Hi gamers! I did a search for this topic, but couldn't find a blog in regards to it, so this could be the first of its kind at the time of this writing
This is in regards to the glory, golden age of arcade gaming (roughly late 1970s [especially once
Space Invaders was released in 1978] until probably 1982/1983), where there were many arcades across the lands of all shapes, sizes, and wonderful sounds and sights to be beheld of coin operated video games and pinball machines. I've lived in Houston, Texas for all of my life (so far) and there were plenty of these to go around here. Plenty to reminisce over, obviously, as each location has a story to tell, if not many.
I'm going to briefly go over just a few local ones that I frequented, then get down to business in regards to why this blog is really here, and not just for old gaming fart's sighing over the long gone past sake.
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Jason's Game Room--this one was different, due to being run by two ex-cops! Unfortunately they probably lost it all, as I don't think they were even open for a year (I was able to nail down the year they were around due to remembering seeing Beastmaster at the dollar theatre just a few doors down at one point after going to this game room once, which was released in 1982). If I remember correctly, the first part of this arcade was all pool tables and/or pinball machines (I got out of pinball for a while, I hate to say, so I'm not going to remember that), then in the back were the video games. They had the Pac-Man flop of
Professor Pac-Man, I remember my mom saying of how funny
Mouse Trap was when you turned yourself into a barking dog and took out the cats, but unfortunately I never played
Warrior, a rare machine
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Games 'r Us--not a huge game room, but it wasn't far, and they had some, uh, *unique* games, lets put it that way: several of the ones that were there upon first opening for business had generic marquees that read they were presented by some company (like, say, "Fun, Inc. presents Scramble", which they didn't distribute Scramble, Stern did!). Made me wonder about the legality of those. They also had
Meteorites real briefly, a raster
Asteroids clone that Atari sued over but lost eventually.
Space Fever was a flat-out
Space Invaders rip-off, but it had three games to choose from (which I want one some day). One day the guy there said that he wanted to go get something to eat and if he could just lock up me and a friend of mine in there (no, don't take that out of context, he was a nice guy. And who the hell wouldn't want to be in a game room to themselves?). It would be a while later before my mom would pick us up so we agreed. Too bad we were out of money, but it was still cool!
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Quiptar's--ok, so the heck with the medium- and small-sized arcades (respectively), how about the biggest and best? Quiptar's had pretty much everything, including the 15 minute fad of the laser disc games (
Bega's Battle, Interstellar, Cobra Command, Astron Belt and
Dragon's Lair, the latter of which a friend of mine was practically rich by having a paper route, so he didn't have a problem spending 50 cents per game until he learned it all and beat it), vector games (
Gravitar and
Star Trek), a mix between big hits (
Tron, Q*Bert) and the not so big (
Lost Tomb, The Pit), plus they even had unique displays for games, such as when
Reactor was released and they had a monitor several feet above the machine proclaiming "New game", so everyone gathered around could still watch it from further away. This great place also gave you a whopping 12 tokens for a dollar, so you couldn't beat that, and they must've had 80-100 games.
Those are just a few of the many examples I could go on about, as I grew up in the fourth largest city in my country, having tons of game rooms, as the local Memorial City Mall (where the mighty Quiptar's used to be, among several others) once had
seven game rooms all at once, I do believe (if not seven, it was six, and that counts the very small one the theatre in the mall had, which is also long gone).
However, I'm going to leave that there as it is, and get onto business from here: as I was thinking about past game rooms, I lamented a few months ago (at the time of this writing)
on my forums the bummer of a thought of with all the tons of arcades all over the world back in the day -- whether they were small, huge, or somewhere in between -- they closed decades ago, yet there is pretty much no record of them ever existing anywhere for the most part; even if you look around the internet you can't find anything about them. If we're lucky, maybe someone mentioned one in a blog somewhere, or for the absolutely huge ones (100 or more games) and/or chains, we'd get a tiny bit of a Wikipedia article on, but that's it. Other than that and with
JammaJup on here listing arcades in two counties in the U. K., which, even though he got in several dozen, that's still not a worldwide catalog of game rooms or anything. People started these up, bought games, brought joy to many, and went under with the video game crash of 1983-1984 (for the most part), disappearing like they never existed in the first place.
[img width=590 height=423]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v467/darrylb/miscellaneous/Pinballs_zps91993344.jpg[/img]
Ok, not from an arcade, but an unpublished photo from a gaming expo I attended once. This is from this page,
as giving a link to a wiki makes it legal, so hah on you.
I couldn't even find a wiki for such a thing, so I came up with my own
http://arcadepreservation.wikia.com/wiki/So, now's your chance to create a history of these places. One thing I want to let everyone know immediately/vow to people, though, is that this is NOT like the horror stories I've heard about Wikipedia, where someone spent hours writing an article about a game, they included references, then the article was deleted within a few hours. This site pretty much runs on the honor/memory (or not!) system; it's just whatever you can bring to the table. If the site gets enough people eventually, perhaps other games will chime in and edit articles and add info to them that you may have forgotten or weren't there to see for yourself.
For those new to wikis, on the front page (or you can click on the link) is a link to the
How to write an article page, which explains as to how you can just look at pretty much any page that's currently on the wiki to see what kind of format I'm looking for: the first time an arcade's name is mentioned in the article, it's to be in
bold, game titles are to be
italicized, etc. It explains everything, although a quick summary in the intro sums it up pretty much, as it may come across sounding more complicated than it actually is, but then, you can just open up editing from a page like this,
http://arcadepreservation...m/wiki/Town_and_Country_6copy and paste everything from it onto a new page and change info as needed (/take out the Background if you don't think it needs one, name of arcade, games, categories at the bottom, etc.). Plus it also has a generic placeholder graphic in the infobox for an arcade that could have closed down decades ago that you probably won't have any pictures of, unfortunately, but at least that's all done already. Also, check out the bonus stuff on that page, as I do have many placeholder graphics for various U. S. chains that can be used in the infobox, and perhaps others can add even more.
And for those that just want to jump right in, first do a search for a game room you want to write about to make sure a page isn't already there (which it won't be!), using the search field at top right (the magnifying glass) if you don't have an account and/or you're using the default Wikia skin, or type up the name of the game room in the search box at left if you're using the MonoBook skin and hit enter. A direct match won't happen with the Wikia skin, or the name will come up in red if using the MonoBook skin. Then you'll click on the Contribute button at the top right and click on Add a page to do just that as you type in the name of your game room, or click on the name in red if using MonoBook and you'll be ready to preserve an arcade!
If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask, although I'm not a coder or anything (at some point I'll have a formatted infobox that you won't have to copy and paste -- with just fields to put in -- as that's all I have for now), but I'll still help out where I can. It'd be great if people could add arcades long gone (or even ones that are still around/brand new nowadays) that will never be back.
Or in a way, they WILL be back, via this wiki
"Game over" my ass!
Links*
http://arcadepreservation.wikia.com/wiki/Full page entries with partial game lists (sadly, no photos though
Who went around taking pictures of arcades back then?) for:
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Games 'r Us*
Jason's Game Room*
Quiptar's
