Although the video game crash of the mid-80s caused a major decline in arcades from their peak popularity, the industry didn’t completely die off. In fact, there was a revival that lasted until the 90s with plenty of companies like Capcom, Midway, SEGA, and Konami all competing to get quarters, francs, loonies, yen, and other coins from around the world. During this time, Namco — another game company — built a colossal 28-player prototype shooter game. Eventually, they cut it down to a (still titanic) six-player game that was actually released to the world. [PhilWIP] and his associates are currently restoring one of the few remaining room-sized games that are still surviving.
The game is called Galaxian 3, with this particular one having been upgraded to a version called “Attack of the Zolgear”. Even though it’s “only” a six-person shooter, it’s still enormous in scale. The six players sit side-by-side in an enclosed room, each with their own controller. Two projectors handle the display, which is large even by modern standards, and a gauntlet of early-90s technology, including LaserDisc players, is responsible for all of the gameplay. When [PhilWIP] first arrived, the game actually powered on, but there were several problems to solve before it was playable. They also wanted to preserve the game, which meant imaging the LaserDiscs to copy their data onto modern storage. Some of the player input PCBs needed repairs, and there were several issues with the projectors. Eventually the team got the system working well enough to play.
[PhilWIP] and the others haven’t gotten all the issues ironed out yet. The hope is that subsequent trips will restore this 90s novelty to working order shortly. It turns out there were all kinds of unique hardware from this wild-west era that’s in need of restoring, as we saw a few years ago with this early 3D cabinet from the same era.
I’d be interested in knowing a bit more about imaging LaserDiscs to modern storage. Probably a bit more complicated than using “dd”, but I wouldn’t know how to go about performing the work…
https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator/wiki/Overview This is likely how they put the Laserdiscs onto modern storage
They’re analogue I think so the archiving projects use an ADC to capture the RF envelope direct from the read amplifier, Google for Domesday archive project for some good writeups and even the hardware used
Talking about wild-west and 3d cabinets, I thought it was going to be a link to Sega’s Time Traveller.
I had the chance to play Galaxian 3 back in the at the Trocadero in London. What a game. They also had Ridge Racer Full Scale where you sit in a Mazda MX5 to drive. Incredible
I would love to see a come back of the sega derby racers game. I forgot it’s acrual name but it was the one where you can play with 6 or so players and train your horse. They would print off a card that you could take with you to save your horse and breed them to get better horses.
Boring! GameWorks late 90s Sky Pirates and Mr Big or Virtua Fighter! Nothing came close back then. Software and PC hardware for most of those GameWorks only titles still exist at Seattle GameWorks. Sit down strap in move up and down 30ft high shooting them baddies as you go. What could be better? Wait…. oh yeah doing it with ur fav friend, drink, food and 24/7 365! Everything good all at once!
“Although the video game crash of the mid-80s”
What is this ‘video game crash’ you speak of? The ‘United States Atari home console crash’ of the mid-80s perhaps?
Thank you for this comments! It’s weird seeing history you lived through morph into nonsense in real-time. Young people now imagine some enormous industry-wide “crash” that stopped all video games for a decade. Of course all that actually happened is Atari’s sales collapsed because they had no quality control and people played games other ways instead. The “crash” was at most console only, and it only lasted two years until Nintendo came along. Arcades were doing just fine all through that period, as was home computer gaming and pinball. Not to mention other consoles like Intellivision that kept right on going through the “crash”. Revisionist history is really annoying.