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September 11, 2014 5:07 PM   Subscribe

Arcades in the Movies, a supercut.
posted by griphus (23 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
So when are we getting Ready Player One turned into a film?!?!
posted by Fizz at 5:28 PM on September 11, 2014


My god Jeff Bridges used to be so young. What movie was that?
posted by skewed at 5:31 PM on September 11, 2014


A few of those were actually NES games. I spotted RC Pro-Am, which has weird arcade styling but is solidly for the NES, and another was NES Contra, which is additionally weird because it was originally an arcade game.
posted by JHarris at 5:35 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]


They forgot Brother From Another Planet.
posted by surplus at 5:36 PM on September 11, 2014 [3 favorites]


RC Pro-Am was a Playchoice-10 game, but I'm not sure about Contra.
posted by griphus at 5:36 PM on September 11, 2014


I'm looking forward to the future super-cut of modern gaming: thousands of clips of people sitting alone at their consoles/computers, inter-spliced with tweeting death threats at Anita Sarkeesian.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:45 PM on September 11, 2014


The Playchoice-10 is weird, because it used stock NES/Famicom ROM images. The games in it were indistinguishable from the console originals. Making an arcade game involves more work than making a game, you also have to design against stalls, have a watchdog to watch for crashes, handle coin drops and assorted other tasks. The Playchoice-10 pushed all that onto a co-processor.

Maybe it counts by the criteria of this video, but I don't remember Playchoice machines exactly heating up the arcade. Certainly RC Pro-Am, weird arcade styling aside, is solidly considered an NES game today.
posted by JHarris at 5:45 PM on September 11, 2014


inter-spliced with tweeting death threats at Anita Sarkeesian.

I was going to say that, as a woman, seeing all the girls in the clips confirms my own memories and experiences of arcades and video games in the late 70s/early 80s being much more social and egalitarian.
posted by Room 641-A at 6:04 PM on September 11, 2014 [5 favorites]


Jeff Bridges.

TRON.

1982.

Before the dark times...

Before the Crash.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 6:25 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


If you haven't seen Joysticks, it is the worst. Imagine a world where the creeps that hang out in an arcade were sexy, cool people that could take on the likes of Joe Don Baker. But more horrifying, imagine a world without Internet pornography where you had to cut a hole in a game cabinet to ogle women. If there is any nostalgia for the golden age of arcades, this movie will kill it dead.
posted by munchingzombie at 6:39 PM on September 11, 2014


A few of those were actually NES games. I spotted RC Pro-Am, which has weird arcade styling but is solidly for the NES, and another was NES Contra, which is additionally weird because it was originally an arcade game.

Mega Man 2 was also in there.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 6:43 PM on September 11, 2014


God, I love that music.
posted by Quilford at 6:49 PM on September 11, 2014


I completely forgot about Suburban Commando and that scene where Hulk Hogan beats an arcade game so hard it starts smoking and raises a little surrender flag. I think at one point someone actually convinced me that machines did that if you got a high enough score.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:14 PM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ooh ooh can we get a pinball supercut too? That would be aces.
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:23 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]


I have vaguely pleasant memories of Suburban Commando that are being preserved by my refusal to rewatch it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:35 PM on September 11, 2014


THE BISHOP OF BATTLE
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:27 AM on September 12, 2014


RC Pro-Am was a Playchoice-10 game, but I'm not sure about Contra.

In your wiki link, it does list Contra as a Playchoice-10 game.
posted by Theta States at 8:04 AM on September 12, 2014


FWIW, for the folks pointing out console games...it's not just a Playchoice-10 situation. In many films, console games have been used for "arcade" close-ups either for licensing reasons or because a variety of factors made them easier to shoot at the time with the given equipment on hand.

It's also worth noting, while the editor chose not to include much of these, that a lot of completely fictional (never existed even as a prototype) arcade machines have existed in movies. Some of those have involved console games or even PC games, like the DOOM cabinet in Grosse Pointe Blank.
posted by trackofalljades at 9:10 AM on September 12, 2014


I did see the fake Galactic Border Patrol from Strange Brew in there.

Included Tron and Fast Times, so I was satisfied.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:25 AM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


So when are we getting Ready Player One turned into a film?!?!

Zak Penn is working on it.

TRON and The Last Starfighter are two major high points of my childhood. Not disappointed.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:27 AM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]


More info on 'Bouncer', a never-released game seen in the clips from 'Ninja III'... and that's me in the 'Police – Berlin – The Fixx' shirt playing it in a test location in 1983!
posted by drmanhattan at 11:05 AM on September 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


Somehow I was listening to Foreigner while this played and it broke my brain.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:47 PM on September 12, 2014


Contra was available as both a Playchoice-10 game and a full-scale arcade game. Arcade Contra is a markedly different game, by the way, very interesting for its own sake, unfortunately overshadowed by its monster NES version.

Point of interest: the Famicom home release of Contra is much harder than the American version, but also contains a number of graphical flourishes, like animated water in the first level and map screens between levels.

Back to the Playchoice, the system, I believe, was offered as a late upgrade for the arcade consoles that Nintendo had sold since Donkey Kong. An arcade game is a hell of a lot more than the computer hardware, of course, and Nintendo's had the quirk of requiring inverted voltage for the monitor. That quirk was probably done, I would guess, to block operators from repurposing machines as games from other companies. Nintendo released the "Versus" platform for those old machines, in the form of the Unisystem and Duosystem, which amounted to a board containing most of the guts of a Famicom/NES. Actually, those guts were duplicated twice; a single board could service two games, which Nintendo took advantage of with the "Red Tent" hardware, which was a two-sided sit down machine where each side was set up to play a different game. Anyway, I believe the Playchoice-10 was offered as a Unisystem kit. I don't have the precise details of how it was implemented, but I think it was done was, one of the hardware units on the motherboard was set up to play the current selected games (either actively played or in attract mode), and the other handled coinage, the selection and timer interface, and watched over the play hardware, which itself was set up just like an NES.

The Unisystem is a very interesting system for NES enthusiasts. In addition to the Playchoice link, a good number of classic NES and Famicom games, both from Nintendo and other companies, were released as Unisystem ports. Some times these games were little changed except to add arcade functionality like coinage and operator settings, but others were greatly changed, or even had completely different programming.

All of the games for the Unisystem had "Vs." as in "versus," added to their titles. Vs. Castlevania was an even more difficult game than its NES version! Vs. Balloon Fight was a "Duosystem" game, that supported two-played play with separate monitors for each, Vs. Excitebike is a much more polished game than its NES version, and so on.
posted by JHarris at 11:30 PM on September 12, 2014 [3 favorites]


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