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I haven't seen one of those old arcades in ages. You could walk into any mall in the 80's and hear the centipede game from halfway across the mall. The one I spent a lot of time in had a very distinctive smell of electronics and carpet cleaner. I could play Spy Hunter as long as I wanted to on one quarter, and my sister could do the same thing with Galaga. I remember being horrified the first time I wandered into a mall in Florida and realized they didn't have an arcade. That situation became more and more common as time went on. I think the demise of the American mall is in some way linked with the demise of the American video game arcade.

The loss of the mall was one factor among many. In order to have an experience better than what you could get at home, you need custom hardware. Moore's Law has kept the cost of bleeding-edge hardware approximately flat in constant dollars, but all the other costs - electricity, rent, lighting, air conditioning - are also subject to inflation over a 10-20 year timeframe. Nobody wants to deal with two slots for quarters/nickels, tokens are a PITA for an operator, and in the end, that means there are two prices for games in the US: $0.25 and $0.50. Nobody could be first to double the price of a game and stay in business, despite the fact that if you're charging $0.25 per play in 2014, it's the equivalent of charging $0.10/play in 1984.

One of the more surprising developments has been seeing them come back, although as playable museums this time, and maybe one or two per state. (Funspot in NH, Ground Kontrol in OR, The 1-Up in CO, and Pacific Pinball and High Scores in CA.) There's also the annual CA Extreme event in the Bay Area with several hundred vids and pins, coming up in about two weekends.

Tempest is by far my favorite video game of all time. No video game since has come close to holding my attention like Tempest. The simplicity of the game, the rhythm of the game, the invisible levels, the chip glitch that enabled you to do weird things to the game depending on the last two digits of your score. I still dream about the game, and I haven't played it in 20 years.

That's a slump you've gotta break. If you can make it to the Bay Area on the weekend of July 28/29, come to California Extreme for a weekend of all the coin-op retrogaming you can handle, no quarters required.

There are usually at least two or three Tempest machines on the show floor, so not only do you not have to worry about quarters, you also won't have to worry about a line-up to play it. It's a rare year that doesn't include virtually the entire line-up of vector games from Atari, Cinematronics, and Sega. Also the only place you'll ever get to play the old laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and Cliffhanger anymore.

I went to Vintage Computer Festival a few times, and when it stopped happening on the west coast, I started running my own, much smaller, very Atari-oriented Atari Party out near Sacramento.

Last weekend I took the train down to California Extreme to play some old video games (and my 4yo likes the older pinball games a lot). I wish Classic Gaming Expo weren't back in Las Vegas, or I'd go to it.

Plus, I still read comp.sys.atari.8bit on Usenet over an SSH connection to my ISP's shell server. :)

Being an avid pinball player I was pleased to see this make it onto /. I thought I would post some other great pinball events in California.

Already occured (but will happen again next year)
Pin A Go Go http://www.pinagogo.com/ May 14-16 Dixon California
California Extreme http://www.caextreme.org/ July 17-18 2010 Santa Clara California

Upcoming
Pacific Pinball Expo http://www.pacificpinball.org/ Oct 1-3 2010

All of them are great shows and we're lucky here in northern California to have 3 great pinball conventions.

Also anyone else interested in pinball in the northern California area there is the Bay Area Pinball Association (BAPA) http://www.bayareapinball.org/
There are a number of players in our league who compete in our local tournaments, as well as the various California Tournaments, and even national and international tournaments. In fact the #2 player at PAPA A division was from our league (Andrei).

Pinballers are a dying breed. Play while you can...join a league...have fun.

-Alex

One weekend a year, collectors from around the world bring everything from Pac-Man to one-of-a-kind prototype games to... California Extreme

You can't? Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.

Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.

Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.

For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).

My bad. You can add pioneer Al Alcorn to that list as well. Where the fuck is he?

Well, last weekend, he was at California Extreme, along with Steve Ritchie (pinball design), Slug Russell (did a talk on PDP-1 Spacewar, and here he is playing Cinematronics' coin-op version), Doug McRae (whose Missile Command hack got him hired by Atari, and whose hack of Pac-Man became Ms. PacMan), many other notables, and of course, hundreds of arcade machines.

"Electronics-oriented flea market"..? Just where do you live?

This weekend, I wake up to the monthly Electronics Flea Market, and after rummaging through a parking lot full of everything from vacuum tubes to DDR2 at $5/stick, I head to the 13th annual California Extreme retro arcade convention.

I can't speak for the original poster, but living in the SF Bay Area fucking rocks :)

So how do we archive all of the fantastic hardware that the likes of Sega and Atari produced? What about pinball games and crane sandboxes? What about the machines that would cast a souvenir for you out of plastic on the spot? There is a lot of gaming history that is sadly endangered.

Coin-op hardware-wise, there's the annual California Extreme event in San Jose. There's also a good vintage console selection (as well as computer selection) at Vintage Computer Fest, which has both an East Coast and a West Coast show every year.

Pinball-wise, we have the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and the Lucky JuJu in the SF Bay Area. (And these are museums, not shows.)

Pinball show-wise, a bunch of Bay Area pinheads also put together the Pacific Pinball Expo, which features a lot of fully-restored electromechanical machines from the 50s-70s, and even a small selection of flipperless / woodrail / bumper games from the late 20s-30s. (If you ever go to the expo, play these games. They're surprisingly fun!)

There's a preponderance of "shows" over "museums" here, but that's because games are interactive (and old electronic/mechanical hardware, even if engineered to take the abuse of an arcade environment, can be fragile), and the risk to the artifacts over the long term is enough to discourage most museum curators from having lots of hands-on exhibits. Building a sufficiently large collection to warrant a museum, leasing a permanent space, and then opening that collection up to the general public on an ongoing basis is a prohibitive amount of time and money for all but a handful of people.

Crowdsourcing the collection process (by having a few hundred people haul in a couple of their own personal games for a weekend), by contrast, works very well. The downside is that you can only attend the event one weekend a year, but the upside is that it's a very well-populated event. And because you've also crowdsourced the repair/maintenance (each exhibitor is responsible for the upkeep of only one or two games on the show floor, and no individual collector's entire collection is at risk), you can let the general public show up and play the games.

So that's how it's done in the coin-op amusement community (and the crane sandboxes and plastic mold-making machines would probably be welcome at either CAX or Pacific Pinball Expo). Anyone got any links for other museums or shows featuring other forms of cultural ephemera?

If you like pinball, may I suggest you check out California Extreme? They tend to have http://www.caextreme.org/ great pinball machines, going all the way back to beginning of pinball history.

CGE is mostly about home consoles (though some folks usually bring some arcade cabinets), but there's a show next-next-weekend called California Extreme that's all about arcades:

http://www.caextreme.org/

(The only thing that is 'extreme' is the nerdiness, but it's a fun show.)

August 11-12, California Extreme, San Jose, CA.

Among last year's guests was Jarvis himself.

A little off topic, but once a year here in San Jose, CA. There's something called California Extreme: http://www.caextreme.org/ which is a convention of classic arcade machine collectors. Basically they rent out an exhibition hall in San Jose and bring all their games set to free play. For $15-$20 you get to play all the arcade games you want, all day, as much as you want. And they're all the original cabinets, which means you don't have to come up with some ridiculous way to play Discs of Tron with the wrong controls.

The only time I've really gotten that "arcade feeling" from my youth in over 20 years.

At CA Extreme over last weekend I also saw a game called "Crossfire Extreme Paintball" that had crashed to a Linux prompt.

It makes a lot of sense to run Linux on arcade machines. You won't have to extend it much (if at all) to get at all the machine's hardware, and it'll save you some cash per-unit.

larry

This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.

Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.

Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.

The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.

A very similarly natured event is taking place this August 7-8 in San Jose, California titled "California Extreme 2004". Last year there was over 400 video games and pinball machine games on the floor, all set for free play. The turnout and number of games available has been gaining momentum every year.

Check it out...

http://www.caextreme.org/2004-show/index.html

California Extreme is a similar event held once a year in San Jose (this year on Aug. 7 and 8), though without the home console angle. I've gone the last couple of years and they've been great events, though the game selection can be a bit inconsistent. I hope to go again this year.

Ten games? Come to the yearly California Extreme and see all those plus another 190 vids and pins.

I have a restored Asteroids Deluxe machine, bought it for a song, reworked the power supplies, and bango, instant early 80s nostalgia trip. Asteroids wasn't my game back then, but the Deluxe version is much more refined -- cooler graphics, better sound, fluorescent backdrop lit by a blacklight, and "killer satellites" that are a real pain.

Why not just play the MAME version? Well, it's not bad, and a gamepad helps, but... there's something about the sound of a quarter dropping through the chute, clinking into the coinbox, the corresponding click of the mechanical coin counter, that just says "okay, this is for real!"...

Problem is, it takes even more skill to find a decently set-up and clean Addams Family pinball machine these days than it does to play it. In other words, finding a good pinball joing is damn near impossible.

> Anybody know of a pinball museum with accessible games to play?

Google for a pinball collector named Tim Arnold. He has semiregular "fun nights" in Las Vegas that'll give you a chance to play some of the machines in his astounding collection.

Tim has also set up a nonprofit to found and fund an open-to-the-public pinball museum that would be a welcome addition to Vegas.

If you're in the Bay Area, be sure to attend the annual CA Extreme classic coin-op convention in San Jose, and Pin-A-Go-Go (link to one of many 2002 show reviews) in Dixon, near Sacramento.

If it's vector games you want, you should check out Vector MAME. As far as I understand, it's a modified version of DOS MAME which will drive a native vector monitor. I saw one of these at CA Extreme this year, but didn't get a chance to look closely.

After years of torment, I finally got a chance to play Marble Man at the recent California Extreme show. It was interesting to experience, but to say that it paled in comparison to the original is a terrible understatement. It just felt flat-out *wrong* to be controlling the marble with a joystick (and "speed" button), and the cartoonish nature of much of the graphics created the wrong feel. And don't even get me started on the insipid "SPELL MARBLE!" bonus round that kept popping up...

after going to California Extreme a few weeks back, there's a big hole in this answer - pinball machines.

Don't forget, if you are in the SF Bay Area and like pinball (and classic video games):

California Extreme!

It's 9/7-9/8 in San Jose, and they have tons of good restored pinball and video games on free play for the entire weekend. So get in your chance to play pinball on machines that are [b]not[/b] broken :-)

It was tres cool last year.

www.caextreme.org coming up on Sept. 7-8!

Yeah, in addition to drooling over the exhibits and expensive/rare stuff, I picked up some pretty cool stuff at VCF 4.0 last year. Lots of old software, hardware, and parts.

(Yes, this is another shameless plug for VCF 5.0, September 15-16th, in San Jose. Why wait until after it's over to read about it on Slashdot? ;) VCF East was the first time the VCF crew put on a show for the East Coast crowd, and it should grow over the next few years.

Meanwhile, for the Silicon Valley crowd, VCF 5.0 is also under the same roof as CA Extreme, a weekend of all the 80s arcade machines and prototypes you could imagine. Serious dr00l.

The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.

Shameless plug alert: If you're in the Bay Area, you can get the real thing in about six weeks:

CA Extreme, September 15-16, in San Jose. Two days, all the classic arcade machines you can play. There's even a bunch of guys with a laser projector hooked up to vector games... (C'mon, what geek didn't fantasize about being able to play Tempest using a low-lying cloud as a projection screen, FAA regs be damned ;-)

And under the same roof at the same time, Vintage Computer Fest 5.0. The name says it all, tons of stuff to dr00l over.

So all you Bay Area types who want to get in a weekend of retro gaming will have your chance to see it too, without the trip to PA!

Old computers. Old video games. These are a few of my favorite things...

They've hooked up with VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) and will be putting on a show of classic arcade games in San Jose towards the end of September.