For folks in the US visiting the west coast, the Musee de Mechanique in San Francisco has many very old video games, pinball and mechanical games as well as other antique penny arcade games. Almost all of them are playable and cost their original amount. It’s fascinating. I love this place and donate to the museum every year.
I admit I haven't been there in at least a decade, but yeah definitely worth the trip if you're in SF! last I was there they had a lot of the early penny arcade machines, as well as 1975's death race. definitely not one to be missed!
This was an awesome trip down memory lane. As a kid growing up in the late 70's, I was blessed to have a father who flunked out of college because his love of pinball was greater than his love of attending class. He would drag me along to various establishments and give me some quarters to keep me busy while he played pinball. I remember standing on bar stools to play pinball, as well as games like electro-mechanical games like Sega's Duck Hunt and Periscope. There was also a car driving game, but I can't remember the name. I still gravitate towards pinball machines, and own a classic Gottlieb Sky Jump.
The closest thing to one of these that I've seen is a physical pong game with magnetic pieces that move around on a table. There's also a game like the basketball one, but you shoot a can with a gun. (I saw it on youtube)
I remember seeing a number of electromechanical games that were a few years vintage in the early 80's at Disney World. One I remember in particular was a flat top construction site simulation thing with four glass sides.
As a child, I played Periscope on Walton pier. They had a similar machine with machine guns and tanks. With Periscope you pressed a button and a white light would shoot under the fiber glass ocean towards the ship at the back. These machines were huge!
You can find lots a video about them on RUclips. There's also older a yet sophisticated ones. Wars were a big driver for SEGA - lonesome soldiers stuck somewhere with money in their pockets.
Wow! I surely remember those Hugo games. In fact, I made them. From 1992 until it ended in about 2006, I programmed over 50 of those games... C64, Amiga, PC, Playstation 1+2, GB... Those were the retro days 😇❤️
I never knew there were that many, I remember there being just around a dozen in rotation on TV. Never got to play cause as he said getting through was like winning the lottery.
@@axelprino There was enough to give me an ulcer... twice 😕 And yes, it was very difficult to play live due to delay in satelite encoding, transmission, decoding, etc.
@@subtledemisefox The latest Hugo games from 2008+ (or about that) I do not know, since I stopped working on them. The company Krea bought the rights to the Hugo brand and took it to a whole new (and not exactly better) level
I'm reminded of when my family used to go camping at campgrounds when I was a kid. Like every place in the 80s it had a small arcade. My sister and I discovered that you could lift up the control panel of the Donkey Kong game and there was a toggle switch inside. Every time you flipped the switch it added one "coin" so you could basically have unlimited free plays.
18:22 the engineer in me is thinking it really wouldn't take much to modify it to give the illusion you can "shoot" the lights with an extra button and some extra wiring. I really hope mechanical games like these make a comeback. I think with some more up-to-date art they are still relevant (as in I think it's just the art that makes these "look" old fashioned in this era), especially for kids who love that tactile kind of game.
Especially if they were designed with modern components, they could make use of things like LEDs that had a very narrow beam of light and light sensors connected to MOSFETs that had filters on them that were matched with the wavelength of the LED that was used to allow the game to do things like drive motors if your shot was lined up and a hit was made, and much more without any sort of full computerization needed.
The pitfall is keeping them in working condition. Although coin pushers and mechanical horse racing still seem to be common in the UK at fairgrounds/coastal town amusements. Pinball is not entirely uncommon in the odd pub or coastal amusements but tends to suffer from poor maintenance. Pre-pandemic I did go to an annual pinball event that usually was part of PlayExpo, sadly I can't risk getting Covid so not been anywhere since.
@@KenPiper I'd probably strobe the LEDs in sequence and use TTL or CMOS NAND gates to figure which LED triggered the phototransistor... ...but, honestly, I also need to take into account that the 1980s are over now. Even a 0..99 up/down counter with two 7-segment LED displays would nowadays be cheaper to implement with a microcontroller than with TTL/CMOS logic ICs. And for just $2 or 2€ more, I could upgrade the LED digits to a frigging 64*128 pixel OLED graphic display! I love your solution because it could be implemented *with relays.* It doesn't get any better than this -- relays also provide built-in acoustic feedback if they are large enough! I'm very sad that these times are over now.
OMG I LOVED Those digital pinball machines as a kid!! My mom worked as a bartender and I would sometimes go in for a few hours while she worked and her manager ALWAYS gave me a fat cup of quarters so I could go play the digital pinball machine they had haha I cant rememer EXACTLY the theme but It was similar to that "Bass Fishin'" one by Williams haha
@@BadWallaby look up VPX, a pinball emulator for windows. You can get some great recreations that run the real roms... Or Zen pinball if you want to go with a commercial package
If only I knew beforehand that you'd come to our arcade booth (the one with the basketball, PolyPlay and old school pinballs) I'd have taken the time to explain everything to you. GC this year sure was busy with all kinds of people approaching us, we'll be there again next year ;)
I studied logic in philosophy and had a lot of fun learning about analog computers. Some of the things that you can make mechanically is really interesting. A small part of me wishes that technology would’ve progressed a little more slowly so we could explore some of those ideas more fully. I am fascinated with computer games that are not video games.
Who else went to the comments to say something about this and thought... I wonder how close to the top the same exact comment I came here to make is? 😂😂😂
That is what i love on retro gaming. Experiences that you hardly get in house. Pinball, mechanical machines, driving games, trackball , lightgun, knob controller like tempest. Dancepad. Also love some arcade weird machines from japan
I was born in 99' so I never got to play most of these, so ive become obsessed trying to find as much footage of cool older arcade machines as I can. All to scratch the itch of wanting to play these even though ill never actually be able to.
This brings back memories I didn't remember I even had. I used to play the domed basket ball game at my local tenpin bowling club. They also had an array of electromechanical pinball machines, an air hockey table and a few other things. I even remember playing the mechanical bike race, but I think that was in Sydney's Luna Park, which still has some of the original attractions and rides from the 1950s or earlier.
Thank you for sharing this, and I hope you're feeling better quickly! Electromechanicals have a special place in my heart. I'm just old enough to have played a few as a little kid, but what really grabs me is the creativity and ingenuity that went into their design.
As a child I was constantly pressing buttons on our TV remote to steer the characters in TV games, not understanding how they were supposed to work. You just digged up some memories, man.
Wow the nostalgia is strong in this one - we had Hugo in Ireland here as well on the Irish language channel. The character's name was translated from Hugo to Hiudaí for full effect. Strangely I had no idea it was a game that went beyond Ireland which has blown my mind.
My dear nostalgia nerd, do you not have a retro arcade in Britain or wherever you live?? I live in the backwater american state of Arkansas and in Little Rock there's this arcade, called Vortex Retro Arcade, and it has hundreds of old arcade machines like this, hundreds of pinball machines (my favorite), and a wall of old nintendo games you can take down and play on their consoles then and there. I experienced it for the first time last month and it was breathtaking. The noise, the lights, the thrill. I will definitely be going back.
This made me remember the games I played as a child. Although I did play pong and a few atari games. Most the games I played were on an old apple //e computer. There was spy hunter, road runner, conan, Mario bros (Not to be confused with the nes super mario) and a lot more games. Thanks for bringing me down memory lane.
BTW - you can have more than one infection at a time, so just b/c you tested positive for COVID, don't mean you didn't also have some other virus ;) Hope you back to full health, keep up the great work.
Love those mechanical arcade games. I can remember them in the 80s, but back then, I thought they were so "uncool", and were relegated to the back of the arcade. But now, they just seem so much more tactile
I could swear that one arcade in my town had that Night Rider game. This was around the time that all the new-fangled vector graphics machines were coming in.
Hey, nice to see a new video! Today is good a good day for another reason: I found a set of Microsoft windows for Workgroup setup 3.5" Discs in a trash heap on the sidewalk ! (also a label printer ) :)
I'm just a bit too young to have seen those mechanical arcade machines in the wild but I find them absolutely fascinating. I wish they held on for another 10 years or so so we could have had games with the best of mechanical and digital.
Playing Hugo on a phone was more of a highlight than I imagined, smol childhood dream right there 😅 Also I won all games we played together, and any footage showing otherwise is fake 👀
I remember playing a car one on Hastings pier, must have been about 1976, the size and shape of a pinball machine. (at the back of the pier they had a half penny arcade, it also had the basketball) If my memory serves me correctly, the car was on a wire going left to right. The road was a cloth roll,when you put your money in, first thing it did was rewind the roll to the beginning. Had a steering wheel and gear lever. There were clear bits in the cloth road where lights would show through. For example, there would be say 5 lights underneath at a crossing, and each would light up in turn giving the illusion of someone crossing the road (as the clear bits were person shaped) You had to stop at crossings, lights etc. As a 12 year old kid, that was my favourite machine in the pier.
I was at an arcade hall on Ameland twice, it's a Dutch island. That hall had the weirdest machines. Skiing / snowboarding and several for racing games had various driver cabins that would move or tremble. As a small kid those machines were difficult to use, no power-steering and they're primed for ages 14 and up. I was 10/12yo and weak. I had more amusement from air hockey or filling my belly with food, but I do recall racing once or twice and was terrible at it, also didn't have a fat stack of coins to practice with after fattening up myself. Would be fun to go to one and finally try out some of those outlandish machines.
14:52 About that time, as a ten-year-old, on a vacation trip, I played some even older electro-mechanical game. One of them was a car racing games, where the competitors were mounted on cloth belts, and your car was on an arm connected to an overhead mechanism. If you crashed the car would rise into the air and flip over and over in slow motion.
@@Alfisonson Yeah, I think that was it. I played at night and the dim lighting made the illusion work so well that I didn't realize that it was a reflection.
Yes, the electromechanical games and pinball machines are very impressive. Thanks for bringing these to a wider audience. Did see the odd one of these still kicking around in pinball parlours as a lad in the 80's. Seeing the more recent (ish!) Funhouse and The Getaway (which was brand-new, then!) pinball machines brought back fond memories of mis-spent lunchtimes as a first year student with mates down the pub of a friday lunch. One of the pubs had Funhouse with fairly low replay scores. In a short time our crew were all pretty good at that machine and we were disappointed if each of us didn't make replay on first play. Before long, the publican put us on a play-time-limit, because the continual noise of the machine was a bit too much for the regular punters, rofl! From that era, my absolute favourite pinball machine was "The Twilight Zone"
I remember the first arcade games I saw, back in the 70s; Wild Gunman was a Western themed quickdraw game, which was on exhibition at the Science museum as it was so new. The other was Starship 1, which had an Easter egg which was only relatively recently discovered
I remember quite a few of the mechanical games still being around when Space Invaders hit the arcades in Scarborough. My faves were the racing game that was literally a Scalextric car on a peg above a revolving drum with the road painted on it, a sub game where you had this little 2 man sub on the end of a long thin pole that revolved around the center, you moved up and dpwn to avoid suspended sea mines all in a giant glass cabinet and then the full size motorbike that was held on 2 metal rollers, with a cage around the whole thing, you steered it left and right trying to follow a red light that moved back and forth. Happy days!
2:00 - I was thinking of this motorbike game from my childhood only the other day. There was an even earlier version with a polished metal bike and a projected road pattern.
A very enjoyable video. I remember playing the old pinball machines in a cafe close to my parent’s house in Coventry. It was in the late 1960s when I first went there, so have no idea how old the machines actually were. I also remember the basketball game, probably from a seaside arcade. As for the coffee concentrate, it reminded me of the Coffee-Chicory liquid that I saw in my grandparents house in the ‘50s.
Thank you for Visiting us and Hugo! It was a blast to finally meet you in person. We also have more informations now on the Original Hugo Hardware and where we can find a living machine!! I will send you a email soon :)
I was on gamescom too, was hoping to walk into you (sadly not the case), the retro hall was so relaxing, you had that confi feeling there, just sit down with ur friend and play some games and consoles you haven't played on before(didn't even knew existed), there where also mini retro events like quizshows, gamescom did good for us retro fans.
Love the electro-mechanical games the most! As a kid, they were like playing with a really expensive and cool toy for a limited time. They are mechanical marvels, though known to be very high-maintenance. Thanks for taking us along. Hope you're feeling better.
@ 12:54 High Speed, and High Speed II/ Getaway, were probably my favorite Pinball machines. I used to skip 7th hour of Junior High, go 3 blocks to the arcade, and play them.
Thanks, great trip and video! BTW, @3:54, all your booze bottles look empty, lol. As a kid, I grew up in Greenwich Village NYC and they had a large antique game dealership (lots of rich people in NYC) and I would creep in like a feral cat and they would let me play the machines close to the doorway. With 1930s or so pinball games you could shoot multiple balls into the machine at one time and I pounded that machine's flippers shooting a dozen pin balls into each other, they finally told me to take off afraid I was going to break the glass cover, lol. Another favorite old memory was the video arcade in Penn Station NY, beside having old EM arcade games, they had working Nickelodeons and they took only 1 cent! When I was out of quarters I stretched it out cranking away at old silent shorts, lol. mid to late 1970s time. Not that I play pinball anymore but my favorite machine I really got into was Williams machine model called "Comet"!
Omg, I have a vague memory of playing a few electro mechanical games as a kid. Thank you for the nostalgia of games I had forgotten about until today 😄
My family spent Summers at Topsail Island, North Carolina and Morehead City, North Carolina. We had a house on Topsail Island. 1967 to 1975. It was VERY strange - all those electromechanical games like Sega's Periscope. I had JUST grown accustomed to seeing them there and being robbed by them - and then they were gone. I had more fun flounder gigging and collecting scallops and running my crab traps. I would feed the entire family EASILY. My mother was amazed. She bought me an ice cream for it all. She would hand me quarters for those robber machines. I remember her opinion of them: "Those pinball machines are worse than the carnival booth criminal! TRASH, I tell ya!" I told her "I thought that's what quarters are FOR, mom!"
This is what people need to recreate these electro mechanical macines, not those boring mini arcade machines with mame on em, proper moving parts in perspex boxes as a talking point, they look so neet, everyone likes skeleton watches and they are similar imo
When I was a kid there was a arcade at a beach my family went to every summer that had nothing but mechanical arcade games. It was awasome. (They did have the latest pinball machines this was 1992-94) then the guy who owned it passed and his kids shut it down.
I actually played some of these games as a kid. Specifically, the motorcycle game and Periscope. My local arcade also had electromechanical bowling and baseball. And I either played that racing game, or something very similar, but what I played actually had a steering wheel. I also remember the television call-in games. The one where I lived was called TV POW. It was basically a ship flying through space, and you were supposed to shout "POW" whenever an enemy entered your crosshairs. Great memories👍
Electromechanical arcade games didn't quite die yet. Some were released in the 80s as well as the 90s. "Golly! Ghost" was a lightgun shooter that used a house room model diorama buried in the cabinet and looking up towards a mirror. Various doors or things like a chest or a toilet seat were opened and closed by servos. These were synced with the video overlay of cartoon ghosts that would come out or go into these and you had to hit them with your blaster.. There were also lighting effects overlaid to give the rooms more ambience. The diorama itself had lights to illuminate it and when the game switched to something it needed the full screen for (post-round scoring, intro/outro, etc.) it would turn off the lights to the diorama and so you only saw what looked like a traditional video game screen. It was a VERY impressive effect, combining electromechanicals and video overlays. I wish it had been a bigger hit and other games using the same style developed.
I remember coming across some electromechanical games on vacation once and marveling at how they used mechanics and mirrors to create an actual playable game.
Never got to see electro-mechanical games in my youth (and I'm an 80's kid). Pinball was still around but that was about it and even that was on its way out in favor of electronic arcade games.
Growing up in the 70s I remember a lot of the electro-mechanical arcade games, although none seen here. From my recollection, the ones that stood out most were war games that had a first person view. I specifically remember a submarine game where you looked through a periscope and launched torpedoes at warships at various distances as they passed by. Another put you in the place of a bombardier where you had to quickly drop bombs on various military facilities and weapons as you flew above. These were really great games but by my teens, in the early 1980s, virtually all them had been replaced by the more well known digital arcade games such as Pacman, Centipede, Tempest, Missile Command, BattleZone, etc.
Brought back some childhood memories. I had one of those little basketball games when i was little. Havnt thought about it in years.. i seen that and i was insantly back playing a game with my grandpa
Cedar Point, located in Sandusky, Ohio in the US had a huge basement arcade of all of the really old school electromechanical games. I really hope it's still there, it was just amazing
19:09 Definitely really cool. It looks just like it's a top down 2D game. Like if there was another tank in there, you'd be playing Combat only with more detailed artwork than the 2600 could display.
I was a kid in the 70s and I liked pinball, but even more video games when they came about in the 80s. Sadly I don't remember seeing any of these electro-mechanical games, I would have loved them!
8:00 That Hugo showcase brought me back some memories... Hugo was also huge in Argentina, as we had our national version broadcasted in a national children television channel. I remember wanting to participate in the game because I thought I could beat them all because the game seemed piss easy. Sadly I didn't have the opportunity because the TV channel owner company went broke and the programme was cancelled.
You would love it at Portland Retro Gaming Expo then. The whole gaming convention is around everything retro gaming. And a big section is dedicated to old upright arcade machines and pinball machines. And a ton of booths to buy lots of games and gaming merch. ;) And sweet nice to see pinball machines there. And I always love it when I see a pinball machine that I have in my own collection and that being The Getaway - High-Speed II. If you have any questions about pinball I have everything from a flipperless 1935 pinball machine to my 1992 pinball machine. I am a pinball nut I have many in my collection and I also enjoy getting them back up and running.
That was perhaps one of the more compelling ad reads I've ever heard. One, super well put together but also, yeah, I love coffee and would love a good decaf option but sadly decaf is usually the flavor. You get a rich blend, or you get decaf. Might just give it a go.
The whole bean decaf coffee that HEB sells, cold brews wonderfully. It just doesn't have all the caffeine my normal batches do. Then again maybe I'm better at preparing coffee than most. Cold brew is stupid easy to make. Get some whole bean coffee in flavor you like, bring it home, grind about 6 oz for half gallon (coarse grind, 12 cups), let it sit in your fridge for a day. Pull the metal filter out and empty the filter (don't forget to rinse the filter). I use N2 chargers, so I drink nitro cold brew coffee. It's about half coffee, the rest is a tiny amount of pure stevia extract, ice and half a table spoon of heavy whipping cream. Pretty simple and I get to control the quality of the coffee used, not taking some company's word that they are using good coffee.
Wow, I remember watching Hugo in Colombia. They had a show they'd present on tv about Hugo. So, the idea was that you could call the show and have a chance to play. Out of the contestants that play they would then choose the highest score I believe. I think the show was from Argentina. The show was more exciting than any current e-sports : P
When I think retro section I forget about the Amiga and Commodore related stuff. The Nintendo, Sega and Sony consoles stick in my memory far more than anything Amiga and commodore ever made.
Love pinball and those mechanical games. Played that Sega Attack tank game as a kid on holiday. Also remember a helicopter game where you controlled a helicopter going round trying to hit lights on various buildings. Would love to play them again.
For some reason just reading the title my brain was expecting literally ancient arcade machines, like some obscure recently discovered arcade game found in some ancient Egyptian ruin or something made out of mud and reeds or something. Still, these were also very interesting! I also remember the Hugo TV game and remember being very annoyed by the fact that mom never let me call in and try to get to play. :D
Takes me way back to me and my brother playing games while my dad bowled at Ambassador Lanes in Edgeware. There was a rally game using a film system that had you driving a vintage car as far as possible. Any crashes would slow you down. Progress was shown above the screen on a map using light bulbs. I have seen that basket ball game somewhere in the UK but I don’t know where. Maybe on holidays in Torquay or Babbacombe in the early 70s. Ambassador also had a video game called Styx where you drew lines to capture as much of the screen as possible without getting zapped by the spark.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Those older mechanical machines have always amazed me. Thank goodness there are people keeping them maintained and sharing with the rest of us.
For folks in the US visiting the west coast, the Musee de Mechanique in San Francisco has many very old video games, pinball and mechanical games as well as other antique penny arcade games. Almost all of them are playable and cost their original amount. It’s fascinating. I love this place and donate to the museum every year.
Wow, now there's a reason to visit that city
I admit I haven't been there in at least a decade, but yeah definitely worth the trip if you're in SF! last I was there they had a lot of the early penny arcade machines, as well as 1975's death race. definitely not one to be missed!
That museum would be the ONLY reason why I would visit San Fran, lol.
This was an awesome trip down memory lane. As a kid growing up in the late 70's, I was blessed to have a father who flunked out of college because his love of pinball was greater than his love of attending class. He would drag me along to various establishments and give me some quarters to keep me busy while he played pinball. I remember standing on bar stools to play pinball, as well as games like electro-mechanical games like Sega's Duck Hunt and Periscope. There was also a car driving game, but I can't remember the name. I still gravitate towards pinball machines, and own a classic Gottlieb Sky Jump.
I'd love to see electromechanical games come back. There's awesome potential with today's tech.
The closest thing to one of these that I've seen is a physical pong game with magnetic pieces that move around on a table. There's also a game like the basketball one, but you shoot a can with a gun. (I saw it on youtube)
Definitely ❤️
Tim Hunkin's Novelty Automation is worth a visit.
They must have cost a fortune to make and maintain. No suprise video games eventually took over.
I remember seeing a number of electromechanical games that were a few years vintage in the early 80's at Disney World. One I remember in particular was a flat top construction site simulation thing with four glass sides.
As a child, I played Periscope on Walton pier. They had a similar machine with machine guns and tanks. With Periscope you pressed a button and a white light would shoot under the fiber glass ocean towards the ship at the back. These machines were huge!
I didn't even know that such machines existed. Those are so cool. I'd love to see a new one made.
Me neither. They're really fantastic considering how long ago they were released.
You can find lots a video about them on RUclips. There's also older a yet sophisticated ones. Wars were a big driver for SEGA - lonesome soldiers stuck somewhere with money in their pockets.
Too expensive, believe it or not. (I’m assuming) Also, the younger generation is unable to use their imagination. ;)
Ive only seen a glimpse of some when i was a kid. Utterly fascinating
Wow! I surely remember those Hugo games. In fact, I made them. From 1992 until it ended in about 2006, I programmed over 50 of those games... C64, Amiga, PC, Playstation 1+2, GB... Those were the retro days 😇❤️
That’s cool
I never knew there were that many, I remember there being just around a dozen in rotation on TV. Never got to play cause as he said getting through was like winning the lottery.
@@axelprino There was enough to give me an ulcer... twice 😕
And yes, it was very difficult to play live due to delay in satelite encoding, transmission, decoding, etc.
I was going to say, I used to play the Hugo games on DOS (Not to be confused with the *other* Hugo games that were King's Quest style adventure games)
@@subtledemisefox The latest Hugo games from 2008+ (or about that) I do not know, since I stopped working on them. The company Krea bought the rights to the Hugo brand and took it to a whole new (and not exactly better) level
I'm reminded of when my family used to go camping at campgrounds when I was a kid. Like every place in the 80s it had a small arcade. My sister and I discovered that you could lift up the control panel of the Donkey Kong game and there was a toggle switch inside. Every time you flipped the switch it added one "coin" so you could basically have unlimited free plays.
18:22 the engineer in me is thinking it really wouldn't take much to modify it to give the illusion you can "shoot" the lights with an extra button and some extra wiring. I really hope mechanical games like these make a comeback. I think with some more up-to-date art they are still relevant (as in I think it's just the art that makes these "look" old fashioned in this era), especially for kids who love that tactile kind of game.
Especially if they were designed with modern components, they could make use of things like LEDs that had a very narrow beam of light and light sensors connected to MOSFETs that had filters on them that were matched with the wavelength of the LED that was used to allow the game to do things like drive motors if your shot was lined up and a hit was made, and much more without any sort of full computerization needed.
The pitfall is keeping them in working condition. Although coin pushers and mechanical horse racing still seem to be common in the UK at fairgrounds/coastal town amusements. Pinball is not entirely uncommon in the odd pub or coastal amusements but tends to suffer from poor maintenance.
Pre-pandemic I did go to an annual pinball event that usually was part of PlayExpo, sadly I can't risk getting Covid so not been anywhere since.
@@KenPiper I'd probably strobe the LEDs in sequence and use TTL or CMOS NAND gates to figure which LED triggered the phototransistor...
...but, honestly, I also need to take into account that the 1980s are over now. Even a 0..99 up/down counter with two 7-segment LED displays would nowadays be cheaper to implement with a microcontroller than with TTL/CMOS logic ICs. And for just $2 or 2€ more, I could upgrade the LED digits to a frigging 64*128 pixel OLED graphic display!
I love your solution because it could be implemented *with relays.* It doesn't get any better than this -- relays also provide built-in acoustic feedback if they are large enough! I'm very sad that these times are over now.
OMG I LOVED Those digital pinball machines as a kid!! My mom worked as a bartender and I would sometimes go in for a few hours while she worked and her manager ALWAYS gave me a fat cup of quarters so I could go play the digital pinball machine they had haha I cant rememer EXACTLY the theme but It was similar to that "Bass Fishin'" one by Williams haha
Fish Tales by Williams, early 90's
@@StanleyKubick1 YESSSS! Many hours of my childhood spent on Williams machines but this one in particular was where most of my quarters went haha!
@@BadWallaby look up VPX, a pinball emulator for windows. You can get some great recreations that run the real roms... Or Zen pinball if you want to go with a commercial package
@@askjacob Thank you! This is so cool 😮 making me want to build one of those fancy full size pinball emulators! 🤔🤔🤔
If only I knew beforehand that you'd come to our arcade booth (the one with the basketball, PolyPlay and old school pinballs) I'd have taken the time to explain everything to you.
GC this year sure was busy with all kinds of people approaching us, we'll be there again next year ;)
I studied logic in philosophy and had a lot of fun learning about analog computers. Some of the things that you can make mechanically is really interesting. A small part of me wishes that technology would’ve progressed a little more slowly so we could explore some of those ideas more fully. I am fascinated with computer games that are not video games.
"Continuous action! Just like I gave your mum." Had me rolling 😂
audibly LOL'd on that one
Who else went to the comments to say something about this and thought... I wonder how close to the top the same exact comment I came here to make is? 😂😂😂
@@TruckPuzzles Same 😂😂😂
It was so funny how it came out of nowhere, so unexpected.
That is what i love on retro gaming. Experiences that you hardly get in house. Pinball, mechanical machines, driving games, trackball , lightgun, knob controller like tempest. Dancepad. Also love some arcade weird machines from japan
I was born in 99' so I never got to play most of these, so ive become obsessed trying to find as much footage of cool older arcade machines as I can. All to scratch the itch of wanting to play these even though ill never actually be able to.
This brings back memories I didn't remember I even had. I used to play the domed basket ball game at my local tenpin bowling club. They also had an array of electromechanical pinball machines, an air hockey table and a few other things. I even remember playing the mechanical bike race, but I think that was in Sydney's Luna Park, which still has some of the original attractions and rides from the 1950s or earlier.
This video was a nice change. I hope you did some interviews at arcade club. That place needs all the help it can get with the energy crisis.
13:01 I have the getaway, it's amazing ! I fully modded mine with shaker and custom sounds packs. Very interesting video 👍
Thank you for sharing this, and I hope you're feeling better quickly! Electromechanicals have a special place in my heart. I'm just old enough to have played a few as a little kid, but what really grabs me is the creativity and ingenuity that went into their design.
As a child I was constantly pressing buttons on our TV remote to steer the characters in TV games, not understanding how they were supposed to work. You just digged up some memories, man.
holy shit i completely forgot about it but i was doing the same thing
I've never really looked into the early electro-mechanical arcades. But after this video I think a trip down the rabbit hole is in order!
funhouse is such a great pinball
Wow the nostalgia is strong in this one - we had Hugo in Ireland here as well on the Irish language channel. The character's name was translated from Hugo to Hiudaí for full effect. Strangely I had no idea it was a game that went beyond Ireland which has blown my mind.
Superb documentation of these machines which caused me to shed a tear or two...thanks for this !
I didn't bother to skip the sponsor spot this time. it was actually nice to watch.
My dear nostalgia nerd, do you not have a retro arcade in Britain or wherever you live?? I live in the backwater american state of Arkansas and in Little Rock there's this arcade, called Vortex Retro Arcade, and it has hundreds of old arcade machines like this, hundreds of pinball machines (my favorite), and a wall of old nintendo games you can take down and play on their consoles then and there.
I experienced it for the first time last month and it was breathtaking. The noise, the lights, the thrill. I will definitely be going back.
This made me remember the games I played as a child. Although I did play pong and a few atari games. Most the games I played were on an old apple //e computer. There was spy hunter, road runner, conan, Mario bros (Not to be confused with the nes super mario) and a lot more games. Thanks for bringing me down memory lane.
BTW - you can have more than one infection at a time, so just b/c you tested positive for COVID, don't mean you didn't also have some other virus ;)
Hope you back to full health, keep up the great work.
Love those mechanical arcade games. I can remember them in the 80s, but back then, I thought they were so "uncool", and were relegated to the back of the arcade. But now, they just seem so much more tactile
I could swear that one arcade in my town had that Night Rider game. This was around the time that all the new-fangled vector graphics machines were coming in.
19:55 Shazamed the soundtrack/song used for the Gamescom Montage:
*ELFL - Purple Voyager*
That's some smooth retrowave/synthwave 👍
Hey, nice to see a new video!
Today is good a good day for another reason: I found a set of Microsoft windows for Workgroup setup 3.5" Discs in a trash heap on the sidewalk ! (also a label printer ) :)
I'm just a bit too young to have seen those mechanical arcade machines in the wild but I find them absolutely fascinating. I wish they held on for another 10 years or so so we could have had games with the best of mechanical and digital.
Playing Hugo on a phone was more of a highlight than I imagined, smol childhood dream right there 😅
Also I won all games we played together, and any footage showing otherwise is fake 👀
I remember playing a car one on Hastings pier, must have been about 1976, the size and shape of a pinball machine. (at the back of the pier they had a half penny arcade, it also had the basketball)
If my memory serves me correctly, the car was on a wire going left to right.
The road was a cloth roll,when you put your money in, first thing it did was rewind the roll to the beginning.
Had a steering wheel and gear lever.
There were clear bits in the cloth road where lights would show through. For example, there would be say 5 lights underneath at a crossing, and each would light up in turn giving the illusion of someone crossing the road (as the clear bits were person shaped)
You had to stop at crossings, lights etc. As a 12 year old kid, that was my favourite machine in the pier.
I was at an arcade hall on Ameland twice, it's a Dutch island. That hall had the weirdest machines. Skiing / snowboarding and several for racing games had various driver cabins that would move or tremble. As a small kid those machines were difficult to use, no power-steering and they're primed for ages 14 and up. I was 10/12yo and weak.
I had more amusement from air hockey or filling my belly with food, but I do recall racing once or twice and was terrible at it, also didn't have a fat stack of coins to practice with after fattening up myself. Would be fun to go to one and finally try out some of those outlandish machines.
14:52 About that time, as a ten-year-old, on a vacation trip, I played some even older electro-mechanical game. One of them was a car racing games, where the competitors were mounted on cloth belts, and your car was on an arm connected to an overhead mechanism. If you crashed the car would rise into the air and flip over and over in slow motion.
You probably mean the "Bally Road Runner" :)
@@Alfisonson Yeah, I think that was it. I played at night and the dim lighting made the illusion work so well that I didn't realize that it was a reflection.
Played a lot of these games as a kid in the 70s. Attack brings back a lot of memories, loved that game.
Yes, the electromechanical games and pinball machines are very impressive. Thanks for bringing these to a wider audience. Did see the odd one of these still kicking around in pinball parlours as a lad in the 80's.
Seeing the more recent (ish!) Funhouse and The Getaway (which was brand-new, then!) pinball machines brought back fond memories of mis-spent lunchtimes as a first year student with mates down the pub of a friday lunch.
One of the pubs had Funhouse with fairly low replay scores. In a short time our crew were all pretty good at that machine and we were disappointed if each of us didn't make replay on first play.
Before long, the publican put us on a play-time-limit, because the continual noise of the machine was a bit too much for the regular punters, rofl!
From that era, my absolute favourite pinball machine was "The Twilight Zone"
I remember the first arcade games I saw, back in the 70s; Wild Gunman was a Western themed quickdraw game, which was on exhibition at the Science museum as it was so new. The other was Starship 1, which had an Easter egg which was only relatively recently discovered
Four player Bomberman in the mid eighties would definitely have blown people away.
I remember quite a few of the mechanical games still being around when Space Invaders hit the arcades in Scarborough. My faves were the racing game that was literally a Scalextric car on a peg above a revolving drum with the road painted on it, a sub game where you had this little 2 man sub on the end of a long thin pole that revolved around the center, you moved up and dpwn to avoid suspended sea mines all in a giant glass cabinet and then the full size motorbike that was held on 2 metal rollers, with a cage around the whole thing, you steered it left and right trying to follow a red light that moved back and forth. Happy days!
2:00 - I was thinking of this motorbike game from my childhood only the other day. There was an even earlier version with a polished metal bike and a projected road pattern.
A very enjoyable video. I remember playing the old pinball machines in a cafe close to my parent’s house in Coventry. It was in the late 1960s when I first went there, so have no idea how old the machines actually were. I also remember the basketball game, probably from a seaside arcade.
As for the coffee concentrate, it reminded me of the Coffee-Chicory liquid that I saw in my grandparents house in the ‘50s.
0:47 Life does, indeed, come at you fast
14:50
Thank you for visiting us at gamescom. Greetings from the Retro Nerds Münsterland e.V. :)
Thank you for Visiting us and Hugo! It was a blast to finally meet you in person. We also have more informations now on the Original Hugo Hardware and where we can find a living machine!! I will send you a email soon :)
I was on gamescom too, was hoping to walk into you (sadly not the case), the retro hall was so relaxing, you had that confi feeling there, just sit down with ur friend and play some games and consoles you haven't played on before(didn't even knew existed), there where also mini retro events like quizshows, gamescom did good for us retro fans.
WOAH that Sure Instinct game is basically Rock-'n'-Roll for the Atari ST!!!! I haven't seen a game like that in decades, that's AWESOME!
Love the electro-mechanical games the most! As a kid, they were like playing with a really expensive and cool toy for a limited time. They are mechanical marvels, though known to be very high-maintenance. Thanks for taking us along. Hope you're feeling better.
@ 12:54 High Speed, and High Speed II/ Getaway, were probably my favorite Pinball machines. I used to skip 7th hour of Junior High, go 3 blocks to the arcade, and play them.
Thanks, great trip and video! BTW, @3:54, all your booze bottles look empty, lol. As a kid, I grew up in Greenwich Village NYC and they had a large antique game dealership (lots of rich people in NYC) and I would creep in like a feral cat and they would let me play the machines close to the doorway. With 1930s or so pinball games you could shoot multiple balls into the machine at one time and I pounded that machine's flippers shooting a dozen pin balls into each other, they finally told me to take off afraid I was going to break the glass cover, lol. Another favorite old memory was the video arcade in Penn Station NY, beside having old EM arcade games, they had working Nickelodeons and they took only 1 cent! When I was out of quarters I stretched it out cranking away at old silent shorts, lol. mid to late 1970s time. Not that I play pinball anymore but my favorite machine I really got into was Williams machine model called "Comet"!
Omg, I have a vague memory of playing a few electro mechanical games as a kid. Thank you for the nostalgia of games I had forgotten about until today 😄
My family spent Summers at Topsail Island, North Carolina and Morehead City, North Carolina. We had a house on Topsail Island. 1967 to 1975. It was VERY strange - all those electromechanical games like Sega's Periscope. I had JUST grown accustomed to seeing them there and being robbed by them - and then they were gone. I had more fun flounder gigging and collecting scallops and running my crab traps. I would feed the entire family EASILY. My mother was amazed. She bought me an ice cream for it all. She would hand me quarters for those robber machines. I remember her opinion of them: "Those pinball machines are worse than the carnival booth criminal! TRASH, I tell ya!" I told her "I thought that's what quarters are FOR, mom!"
This is what people need to recreate these electro mechanical macines, not those boring mini arcade machines with mame on em, proper moving parts in perspex boxes as a talking point, they look so neet, everyone likes skeleton watches and they are similar imo
When I was a kid there was a arcade at a beach my family went to every summer that had nothing but mechanical arcade games. It was awasome. (They did have the latest pinball machines this was 1992-94) then the guy who owned it passed and his kids shut it down.
I actually played some of these games as a kid. Specifically, the motorcycle game and Periscope. My local arcade also had electromechanical bowling and baseball. And I either played that racing game, or something very similar, but what I played actually had a steering wheel. I also remember the television call-in games. The one where I lived was called TV POW. It was basically a ship flying through space, and you were supposed to shout "POW" whenever an enemy entered your crosshairs. Great memories👍
those machines were incredible to watch up close
Electromechanical arcade games didn't quite die yet. Some were released in the 80s as well as the 90s. "Golly! Ghost" was a lightgun shooter that used a house room model diorama buried in the cabinet and looking up towards a mirror. Various doors or things like a chest or a toilet seat were opened and closed by servos. These were synced with the video overlay of cartoon ghosts that would come out or go into these and you had to hit them with your blaster.. There were also lighting effects overlaid to give the rooms more ambience. The diorama itself had lights to illuminate it and when the game switched to something it needed the full screen for (post-round scoring, intro/outro, etc.) it would turn off the lights to the diorama and so you only saw what looked like a traditional video game screen. It was a VERY impressive effect, combining electromechanicals and video overlays. I wish it had been a bigger hit and other games using the same style developed.
I love the electromechanical cabinets, and being able to see inside of them is a great! Fascinating!
I remember coming across some electromechanical games on vacation once and marveling at how they used mechanics and mirrors to create an actual playable game.
"offering continuous action - just like I gave your mum", outstanding stuff...... retro gags, not enough of that any more 🙂
That one came unexpected.
13:30 made me chuckle. Thanks
Never got to see electro-mechanical games in my youth (and I'm an 80's kid). Pinball was still around but that was about it and even that was on its way out in favor of electronic arcade games.
Growing up in the 70s I remember a lot of the electro-mechanical arcade games, although none seen here. From my recollection, the ones that stood out most were war games that had a first person view. I specifically remember a submarine game where you looked through a periscope and launched torpedoes at warships at various distances as they passed by. Another put you in the place of a bombardier where you had to quickly drop bombs on various military facilities and weapons as you flew above. These were really great games but by my teens, in the early 1980s, virtually all them had been replaced by the more well known digital arcade games such as Pacman, Centipede, Tempest, Missile Command, BattleZone, etc.
"I'm done with youtube"
Proceeds to post more videos
I'm glad you kept going 😁👍
13:10 Nice transition.
Best coffee sponsorship ever - fill a jar with ice cubes and 90% milk, pour some 'stuff' into it and apparrently it tastes like coffee. Must buy
I used to play Monaco GP in the full sit down cabinet at Butlins in Skeggy, back in the early 90s. Loved that game
Fantastic stuff. Those electromechanical machine are fantastic. I love that Attack II. Retro for life!
Brought back some childhood memories. I had one of those little basketball games when i was little. Havnt thought about it in years.. i seen that and i was insantly back playing a game with my grandpa
I remember those mechanical arcade machines , the motorcycle type was everywhere and you could even get portable cheap tacky versions from toystores.
Cedar Point, located in Sandusky, Ohio in the US had a huge basement arcade of all of the really old school electromechanical games. I really hope it's still there, it was just amazing
19:09 Definitely really cool. It looks just like it's a top down 2D game. Like if there was another tank in there, you'd be playing Combat only with more detailed artwork than the 2600 could display.
I remember as a child playing Periscope and also Shark Hunter, those were fun games tucked away in dark corners :)
Yes thank you for visiting Team Retr-o-Mat ! Despite that Harold got stolen this gamescom was long overdue to be great again!
That talking android at the end was so realistic! Even craved food!!!
We had a sit down fully enclosed Monaco GP sit down cabinet in my arcade. It had big speakers !
I played Getaway so much! Great machine.
Mark Rober and Peter Leigh both covering arcade games? My lucky night!
Not going to lie, the biggest nostalgia hit I got from this was seeing Andy Crane. All the other stuff's pretty interesting, though!
I'm so sorry you're unwell, and I hope you are well soon.
I love electromechanical games! Thanks for sharing this with us!!!
I love the look of those 4:3 Hannspree monitors!
Funhouse is the best pinball machine ever made IMO
I was a kid in the 70s and I liked pinball, but even more video games when they came about in the 80s. Sadly I don't remember seeing any of these electro-mechanical games, I would have loved them!
8:00 That Hugo showcase brought me back some memories... Hugo was also huge in Argentina, as we had our national version broadcasted in a national children television channel. I remember wanting to participate in the game because I thought I could beat them all because the game seemed piss easy.
Sadly I didn't have the opportunity because the TV channel owner company went broke and the programme was cancelled.
You would love it at Portland Retro Gaming Expo then.
The whole gaming convention is around everything retro gaming.
And a big section is dedicated to old upright arcade machines and pinball machines.
And a ton of booths to buy lots of games and gaming merch. ;)
And sweet nice to see pinball machines there.
And I always love it when I see a pinball machine that I have in my own collection and that being The Getaway - High-Speed II.
If you have any questions about pinball I have everything from a flipperless 1935 pinball machine to my 1992 pinball machine.
I am a pinball nut I have many in my collection and I also enjoy getting them back up and running.
That mom joke came out of nowhwere and hit me right in the feels. 💔
The PONG Table was awesome Modern Retro
Fantastic to see these amazing electromechanical items. Great memories. Thank you
That was perhaps one of the more compelling ad reads I've ever heard. One, super well put together but also, yeah, I love coffee and would love a good decaf option but sadly decaf is usually the flavor. You get a rich blend, or you get decaf. Might just give it a go.
As a 56 year old these take me back to when I was a little kid
4:48 my god. That was so pro I thought I was watching a serious 90's BBC news/documentary broadcast.
The whole bean decaf coffee that HEB sells, cold brews wonderfully. It just doesn't have all the caffeine my normal batches do. Then again maybe I'm better at preparing coffee than most. Cold brew is stupid easy to make. Get some whole bean coffee in flavor you like, bring it home, grind about 6 oz for half gallon (coarse grind, 12 cups), let it sit in your fridge for a day. Pull the metal filter out and empty the filter (don't forget to rinse the filter). I use N2 chargers, so I drink nitro cold brew coffee. It's about half coffee, the rest is a tiny amount of pure stevia extract, ice and half a table spoon of heavy whipping cream. Pretty simple and I get to control the quality of the coffee used, not taking some company's word that they are using good coffee.
Hugo! That's brought back memories I'd almost totally forgotten!
Wow, I remember watching Hugo in Colombia. They had a show they'd present on tv about Hugo. So, the idea was that you could call the show and have a chance to play. Out of the contestants that play they would then choose the highest score I believe. I think the show was from Argentina.
The show was more exciting than any current e-sports : P
When I think retro section I forget about the Amiga and Commodore related stuff. The Nintendo, Sega and Sony consoles stick in my memory far more than anything Amiga and commodore ever made.
Love pinball and those mechanical games. Played that Sega Attack tank game as a kid on holiday. Also remember a helicopter game where you controlled a helicopter going round trying to hit lights on various buildings. Would love to play them again.
For some reason just reading the title my brain was expecting literally ancient arcade machines, like some obscure recently discovered arcade game found in some ancient Egyptian ruin or something made out of mud and reeds or something.
Still, these were also very interesting! I also remember the Hugo TV game and remember being very annoyed by the fact that mom never let me call in and try to get to play. :D
Takes me way back to me and my brother playing games while my dad bowled at Ambassador Lanes in Edgeware. There was a rally game using a film system that had you driving a vintage car as far as possible. Any crashes would slow you down. Progress was shown above the screen on a map using light bulbs. I have seen that basket ball game somewhere in the UK but I don’t know where. Maybe on holidays in Torquay or Babbacombe in the early 70s. Ambassador also had a video game called Styx where you drew lines to capture as much of the screen as possible without getting zapped by the spark.
love how the random Ciri/Witcher cosplayer just hung around the basketball thing for a photo, very in character
Very nice. I see most of these things for the first time. Thank you.