You should do videos on later arcade games the pushed the limits. This only going to 1984 leaves out so much history
Great video - I was too young to care about the games I played back in the day, I just played them. Now, I love watching these kinds of videos and learning the history and background/making of. 👍👍👍
I do feel it was because I, Robot was so abstract that it didn't find a market. And I did find the bit about the Galaxian hardware interesting - there are several boards that were re-used in that era, including the Super Pac-Man hardware from Namco that powered a lot of games.
I didn't hear of the video game crash till the early 2000's. I'm sure most gamers outside of the USA never heard of it either. We were too busy playing games on home computers such as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum to have noticed any video game crash.
I didn't know about the game crash either. Of course there was a decline in video game popularity(it happens to everything) but I don't remember buying any games at cheaper prices until after that time just before the NES came out. Home Computers were the big thing at the time as well as Colecovision. Atari 5200 was a failure. We had more options. Home Computers dominating probably did shake up things a bit. I know Texas Instruments was falling apart with the TI994a and 3rd party devs started making carts for them. This was good for me because I finally was able to have games like Donkey Kong, Burgertime, & Congo Bongo available. Also the best Imagic ports were on that system. A few of my friends had Atari 800 and one had a C64. If you had a Home Computer everyone was at your house.
The crash was mostly in the US and a bit Canada. Personally I don't remember people were talking about a crash here in Canada, but I felt the drought of games at that time. Not many games were coming out. Anyway, small PC (like C64, TRS-80) were becoming popular around that time, so they kept us busy until the NES came in 1986. The rest is history.
eeermz, afaik galaxian/galaga was the first game that had 'powerups' ... from time to time you get the opportunity to get a second rocket so you'd double your firing power. If I'm not mistaken it's when the "boss' comes down the first time, together with 2 scouts, if you kill them on the first descent you should get a bonus rocket (it sits next to your primary rocketship, and if i'm not wrong it also allowed you to take 1 hit before dying, but the rocketship that took the hit would be removed again...) The golden age of arcades didn't die in '83 when the console crash happened (it was mainly the consoles that crashed because every company was selling a console and every day there came a new one on market, also since atari didn't do any Quality Assurance about the games that get released there was a gigantic ton of crap released which were pure moneygrabs. Games that looked nice on the box-art, but actually were either a clone of an existing game or were games that looked like they were developed by a toddler. The arcade hat it's highdays until the end of the'80s, and it suddenly dropped in the mid '90s, when consoles like the playstation delivered a lot more power than the average arcade game. Also pc was getting a much more serious approach from developers. Microsoft created directx so games would run a lot better compared to dos games of the previous age, it also allowed that gamedevs didn't have to add drivers or API's into the games to support the ever growing list of soundcards, gfx cards, etc. (that's also why most '90s era soundcards have a "soundblaster compatible mode", so they could have sound in the many dos-games that almost always had support for soundblaster cards. For me the golden age of Arcade consists of games like Double Dragon, Golden Axe, 1942, Wonderboy, Gyruss, Outrun, Chase HQ, The Simpsons, Operation WOLF, Ikari Warriors and many many more... By the time StreetFigher II and a bit later Mortal Kombat came on the scene the arcade was at it's last 'high' period, soon people would stop coming to the arcades and they'd start dying off. There were a lot less arcades in the 90's and most arcades i knew started adding gambling machines and the typical 90's "fotoplay" systems with touchscreen and simple games. Kids didn't come to the arcades anymore as they had consoles with the same games, so arcades started first having an 18+ section (gambling) and later turned 18+ completely so they could put the slots machines closer to the entrance to lure in gamblers. The arcade games were put into the back. From the early 2000's on most arcades were gone or were gamble-halls with maybe a pinball machine or two and one or two arcade games. The arcade became something young kids would only see at the fair where mobile "luna parks" would be that had a few old games, maybe one or two recent games, and claw machines and coin pushers (operated with tokens instead of real money). Only in Japan you still have some real arcades, even the big sega building doesn't exist anymore (that was a multi-level arcade, very big). I had great times in the arcades when i was young, i learned to know a lot of friends in those smoke-loaded, soggy smelling, noisy places... (yeah back then you could smoke while playing games... the smoke ban killed a lot of business if you ask me)
Awesome job on digging up I Robot! That's a deep cut. Jaw-dropping graphics for the time. I tracked down a ROM of it and gave it a play on MAME, oh.... I'd say sometime around 2005. It wasn't a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination... but it wasn't super fun or addicting like many of the others on the list. I love the content you've been putting out... I do have a small suggestion for you, if you'll humor me... I don't know if it's an "other side of the pond" thing, but most of the folks I know of in the USA that I've talked shop in person with tend to have a pretty standard way of pronouncing processor names. But, once again, this is the TH-cam comments section, feel free to take this with as big a grain of salt as you like: MOS Technoglogy 6502: "Sixty Five Oh Two" Intel 8008: I've.... never heard anyone talk a lot about the 8008. My guess is "Eight Oh Oh Eight" or "EIghty Oh Eight". Intel 8080: "Intel Eighty Eighty" Intel 80286: "Two Eighty Six" Intel 80386: "Three Eighty Six" Intel 80486: "Four EIghty Six" Motorola 6800: "Sixty Eight Hundred" or "Motorola Sixty Eight Hundred" Motorola 68000: "Sixty Eight Kay" or "Motorola Sixty Eight Kay" You might notice I've left off a processor. :) Honestly, though, I call it a "Zee Eighty". Do y'all over there call it a "Zed Eighty"? Either way, I agree that the computer that Sir Clive Sinclair made out of it is definitely a "Zed Ex Spectrum"... and the car brand is definitely "Jag-You-Ar", and not "Jag-war", and ABSOLUTELY not "Jag-Wire". As far as the naming of other systems goes, there seems to be far more contention. "Super Nintendo", "Sness", "Snezz"... who can say for sure?
As someone who owned every major console, including the SNES, and had many video gaming friends, the NES was uniformly pronounced "enn-ee-ess" (but was more often just called "the Nintendo,") and the SNES was always "ess-enn-ee-ess," or "the Super Nintendo," never ever "sness," much less "snez." Those pronunciations come from modern-day retro commenters.
@@straightupanarg6226 I actually thought it was a British thing. The majority of the time I hear someone saying "Nezz" or "Snezz", it's someone from the UK.
Galaxian was the very first game that I've enjoyed in the arcades back then. Most of the time i just watch others playing all the arcade games like pacman, crazy climber, space invaders etc as i had limited allowance back then. But I did play galaxian enough to reach 14 flags as far as I can remember.
Very entertaining and informative video. I am 50 but i didn't know I Robot and its relevance (i knew and played the coin-ops of every other games but Blaster)
This was just a bit before my time. Sure I had been to arcades as a young kid but playing them back then was nigh on impossible. I got my start in 1986 with the Nes and the Master System in 1986. I was still incredibly young but that's when arcades began catching my eyes. You could say I really came into my own during the second golden age of arcade gaming or from 1989 through 1998. Once the Dreamcast was on the horizon everyone knew the end was nigh for most arcades. When the home consoles could perfectly replicate the arcade experience while expanding on it greatly there was no reason to dump all of our change into them. By then most arcades consisted on DDR machines and I wasn't having any of that.
I was a Streetfighter 2 drone (as evidenced to this day by the handle I assign myself on every social media platform). Once my Super Nintendo got a version of Streetfighter 2, and once I saw just how decent a port it really was, the arcades were done in my mind. The sheer depth of games like Zelda, Secret of Mana, and later games like FF7, Metal Gear Solid, Mario 64, Ocarina, then on PC stuff like Doom. These were games the arcade COULD deliver but never would, so I just didn't care for them by the year of our lord 1993.
@@thegreathadoken6808 I understand where you're coming from and I was a lot like you in the early 1990's. However, arcade gaming in 1993 (good example) did reach beyond home consoles at least too me. That's when games like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Tekken, and Ridge Racer hit the arcade scene. These games were at least two years out for home releases and once I saw those amazing polygons splashed all over the screen I was completely mesmerized. I did anything I could just to get to the arcades to play Virtua Fighter. Now, I was a huge console gamer (still am) even when going to the arcades during the late 1990's for the same reasons as you. Games like Thunder Force 4, Phantasy Star 2/4, Street Fighter, Zelda, Streets of Rage, Ghouls n' Ghosts, Sonic, Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, AVP, NBA Jams, just everything...However, even with a Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation in 1995 arcades were doing things the consoles couldn't without compromise. Like for example Street Fighter Alpha 1+2, Sega Rally, The House of The Dead, Time Crisis, Marvel vs. Capcom, Darkstalkers, Killer Instinct, Cruise n' USA, and so many more that we still don't have arcade perfect renditions of.
I do have a theory defender was really the first bullet hell. Cuz once the planet blows up all the ships turn into mutants. And they all swarm around you throwing bullets at your ship. That's bullet hell.
15:00 The huge success of Battlezone and Star Wars counters the idea that people just couldn't cope with 3D. Personally, I wonder if it failed just because it was so garishly ugly. I mean, even for the 80s, that's eye-bleeding. The gameplay doesn't look very smooth either. (Especially compared to the Atari vector games.)
I would say that it's not the graphics themselves that caused their failure, but rather cost these games would be sold at a higher cost due to their complexity, and arcade owners don't/can't afford to gamble on experimental games unless it was cheap or there was a lot of hype. Most arcades had a shelf life of a month before being replaced unless it was a huge success. If a game did not rack up enough traffic it would either be converted to something else, or sold (or traded) to other arcade owners, amusement leasers.
Both of those were Don Bluth games. His involvement is why Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were a success in comparison to most, if not all other FMV based games.
And the coleco arcades for less than$100 in 2021 and the Pocket arcade machines for $50-$75 in 2021 and the original arcades shown in the video here from old to new in 2021 price range is expensive for $3000-$40,000
But there is a weird caveat. There was an interview with Eugene Jarvis. When the consumers electronic show in 81.. When defender was being shown off everyone in the press was announcing that rally X was going to be the next big game. While defender was not going to impress anyone.. In at the exact time defender was being shown off Pac-Man was being shown off. And everyone was saying rally X was going to be the big game. Totally true interview.
I have a few comments regarding the almost complete flops of Blaster and I, Robot. Those games were hyped unbelievably in the coin op magazines and elsewhere months before they actually came out, generating a lot of buzz and "high" expectations. Everyone expected them to be amazing, like the awesome experience of playing Robotron or Defender for the first time. And they just weren't. They were incremental improvements in doing pseudo 3d, but they didn't have the smooth gameplay and crispness of their simpler predecessors. Also, it was really hard to find arcades that had them. I think they overpriced them, and by that time arcade owners had begun favoring generic, cheap knockoff games by obscure companies in order to turn a quick profit. The games became more about enticing you to keep putting tokens in than giving you a great experience.
I played nearly every game in this video (and a whole lot more!) in the 80's and I still remember being blown away by the Star Wars arcade game and even Battlezone. At the time they seemed light years ahead even if they don't appear to hold up well today. Even the garish looking vector & peudo 3D games were so cool at the time. I feel many of those type of games weren't more popular at the time because they had more of a learning curve to them. Other popular games like Galaga, Pac Man, Frogger, and Pole Position were super simple to walk up and play. Plus, I would imagine the games that required additional math chips & co-processors in them probably cost more initially so unless you had a well known IP like Star Wars attached arcade owners would be hesitant to buy them. Plus the North American crash that started in 83 and lasted until about 86 did hurt arcades quite a bit. Although not as much as it nearly killed console gaming which almost disappeared in many parts of the US from 84 to early 86 when the NES went nationwide.
I hadn't realised Galaxian was that old. I just assumed that and Galaga were mid 80s. The voices in Star Wars do contain a certain quality of the actors so they must have started as samples before being turned into whatever they ended up as. I would guess phonemes, like a very crude version of more modern voice synthesis.
Wait, I thought they digitized the voices from the movie to put in the arcade game. Maybe it's a difference between emulation vs real hardware. The voices sounded great, especially in the sit down version.
Good video. But you MIGHT have one fact wrong. When Turbo was made, Sega was an American company hiring Japanese labor to build machines, and the test audience was American servicemen serving in Japan. It was a Gulf And Western Company, which also owned Paramount Pictures. That's how Sega easily go the rights to make a Star Trek arcade game.
Sega = SErvice GAmes. They used to make gambling machines before gambling was banned on the military bases, so they switched to entertainment games (mechanical ones at first).
@@AnthonyFlack exactly. That would explain a lit of things that would also explain games of skill which were "gambling games" but not legally gambling for federal purposes because there was no element of pure chance. You won either based on timing or a strategic angle or some other combination of things, all of which you are in control of.
I loved I, Robot even though I'm no good at it. In later levels they throw curve balls at you like enemies tat attack the camera. you need to change the angle of the camera using the P1 P2 buttons to dodge. I can't get that far. I had an old game magazine that did a similar rundown you have here, but they cite Robotron:2084 because of the "dynamic color" cycling on the screen border.
Look into the TMS9918, it is the real grand daddy off the NES SEGA MEGA DRIVE and other home consoles. Texas Instruments even coined the word Sprite. Sprites and tiles were invented due to the constraints of mid seventies DRAM bandwidth.
The Video Game Crash has always seemed weird to me. Supposedly the reason for it was E.T. 2600 and the Pacman port for that console but how does that translate to gaming as a whole? People disliked how badly Pacman was ported compared to the famous arcade original which implies their problem was with home consoles rather than arcade games. I guess I can't ignore facts but when it comes to the general public, people were still going to arcades and enjoyed what consoles they had. Even if Nintendo didn't release the NES, the rising computer market would have been an easy way to sneak Video Games into the home. A similar kind of crash happened with the internet. In that case, the reason for that was a sudden influx of interest that eventually got evened out later on, not because internet was bad but because the momentum was too fast for it's own good.
It's been my understanding that Pac-Man and E.T were more like the straw that broke the camels back- that there had been a ton of poorly performing games that had slowly built up antipathy to games as a whole, and that E.T was just such a high-profile dud that it just pushed the idea that console gaming was just trash with no quality control into memetic reality, and people just turned away in large enough numbers for it to really show. If I had to guess, since I'm not really THAT well-read in the subject, I feel like there has to be more to it than just Atari crashing- maybe Atari, being such a big player in the market, had a bunch of investments they couldn't pay when their customers left them, and so them withdrawing maybe created aftershocks that left more and more companies without money?
The reality of the North American video game crash was a combination of the media trashing video games combined with a recession. Games didn't go away though as they just shifted to home computers. Parents could better justify purchasing a computer for their child than a console since a computer could be thought of as a way to enhance a child's education and address media criticism. And yes, there's no doubt that Atari had over-extended by 1983. People criticise the Atari 2600 offerings from Atari just before the crash. However, Atari's arcade offerings were still top-notch right into 1985.
You can't understand how someone could mistake that Alec Guinness voice for a sample??? C'mon mate, transport yourself to back in the day and try to remember the first (100) times you heard it. I always thought that's what it was, it's only because you pointed it out that I realise it was synthesised!
Sheer opinion based on how old you were. Arcade games speak to a period of your own experience. Arcades were at their peak in the 80's, after that everyone had their own in their bedroom. Don't listen to this guy, you enjoy what you enjoy.
I wonder - once arcade machines were more powerful than home computers - what was the most powerful arcade machine ever? in relation to machines of the time? IE before arcade machines became PCs in wooden cases?
Yeah. Hard Drivin', S.T.U.N. Runner, i-Robot (custom FPU added to help out the CPU), and Robotron (twin 4-bit blitters to help out the CPU). The chips in S.T.U.N. runner were out of this world for the time. In addition to the 68010 CPU and a healthy dose of VRAM for the year, there were three 50 MHz chips, plus a sound board with its own CPU and two audio chips (in 1989!). Oh, and Gyruss had five sound chips and two CPUs dedicated to audio.
ok yeah I am sorry but you missed a HUGE evolution of games by not mentioning Dragon's Lair. That game was responsible for a massive boost during the 83 crash in addition to creating the very first QTE movie experience. I have no idea why you mentioned I, Robot. The system was not advanced and it sold fewer than 1,000 copies. It wasn't a flop because nobody got it, it was a flop because the gameplay was trash.
New arcade machines for the arcades in 2022 will be more expensive than 2021 all arcade and arcade 1ups the newer they get the more expensive the price range will be but the good news is that all arcade machines that are 50 years old will be cheapest and most of them will not exist anymore because one day the videogame era and the arcade era will end it will be nothing but a old fad that permanently vanished by the year of 2122 will be the end of the gaming era
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"Star Fox was inspired by I, Robot."
Well, I can see a little inspiration-
*Sees a giant floating head made of polygons as a boss*
Oh. Okay. Yeah, now I see it.
If they had made "I, Robot" mostly shooting levels, it probably would've done better. It really does look amazing for the time.
I remember seeing it when it first came out. I'd been playing arcade games as a child right a the beginning of all this. There was something different to I Robot which just didn't sit right for the time. It may sound strange, but even then bitmap graphics, the larger and more colourful the better - would win attention.
The concept is just weird. Watching this video, I suddenly realized that it's actually 3D PacMan. It's taken me almost 40 years to understand that.
I think the problem with I,Robot was each level tried too hard to be completely different to the one before. If it was 'paint a level, shooty bonus round, paint a level, shooty bonus round' it would have been more playable; you could practise and develop how you play the two different types of round. Instead it kept doing crazy enemies like those massive rolling balls or the giant head, or sharks zig-zagging back and forth that almost turned it into Frogger. Each new level was just so random it nearly always killed you the first time you got there as you had no idea how to play it.
The bullets and ship explosion in Defender still look and sound fantastic today. Can't believe that the CPU that drove my humble Dragon 32 was also at the heart of the defender board.
Pretty much all the Dragon needed was more RAM and a wider color palette. As evidenced by the transcode of Defender to the Tandy Color Computer III: th-cam.com/video/jLdAvNj8HNI/w-d-xo.html
This is basically a history of advancements in Golden Age arcade games and I'm completely fine with that. The title just makes it more algorithm friendly. I think most people will get that.
I agree. But since he called this "arcade games," I wish he would have talked about the earliest games which go back to 1930s. There is a jet-fighter game that came in 2 formats. One with a built in "screen" and one with a projector where it projected the jets onto a wall. You used your machine gun to try to shoot the jet out of the sky. Very cool game. Then there was the 1930s and 40s baseball games. Then there was the "set" games of the 60s involving driving on the moon and attack helicopters and such. Then the lightgun and racing games of the early to mid 70s.
I have only the vaguest memories of those electromechanical games (I was 8 years old when Space Invaders came out), but I've always liked them. There were out of the way places where these games were still available to play when I was a teenager. Some of the pre-videogames were right in the arcades still in the 80s.
@@tarstarkusz These games are what really kicked the industry in high gear by leaps and bound. The old mechanicals never real reached that level. Add to the fact that CPU's and logic chips were cheap enough to bring these to the home, did not hurt that industrial explosion. The older games you mentioned would not be in anyway cost effective to become consumer level by any stretch.The title should have read "Games That Pushed The Limits in the Golden Age of VIDEO Arcade Games". To most people, when you mention arcade today , the first thing coming to mind would be most likely be video games. Us old coots think of mechanicals and pinballs as well.
@@GORF_EMPIRE Digital Derby, Hit N Missile and Marx Shooting Gallary (I had that growing up. I loved that game) are examples of bringing the electromechanical arcade home. Chutes Away is an example of one of the "set" games being brought home.
I do agree though that many of these mechanical games were just too big and complex to make available for a toy to give to a kid, though the above mentioned games do bring it home at a smaller scale.
I was always more fascinated with the electromechanical games than video games, though I played video games a lot more. Video games never seemed all that mysterious to me. The ideas did (like who dreams up these games), but they never seemed like a black box to me the way the electromechanical games did. I never really wondered, 'how do they work' mostly because i got into computers at an early age.
@@tarstarkusz Of course you can site some examples but they never reached the power house consumer level of the likes of Atari and Nintendo. If it were not for Atari, I would have maintained my non-interest in computers I had as a kid since in school they were not games but more school work..... I suppose you can blame the education system for that since they never really explained just what a computer really was or what it might one day be able to accomplish. They seemed like a glorified calculator. The really odd thing is that nowadays, today's computers are boring.... the average person has no clue what they really are and just how to talk to them on the CPU level. They do everything for you. They are just appliances today, as powerful as they are, they leave little to the imagination like the old 8 bit home computer era. With the old school machines to make them useful other than playing games on them, you'd have to actually understand their internal workings. I abandoned Windows a couple years ago and went to Linux just to get back that command line feeling of being the master of the machine and not it's slave. I think you get what I mean.
@@GORF_EMPIRE Yea, I do. I had to be dragged screaming and kicking into Windows. The phones and tablets are especially bad. They are loaded with spyware and largely a total black box to 99% of people. An appliance, as you say.
Gun fight was my game as a little kid back in the mid-70s. Five year old me standing on a bench at the pizza place destroying my 13 year old brother repeatedly and he just would throw a fit. So many great memories from back then, I could go on and on.
One thing to mention (at least in the U.S.): the Golden Age of video games was so great because video games were a genuine fad at the time, right along side Rubik's cubes. People of all ages were playing video games (for lots of people, video games like Pacman were the first interaction they ever had with a computer) and video games were everywhere. Arcade machines in every gas station and supermarket, along with each decent-sized town having an arcade or two. Hit songs on the radio, coverage from TV, radio and newsprint, fast food promotions, cartoons, cereal...all so exciting. The crash of 1983 was due to many things, but one major driver that never gets mentioned is that the fad was over. Videogames lost their limelight across generations and everyone (except for kids and a few die hards) moved on.
Excellent video!
Scary to acknowledge that the best 3d you could (hypothetically) find in an arcade in 1983 was Blaster, but just two years later we had Space Harrier running at 60fps. That may be the single fastest evolution of graphics hardware that has ever or will ever occur.
Not much. Space Harrier had the same technique in simulating 3d than 17:25 Pole Position (that was runningin 60fps too). That is sprite/tile scaling.They just bumped more colors and sprites. People and technology wasn't ready for real 3d videogames (with not just abstract wireframe graphic( in the 80s. It returned to be a thing in the mid 90s with the Sega VR series and Namco Rail shooters but if you watch them...they were't very different than I Robot. The real evolution began when they used the texture mapping to fill the poligons instead of just plain colors or techniques like gourad shading to simulate the shading of surfaces (like in the first Sega VR series coin-ops like Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing)
Tempest was a much bigger deal than Star Wars, I think. But both were pretty groundbreaking. Novel controllers (the yoke and the spinner) along with color vector graphics and speech. Tempest brought that full color experience 2 years earlier.
But at heart, Tempest was a fairly standard early shmup, just with a novel viewpoint. It was Space Invaders in a pit, basically. What made the Star Wars arcade game so mind-blowing was in how successfully it recreated the final battle from the movie. There'd been plenty of licensed tie-in games before, but it was the first one to really FEEL like the movie it was based on.
@@jasonblalock4429 I would say it's (Star Wars) more like the first rail shooter. It is very rail like.
Tempest was trippy and cool and very fun, but it was also very abstract. You couldn't relate anything on-screen to any actual object. Star Wars was a full "you are there" experience depicting objects and scenarios you could likely relate to from the film. Much more immersive, especially when you factor in the cockpit style sit-down versions of the machine.
I love vector graphics games and I'm sad the technology didn't catch on (directly controlling the cathode ray and all that).
The hardware used in Turbo Buck Rodgers and Subroc used a bank of 8 voltage controlled oscillators to provide the clock pulses to the the object ROMs as they were read out and drawn to the screen as the beam moved across the CRT. The slower the VCO frequency the longer the pixel data took to be read out and the larger the object would appear on the screen. Essentially the hardware raced the beam like an Atari 2600 when drawing the sprite layer.
I Robot looks so good I kind of got distracted from the narration just watching the gameplay
I noticed a change in audio later on. I've developed a couple of techniques to help with this.
1. Wear the same top & position your mic in exactly the same way (pick a standard way to do it for every video so you don't forget how you did it). That's only if you're using a lavalier mic though.
2. If you process your audio, make sure you keep an unprocessed version of the original cut of the audio. Then if you need to make corrections with new audio, add this new audio to the existing audio file (at the beginning or end, it doesn't matter), then process the whole lot again. Now take the new audio part and just save that part. By processing the old & new audio together, you get a very similar processing to the original processing, and so the new audio sounds remarkably similar to the old audio.
Hope that helps! Love the vids. Keep em' coming.
Well spotted! I do try and do the voice over in one session usually to avoid this problem but as you noticed I had to rerecord some parts a few days later to correct some problems. I have a mic on a boom but I think the same thing applies, slight movements seem to make a noticeable difference in the sound. This is something I'll have to be more careful about in future.
As for the processing, that's a really good idea. I've just been slapping the inserts over the top of the top of the tracks in my video editing package. If I need to do this again I'm sure think redoing it in Audacity that I usually use to record will probably help too.
Thank you for the constructive criticism!
Loved these games…but also liked Joust, Crystal Castles, M.A.C.H. III, Moon Patrol, & Qix
Moon Patrol deserves a mention - first parallax scroll wasn't it?
Even to this day I find the animation in Pole Position impressive.
Loved this video. I am very interested in early arcade history and your treatment of the subject here was superb. Thanks 😊
Thanks for watching!
My favorite story about Space Invaders is about how it's technical limitations led to emergent gameplay. The original reason why the aliens speed up as you defeat them is simply that the hardware was slowed down while having to change the graphics for a large number of them, which Nishikado decided to keep as a feature rather than compensate for in the programming.
The US Army commissioning a trainer off Battlezone deserved to be mentioned.
Oh good point. I was going to mention that but I must have forgotten about it.
Crazy Kong is in fact a Nintendo sanctioned product licensed out to a third party as a converstion kit for Crazy Climber. Where it is illicit is that it was authorized only to meet the demands of the Japanese market and no where else.
I thought it was legal in Europe but not in North America.
Except that as a kid of the 80s, there were at least 10 versions of Crazy Kong at various arcades, all made by different companies.
@@prman9984 except what? That Krazy Kong was bootlegged does not make it any less official.
I still remember the first time I played Galaxian at an arcade on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Md. Couldn't believe how advanced it was over previous generation of arcade machines. Galaxian was one of the first ROM's I loaded onto my Super RetroCade and I still enjoy playing it today.
I think blaster is amazing. It's such a trip I love the colors. And the different objectives like trying to rescue spacemen are fun
Can you do a video on the pre-video game arcade games. Many of them greatly pushed the limits. Without them, there never would have been the video game arcade craze of the 80s.
The history of coin operated machines is pretty fascinating and goes back MUCH further than anyone would imagine. In Ancient Rome there were coin operated machines, usually connected with worship. There were natgas vending machines in peoples' homes and apartments in the UK into the 20th century. Put a pence in the machine and you got 5 minutes or whatever in naturalgas. There were mid 19th century "jukeboxes" that played music box music at train stations in the UK.
But in my humble opinion, the first true arcade games that were not just novelties like the flipping cards or talking wizards came in the 30s. That's the period (from the 30s to the 70s) I'd love to see a video of.
A little advice from someone who stretches canvases...
When stretching fabric, it helps to put one tack/staple in the center of each edge. Attach one side, go to the opposite side, stretch, and affix. Next, go to the other set of opposite sides and repeat. Work away from those middle bits towards the corners, stretching as you go. This prevents slack, wrinkles, and bunching if your fabric has a little stretch to it.
Here's what stands out to me about Arcade games. The first popular game i remember was Space Invaders in 1978. In 79 you had Asteroids and Galaxians. But if you look at 1980 to 1982 you had so many incredible arcade games come out.
Just look at the games that came out between 80 to 82. Pacman, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Mrs Pacman, Galaga, Moon Cresta, Defender, Scramble, Robotron, Frogger, Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, Joust, Dig Dug, Vanguard, Zaxxon, Qbert, Pole Position, Jungle Hunt, Tempest, Moon Patrol, Moon Buggy, Cobra, Berzerk, Gorf, Phoenix, Burger Time, Battle Zone, Mr Do, Star Castle, Tron, Pleiads.
On TH-cam, i've found some amazing looking space games that i didn't play back in the early 80s, but these games look great. Just look up any of these games on TH-cam. Space Cruiser, Condor, Space Firebird, Speak and Rescue, Astro Fantasia, Astro Blaster, Space Fury, Battle Cross, Sky Base. This Catacomb game looks great. It's looks like a combination of Moon Cresta and Scramble. Here it is th-cam.com/video/ZUAqxPUXHnk/w-d-xo.html
Prepare to qualify still ringing in my ears since Pole Position 1982.
Good coverage, I always appreciate someone mentioned how these games actually worked.
Excellent video as usual. There is an urban legend that 500 I Robot cabinets were dumped into the ocean. You could do a whole episode on I Robot, or perhaps Dave Theurer games in general since you missed Tempest and Missile Command. Tac scan would be another limit pushing vector game to cover. Hell, you should do a whole vector episode.
Allegedly for the insurance money, because they were never going to sell.
18:24 very subtle and very funny.
So as a person who experienced all of this here is my take on it. When Space Invaders came about you either knew about the 'counting shots' method for 300 point top ships or not. As games moved on there were people in the arcades that just excelled at them. I remember putting my first 10p into a Defender machine and it lasting seconds but then replaying it straight away! What a game, along with Missile Command were games that were hard, they also felt like they rewarded you upon repeat plays. For me all this ended with the C64, followed by an Amiga thing and finishing with a PS1 that I could spend my money on.
A half decent sponsor this time, and I was looking forward to seeing what terrible mobile game was going to be recommended too.
Fair enough.
I second that
Gotta pay the bills somehow!
This is so much more interesting than I expected. You should do videos on later arcade games the pushed the limits. This only going to 1984 leaves out so much history
Great video - I was too young to care about the games I played back in the day, I just played them.
Now, I love watching these kinds of videos and learning the history and background/making of.
👍👍👍
Glad you enjoyed!
I do feel it was because I, Robot was so abstract that it didn't find a market. And I did find the bit about the Galaxian hardware interesting - there are several boards that were re-used in that era, including the Super Pac-Man hardware from Namco that powered a lot of games.
MAME was originally just a Pac-Man/Galaxian emulator.
Holy cow! That Pole Position game is featured in the Judas Priest music video: Freewheel Burning, from 1984!
I didn't hear of the video game crash till the early 2000's. I'm sure most gamers outside of the USA never heard of it either. We were too busy playing games on home computers such as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum to have noticed any video game crash.
I didn't know about the game crash either. Of course there was a decline in video game popularity(it happens to everything) but I don't remember buying any games at cheaper prices until after that time just before the NES came out.
Home Computers were the big thing at the time as well as Colecovision. Atari 5200 was a failure. We had more options. Home Computers dominating probably did shake up things a bit. I know Texas Instruments was falling apart with the TI994a and 3rd party devs started making carts for them. This was good for me because I finally was able to have games like Donkey Kong, Burgertime, & Congo Bongo available. Also the best Imagic ports were on that system. A few of my friends had Atari 800 and one had a C64. If you had a Home Computer everyone was at your house.
The crash was mostly in the US and a bit Canada. Personally I don't remember people were talking about a crash here in Canada, but I felt the drought of games at that time. Not many games were coming out. Anyway, small PC (like C64, TRS-80) were becoming popular around that time, so they kept us busy until the NES came in 1986. The rest is history.
Speaking of Blitters, two of the guys who worked on the Amiga worked at Williams prior to the Amiga/Lorraine project.
eeermz, afaik galaxian/galaga was the first game that had 'powerups' ... from time to time you get the opportunity to get a second rocket so you'd double your firing power. If I'm not mistaken it's when the "boss' comes down the first time, together with 2 scouts, if you kill them on the first descent you should get a bonus rocket (it sits next to your primary rocketship, and if i'm not wrong it also allowed you to take 1 hit before dying, but the rocketship that took the hit would be removed again...)
The golden age of arcades didn't die in '83 when the console crash happened (it was mainly the consoles that crashed because every company was selling a console and every day there came a new one on market, also since atari didn't do any Quality Assurance about the games that get released there was a gigantic ton of crap released which were pure moneygrabs. Games that looked nice on the box-art, but actually were either a clone of an existing game or were games that looked like they were developed by a toddler. The arcade hat it's highdays until the end of the'80s, and it suddenly dropped in the mid '90s, when consoles like the playstation delivered a lot more power than the average arcade game. Also pc was getting a much more serious approach from developers. Microsoft created directx so games would run a lot better compared to dos games of the previous age, it also allowed that gamedevs didn't have to add drivers or API's into the games to support the ever growing list of soundcards, gfx cards, etc. (that's also why most '90s era soundcards have a "soundblaster compatible mode", so they could have sound in the many dos-games that almost always had support for soundblaster cards. For me the golden age of Arcade consists of games like Double Dragon, Golden Axe, 1942, Wonderboy, Gyruss, Outrun, Chase HQ, The Simpsons, Operation WOLF, Ikari Warriors and many many more...
By the time StreetFigher II and a bit later Mortal Kombat came on the scene the arcade was at it's last 'high' period, soon people would stop coming to the arcades and they'd start dying off. There were a lot less arcades in the 90's and most arcades i knew started adding gambling machines and the typical 90's "fotoplay" systems with touchscreen and simple games. Kids didn't come to the arcades anymore as they had consoles with the same games, so arcades started first having an 18+ section (gambling) and later turned 18+ completely so they could put the slots machines closer to the entrance to lure in gamblers. The arcade games were put into the back. From the early 2000's on most arcades were gone or were gamble-halls with maybe a pinball machine or two and one or two arcade games. The arcade became something young kids would only see at the fair where mobile "luna parks" would be that had a few old games, maybe one or two recent games, and claw machines and coin pushers (operated with tokens instead of real money). Only in Japan you still have some real arcades, even the big sega building doesn't exist anymore (that was a multi-level arcade, very big). I had great times in the arcades when i was young, i learned to know a lot of friends in those smoke-loaded, soggy smelling, noisy places... (yeah back then you could smoke while playing games... the smoke ban killed a lot of business if you ask me)
Awesome job on digging up I Robot! That's a deep cut. Jaw-dropping graphics for the time. I tracked down a ROM of it and gave it a play on MAME, oh.... I'd say sometime around 2005. It wasn't a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination... but it wasn't super fun or addicting like many of the others on the list.
I love the content you've been putting out... I do have a small suggestion for you, if you'll humor me... I don't know if it's an "other side of the pond" thing, but most of the folks I know of in the USA that I've talked shop in person with tend to have a pretty standard way of pronouncing processor names. But, once again, this is the TH-cam comments section, feel free to take this with as big a grain of salt as you like:
MOS Technoglogy 6502: "Sixty Five Oh Two"
Intel 8008: I've.... never heard anyone talk a lot about the 8008. My guess is "Eight Oh Oh Eight" or "EIghty Oh Eight".
Intel 8080: "Intel Eighty Eighty"
Intel 80286: "Two Eighty Six"
Intel 80386: "Three Eighty Six"
Intel 80486: "Four EIghty Six"
Motorola 6800: "Sixty Eight Hundred" or "Motorola Sixty Eight Hundred"
Motorola 68000: "Sixty Eight Kay" or "Motorola Sixty Eight Kay"
You might notice I've left off a processor. :) Honestly, though, I call it a "Zee Eighty". Do y'all over there call it a "Zed Eighty"? Either way, I agree that the computer that Sir Clive Sinclair made out of it is definitely a "Zed Ex Spectrum"... and the car brand is definitely "Jag-You-Ar", and not "Jag-war", and ABSOLUTELY not "Jag-Wire".
As far as the naming of other systems goes, there seems to be far more contention. "Super Nintendo", "Sness", "Snezz"... who can say for sure?
As someone who owned every major console, including the SNES, and had many video gaming friends, the NES was uniformly pronounced "enn-ee-ess" (but was more often just called "the Nintendo,") and the SNES was always "ess-enn-ee-ess," or "the Super Nintendo," never ever "sness," much less "snez."
Those pronunciations come from modern-day retro commenters.
@@straightupanarg6226 I actually thought it was a British thing. The majority of the time I hear someone saying "Nezz" or "Snezz", it's someone from the UK.
Awesome documentary
Now there are arcade 1up of some of these arcades you can buy for cheap $400-$1500 price range in 2021
Galaxian was the very first game that I've enjoyed in the arcades back then.
Most of the time i just watch others playing all the arcade games like pacman, crazy climber, space invaders etc as i had limited allowance back then.
But I did play galaxian enough to reach 14 flags as far as I can remember.
We never hear about limit pishing arcade games. Great idea
Very entertaining and informative video. I am 50 but i didn't know I Robot and its relevance (i knew and played the coin-ops of every other games but Blaster)
Awesome video. Phoenix was my favourite back in the day
And the arcade 1up minis you can get for $150-$350 prince range today in 2021
Excellent story telling, thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
lol I get Tempest vibes out of I, Robot. Looks fun! :3
This was just a bit before my time. Sure I had been to arcades as a young kid but playing them back then was nigh on impossible. I got my start in 1986 with the Nes and the Master System in 1986. I was still incredibly young but that's when arcades began catching my eyes. You could say I really came into my own during the second golden age of arcade gaming or from 1989 through 1998. Once the Dreamcast was on the horizon everyone knew the end was nigh for most arcades. When the home consoles could perfectly replicate the arcade experience while expanding on it greatly there was no reason to dump all of our change into them. By then most arcades consisted on DDR machines and I wasn't having any of that.
I was a Streetfighter 2 drone (as evidenced to this day by the handle I assign myself on every social media platform). Once my Super Nintendo got a version of Streetfighter 2, and once I saw just how decent a port it really was, the arcades were done in my mind.
The sheer depth of games like Zelda, Secret of Mana, and later games like FF7, Metal Gear Solid, Mario 64, Ocarina, then on PC stuff like Doom. These were games the arcade COULD deliver but never would, so I just didn't care for them by the year of our lord 1993.
@@thegreathadoken6808
I understand where you're coming from and I was a lot like you in the early 1990's. However, arcade gaming in 1993 (good example) did reach beyond home consoles at least too me. That's when games like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Tekken, and Ridge Racer hit the arcade scene. These games were at least two years out for home releases and once I saw those amazing polygons splashed all over the screen I was completely mesmerized. I did anything I could just to get to the arcades to play Virtua Fighter.
Now, I was a huge console gamer (still am) even when going to the arcades during the late 1990's for the same reasons as you. Games like Thunder Force 4, Phantasy Star 2/4, Street Fighter, Zelda, Streets of Rage, Ghouls n' Ghosts, Sonic, Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, AVP, NBA Jams, just everything...However, even with a Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation in 1995 arcades were doing things the consoles couldn't without compromise. Like for example Street Fighter Alpha 1+2, Sega Rally, The House of The Dead, Time Crisis, Marvel vs. Capcom, Darkstalkers, Killer Instinct, Cruise n' USA, and so many more that we still don't have arcade perfect renditions of.
I hope you make more videos on the history of arcade games
It seems that PCBWay is sponsoring a lot of my favorite TH-camrs, these days.
But anyway, another good video.
Arcade key chains working arcades for $20-$40 today in 2021 and Pandora box arcade joysticks with 200 games for $250 in 2021
I do have a theory defender was really the first bullet hell.
Cuz once the planet blows up all the ships turn into mutants.
And they all swarm around you throwing bullets at your ship.
That's bullet hell.
15:00 The huge success of Battlezone and Star Wars counters the idea that people just couldn't cope with 3D. Personally, I wonder if it failed just because it was so garishly ugly. I mean, even for the 80s, that's eye-bleeding. The gameplay doesn't look very smooth either. (Especially compared to the Atari vector games.)
Turbo was also really garish IMO.
I would say that it's not the graphics themselves that caused their failure, but rather cost these games would be sold at a higher cost due to their complexity, and arcade owners don't/can't afford to gamble on experimental games unless it was cheap or there was a lot of hype. Most arcades had a shelf life of a month before being replaced unless it was a huge success. If a game did not rack up enough traffic it would either be converted to something else, or sold (or traded) to other arcade owners, amusement leasers.
great video. I could watch more of these all day long!
Now that is a relevant advertisement!
I, Robot makes me want to listen to vaporwave.
Wasn't expected another one of these already, nice!!!
The walking dead, Luigi's mansion 3 , and crus n blast and the other newest arcade machines in 2021 today is $2,758,000
Great video!
None of the other FMV games were ever as big as Dragon's Lair, I think, because the art was not very good in those other games.
Yeah, I don't really remember any of the others, apart from Space Ace of course.
Both of those were Don Bluth games. His involvement is why Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were a success in comparison to most, if not all other FMV based games.
@@jaysmith2858 Exactly. All the other FMV games had mediocre art, on par with say, the speed racer cartoons from the 60/70s.
Great video dude i love stuff like this👍
And the coleco arcades for less than$100 in 2021 and the Pocket arcade machines for $50-$75 in 2021 and the original arcades shown in the video here from old to new in 2021 price range is expensive for $3000-$40,000
Fuck yeah, Robotron and I, Robot! Two of my favorite arcade games ever.
I wondered what the floaty head shooter game was called! I'Robot looked good!
But there is a weird caveat.
There was an interview with Eugene Jarvis.
When the consumers electronic show in 81..
When defender was being shown off everyone in the press was announcing that rally X was going to be the next big game.
While defender was not going to impress anyone..
In at the exact time defender was being shown off Pac-Man was being shown off.
And everyone was saying rally X was going to be the big game.
Totally true interview.
Great video, one of the best
I, Robot doesn't look much worse than some games on the Jaguar. Like the "where did you learn to fly" one. Lol
Great video!
I have a few comments regarding the almost complete flops of Blaster and I, Robot. Those games were hyped unbelievably in the coin op magazines and elsewhere months before they actually came out, generating a lot of buzz and "high" expectations. Everyone expected them to be amazing, like the awesome experience of playing Robotron or Defender for the first time. And they just weren't. They were incremental improvements in doing pseudo 3d, but they didn't have the smooth gameplay and crispness of their simpler predecessors. Also, it was really hard to find arcades that had them. I think they overpriced them, and by that time arcade owners had begun favoring generic, cheap knockoff games by obscure companies in order to turn a quick profit. The games became more about enticing you to keep putting tokens in than giving you a great experience.
I was a big fan of the I, Robot arcade game. :)
18:14 It makes sense when you point it out.
I played nearly every game in this video (and a whole lot more!) in the 80's and I still remember being blown away by the Star Wars arcade game and even Battlezone. At the time they seemed light years ahead even if they don't appear to hold up well today. Even the garish looking vector & peudo 3D games were so cool at the time.
I feel many of those type of games weren't more popular at the time because they had more of a learning curve to them. Other popular games like Galaga, Pac Man, Frogger, and Pole Position were super simple to walk up and play. Plus, I would imagine the games that required additional math chips & co-processors in them probably cost more initially so unless you had a well known IP like Star Wars attached arcade owners would be hesitant to buy them.
Plus the North American crash that started in 83 and lasted until about 86 did hurt arcades quite a bit. Although not as much as it nearly killed console gaming which almost disappeared in many parts of the US from 84 to early 86 when the NES went nationwide.
Star Wars (and its sequel Empire) just made you feel like you were Luke Skywalker.
"Nightmare fuel" Donkey Kong looks like ...whatever hardware incompatibility made so many CGA era games use the wrong color palette
I hadn't realised Galaxian was that old. I just assumed that and Galaga were mid 80s.
The voices in Star Wars do contain a certain quality of the actors so they must have started as samples before being turned into whatever they ended up as. I would guess phonemes, like a very crude version of more modern voice synthesis.
Wait, I thought they digitized the voices from the movie to put in the arcade game. Maybe it's a difference between emulation vs real hardware. The voices sounded great, especially in the sit down version.
Good video.
But you MIGHT have one fact wrong.
When Turbo was made, Sega was an American company hiring Japanese labor to build machines, and the test audience was American servicemen serving in Japan.
It was a Gulf And Western Company, which also owned Paramount Pictures. That's how Sega easily go the rights to make a Star Trek arcade game.
Sega = SErvice GAmes. They used to make gambling machines before gambling was banned on the military bases, so they switched to entertainment games (mechanical ones at first).
@@AnthonyFlack exactly. That would explain a lit of things that would also explain games of skill which were "gambling games" but not legally gambling for federal purposes because there was no element of pure chance. You won either based on timing or a strategic angle or some other combination of things, all of which you are in control of.
I loved I, Robot even though I'm no good at it. In later levels they throw curve balls at you like enemies tat attack the camera. you need to change the angle of the camera using the P1 P2 buttons to dodge. I can't get that far.
I had an old game magazine that did a similar rundown you have here, but they cite Robotron:2084 because of the "dynamic color" cycling on the screen border.
Space Firebird (1980 Nintendo) is the forgotten space shooter of the arcade and in my opinion the best..
I'm pretty sure Crush Roller wasn't released in 1978.
Arcade games of such graphics details only appear from the 80s onwards.
I would be not surprised if snes vortex was inspired from i robot, it just looks and plays similar to it.
Great vid
Look into the TMS9918, it is the real grand daddy off the NES SEGA MEGA DRIVE and other home consoles. Texas Instruments even coined the word Sprite. Sprites and tiles were invented due to the constraints of mid seventies DRAM bandwidth.
Robotron ❤
23:58 I, Robot was a very expensive arcade game for its time, so it was a flop.
The big jump came when JAMMA democratised. But this video was great!
awesome!
The Video Game Crash has always seemed weird to me. Supposedly the reason for it was E.T. 2600 and the Pacman port for that console but how does that translate to gaming as a whole? People disliked how badly Pacman was ported compared to the famous arcade original which implies their problem was with home consoles rather than arcade games. I guess I can't ignore facts but when it comes to the general public, people were still going to arcades and enjoyed what consoles they had. Even if Nintendo didn't release the NES, the rising computer market would have been an easy way to sneak Video Games into the home.
A similar kind of crash happened with the internet. In that case, the reason for that was a sudden influx of interest that eventually got evened out later on, not because internet was bad but because the momentum was too fast for it's own good.
It's been my understanding that Pac-Man and E.T were more like the straw that broke the camels back- that there had been a ton of poorly performing games that had slowly built up antipathy to games as a whole, and that E.T was just such a high-profile dud that it just pushed the idea that console gaming was just trash with no quality control into memetic reality, and people just turned away in large enough numbers for it to really show. If I had to guess, since I'm not really THAT well-read in the subject, I feel like there has to be more to it than just Atari crashing- maybe Atari, being such a big player in the market, had a bunch of investments they couldn't pay when their customers left them, and so them withdrawing maybe created aftershocks that left more and more companies without money?
The reality of the North American video game crash was a combination of the media trashing video games combined with a recession. Games didn't go away though as they just shifted to home computers. Parents could better justify purchasing a computer for their child than a console since a computer could be thought of as a way to enhance a child's education and address media criticism. And yes, there's no doubt that Atari had over-extended by 1983. People criticise the Atari 2600 offerings from Atari just before the crash. However, Atari's arcade offerings were still top-notch right into 1985.
You can't understand how someone could mistake that Alec Guinness voice for a sample???
C'mon mate, transport yourself to back in the day and try to remember the first (100) times you heard it. I always thought that's what it was, it's only because you pointed it out that I realise it was synthesised!
For a comparison, it's like saying that you used to watch Cheers and always knew Ted Danson was wearing a wig!
Hidden surface removal is known as occlusion.
More specifically occlusion culling (not to be confused with ambient occlusion). Or, in the CAD world, hidden line removal.
BERZERK!!!!!
golden age of arcade VIDEO games
Sheer opinion based on how old you were. Arcade games speak to a period of your own experience. Arcades were at their peak in the 80's, after that everyone had their own in their bedroom. Don't listen to this guy, you enjoy what you enjoy.
Was it really the first video game hardware with tile based? I mean Intellivision was announced / released before it and it had tile based graphics
Why is there an 80’s anime ova in this ‘pushing the limits’ playlist?
Tunnel hunt
“It’s like stummies”
I wonder - once arcade machines were more powerful than home computers - what was the most powerful arcade machine ever? in relation to machines of the time? IE before arcade machines became PCs in wooden cases?
Hard Drivin' has to be up there. That thing was absolutely insane when it came out.
@@Sharopolis - You've probably already solved it - only very recently have I learned how much better the Arcade version was... or that it existed ;)
Yeah. Hard Drivin', S.T.U.N. Runner, i-Robot (custom FPU added to help out the CPU), and Robotron (twin 4-bit blitters to help out the CPU). The chips in S.T.U.N. runner were out of this world for the time. In addition to the 68010 CPU and a healthy dose of VRAM for the year, there were three 50 MHz chips, plus a sound board with its own CPU and two audio chips (in 1989!). Oh, and Gyruss had five sound chips and two CPUs dedicated to audio.
I'm at a total loss as to why you didn't mention Dragon's Lair.
ok yeah I am sorry but you missed a HUGE evolution of games by not mentioning Dragon's Lair. That game was responsible for a massive boost during the 83 crash in addition to creating the very first QTE movie experience. I have no idea why you mentioned I, Robot. The system was not advanced and it sold fewer than 1,000 copies. It wasn't a flop because nobody got it, it was a flop because the gameplay was trash.
NEO GEO MVS
CAPCOM CPS1
CAPCOM CPS2
~THE LEGEND~
New arcade machines for the arcades in 2022 will be more expensive than 2021 all arcade and arcade 1ups the newer they get the more expensive the price range will be but the good news is that all arcade machines that are 50 years old will be cheapest and most of them will not exist anymore because one day the videogame era and the arcade era will end it will be nothing but a old fad that permanently vanished by the year of 2122 will be the end of the gaming era
Crush Roller is from 1981, not 1978. Taito ???
Definitely the best years of Arcade video gaming!
I, Robot looks like fun, If a bit seizure inducing. :)
2084 …. Not as far off as it seemed as a kid 😅😅