As I kid, I played a lot of video games. Of course, this was in the days before home console systems (and it took Atari a while to get to Australia). Instead, down at the corner store (the local deli) there was a continual rotation of stand-up cabinets. Pac-Man, Scramble, Defender, Galaga, all the classics. I’d usually go down for a few games after school, and play games with the big kids. I never managed to get any high scores, but this never stopped me playing. A couple of years later I discovered that the property company Mum worked for owned the biggest video arcade in Adelaide, and I’d sometimes get to follow her around while she counted the take from the machines and gave me lots of free credits. Kid geek heaven, that was! I got into some of the more challenging games like Missile Command and Tempest there, and improved a bit. That was where I got the pinball bug though, so I never played the video games so much after that. But I still have a real fondness for the old games. This was back in the days where your here character was a 10×15 grid of 4-colour pixels making “bloop bloop” sounds. Instead of relying on flashy graphics and music, game designers instead had to rely on gameplay and originality. Twenty years later, these old games are still great fun to play.
That’s why I covet what Aaron Mahler has created. He’s taken an old Millipede cabinet, added new controls, stuck a PC emulating old arcade games (using MAME) inside. He can choose from hundreds of games, and play them exactly like they were in the good old days. It even uses an original monitor and speakers! You can read all about in in Scientific American. I sooo want one of these.