Arcade game documentary videos
April 6, 2025 7:17 PM Subscribe
This person on YouTube makes documentaries about arcade games. Zaxxon! Q*bert! Spy Hunter! Dragon's Lair! Dozens more!
Ah, I had to watch Q*bert, not so much to learn anything new, as just to hear it. While there are a lot of arcade sounds rattling around in the echoey chambers of my aging brain (I will never stop hearing the robots of Berzerk spotting me), Q*bert holds some special place in my auditory cortex. It was so crunchy in the arcade cabinet, none of the home versions ever came close. I did learn from the video that there was an actual bit of thumping hardware in the cabinet, which explains some of the oomph when you die.
When I tell my kids I used to get an allowance of two dollars a week, which in the old exchange rate came out to eight game tokens at the arcade, they look at me in horror as though I were telling them tales of the Great Depression. While I tend to agree that this was not enough money, considering how quickly I lost it all on games I was bad at, it certainly felt glorious at the time.
(Now, someone do a post on this game I can NOT find any evidence ever existed--a sort of science fiction motorcycle game where you've got kind of a first-person POV riding through a futuristic highly stylized city street/track/bridge, where much of the screen is black, and which I believe you actually sat on, like there was a plastic cycle built into the cabinet--I've been trying to remember that thing for YEARS.)
posted by mittens at 4:59 AM on April 7 [3 favorites]
When I tell my kids I used to get an allowance of two dollars a week, which in the old exchange rate came out to eight game tokens at the arcade, they look at me in horror as though I were telling them tales of the Great Depression. While I tend to agree that this was not enough money, considering how quickly I lost it all on games I was bad at, it certainly felt glorious at the time.
(Now, someone do a post on this game I can NOT find any evidence ever existed--a sort of science fiction motorcycle game where you've got kind of a first-person POV riding through a futuristic highly stylized city street/track/bridge, where much of the screen is black, and which I believe you actually sat on, like there was a plastic cycle built into the cabinet--I've been trying to remember that thing for YEARS.)
posted by mittens at 4:59 AM on April 7 [3 favorites]
For those also interested in video game history in general, there's of course Hbomberguy's Dragon Lair documentary.
Ahoy also has great videos on specific games but also video game tropes (and firearms portrayed in video games and movies.)
Jeremy Parish has videos on Nintendo/Sega games from the 90s.
And if you want narrated gameplay videos that aren't speed runs but don't waste time going through entire games from start to finish, U Can Beat Video Games is great. (I watch on 1.5x speed though, as they can be a bit slow.)
posted by AlSweigart at 7:27 AM on April 7 [2 favorites]
Ahoy also has great videos on specific games but also video game tropes (and firearms portrayed in video games and movies.)
Jeremy Parish has videos on Nintendo/Sega games from the 90s.
And if you want narrated gameplay videos that aren't speed runs but don't waste time going through entire games from start to finish, U Can Beat Video Games is great. (I watch on 1.5x speed though, as they can be a bit slow.)
posted by AlSweigart at 7:27 AM on April 7 [2 favorites]
@mittens: Was that perhaps S.T.U.N. Runner ? I could never play it well, but I really loved it, it felt like a racing game version of Tempest.
PatmanQC breaks it down here.
posted by AbnerRavenwood at 7:44 AM on April 7 [1 favorite]
PatmanQC breaks it down here.
posted by AbnerRavenwood at 7:44 AM on April 7 [1 favorite]
Dragon's Lair and Space Ace are the big names in the history of laserdisk gaming but Cliff Hanger has kept a spot in my brain because I found the cutscene of the main character being hanged if you failed to be creepily disturbing especially since most of the time it meant they were like, hanging his corpse or something.
Later I learned it was a weird cash grab made by splicing together video from two of the Lupin anime and that to this day we still don't know who the English voice cast was.
After Robotech (mutant cut together derivitive of Macross), and Battle of the Planets (mutant cut together drivitive of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) Cliff Hanger was my third major exposure to anime before I knew what anime was.
Fun times!
I also love that two games from my childhood just stole the music they used because back then no one thought of video games as worth anything so the idea of licensing music would have a) seemed bizarre, and b) the rights owners wouldn't permit it. Spy Hunter, of course, used the Peter Gunn theme, and Vanguard used Vultan's Theme from Queen's soundtrack for the Flash Gordon movie.
mittens re: Q-bert, I've always felt vindicated since I learned about the mechanical thumper. When was a kid I was fascinated by the noise and convinced it couldn't be fake.
I hung around people playing and put my ear all over the cabinet (eew, in retrospect) and eventually figured out that a) there definitely was one, and b) roughly were it was.
And no one believed me. They said I was making stuff up and no one would put a mechanical thumper into the cabinet. It had to just be a speaker.
Well suck it doubters, I was flipping right!
posted by sotonohito at 11:49 AM on April 7 [3 favorites]
Later I learned it was a weird cash grab made by splicing together video from two of the Lupin anime and that to this day we still don't know who the English voice cast was.
After Robotech (mutant cut together derivitive of Macross), and Battle of the Planets (mutant cut together drivitive of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) Cliff Hanger was my third major exposure to anime before I knew what anime was.
Fun times!
I also love that two games from my childhood just stole the music they used because back then no one thought of video games as worth anything so the idea of licensing music would have a) seemed bizarre, and b) the rights owners wouldn't permit it. Spy Hunter, of course, used the Peter Gunn theme, and Vanguard used Vultan's Theme from Queen's soundtrack for the Flash Gordon movie.
mittens re: Q-bert, I've always felt vindicated since I learned about the mechanical thumper. When was a kid I was fascinated by the noise and convinced it couldn't be fake.
I hung around people playing and put my ear all over the cabinet (eew, in retrospect) and eventually figured out that a) there definitely was one, and b) roughly were it was.
And no one believed me. They said I was making stuff up and no one would put a mechanical thumper into the cabinet. It had to just be a speaker.
Well suck it doubters, I was flipping right!
posted by sotonohito at 11:49 AM on April 7 [3 favorites]
I once sneered at someone’s classical music knowledge by saying “They don’t know Schubert from Q*bert!”
posted by Lemkin at 12:56 PM on April 7 [2 favorites]
posted by Lemkin at 12:56 PM on April 7 [2 favorites]
Cliff Hanger was absurdly popular for a while at my arcade. Like, poor Space Ace would sit there gathering dust, while kids played Cliff Hanger. It felt like a lot of laserdisc games had a brief burst of popularity but there wasn't much to actually do in them, so everyone would wander off and do other games after a while.
If there had ever been a Battle of the Planets game I would've mortgaged my parents' house to get enough quarters to beat it, though.
OH! The game I mentioned earlier may have been Star Rider! The graphics aren't exactly as I remember them, but it's a very similar feel, and for all I know, my memories are throwing Tron or something in there. And it too was a laserdisc game!
posted by mittens at 1:50 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]
If there had ever been a Battle of the Planets game I would've mortgaged my parents' house to get enough quarters to beat it, though.
OH! The game I mentioned earlier may have been Star Rider! The graphics aren't exactly as I remember them, but it's a very similar feel, and for all I know, my memories are throwing Tron or something in there. And it too was a laserdisc game!
posted by mittens at 1:50 PM on April 7 [1 favorite]
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posted by JHarris at 12:51 AM on April 7 [1 favorite]