The 50 Greatest Arcade Cabinets
Of All Time
As listed by i-mockery.com
#25: Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)
Personally, I don't care to do a lot of jumping and stomping while I'm playing my games. When I do some of that, though, it's usually because I just realized I haven't saved my game in almost two hours. Regardless, DDR took a very unique approach to the game of Simon. Each DDR unit consists of an upright cabinet with two huge speakers, and two dance stages, each with four pressure pads set up in a cross formation. You'd think these things would be in constant need of repairs, what with all manner of players stomping on them in the course of a normal day, but the dance stages were remarkably sturdy. Heck, the machines are even being incorporated into the physical fitness programs at a few schools around the world. Now you too can impress your classmates with your ability to match the rhythm of a whole assortment of J-pop songs!
#24: Guitar Freaks
These days, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who's never heard of Guitar Hero. For that very reason, it's worth acknowledging its arcade predecessor on this list. The cabinet had two guitar controllers with it, each with a fret bar and three colored buttons on the neck, which presumably makes it easier than Guitar Hero, with its five colored buttons. The cabinet could also be linked with the arcade game, Drummania, which is the same sort of game but with drums. Even better, those two systems could then be linked with the game Keyboardmania. What this means is that not only do you have the progenitor to the Guitar Hero games; you've also got the earliest version of the game Rock Band!
#23: Panic Park
Pushing and shoving... it's what friendship is all about. Well, some brilliant people at Namco figured out a way to make it into a video game. Panic Park consists of a series of mini-games in which you must take your controller and try to physically push your opponent out of the way at just the right time. Keep in mind, your opponent is trying to do the exact same thing to you, so the end result is a big shoving match and a lot of laughs. And no, there's nothing wrong with kicking your opponent in the shins to give yourself that extra "edge" needed to win the round! Come on, you know you've always wanted to shove your friend into a raging fire... Panic Park actually gives you that chance! If you've got big hands though, watch out, because you can really smash your knuckles when ramming those two controllers together if you're not careful. Then again, what do a few bloody knuckles matter in the grand scheme of things if you win the war?
#22: Arm Champs & Arm Champs II
Here's another game for those of you who like to show off your machismo at the arcade. Arm Champs had no joysticks or buttons to mash, you simply grabbed onto the arm which protruded from the machine and tried to pin it down. For added amusement, they included a monitor which features the head of your opponent so you could see 'em struggle when you were winning or see 'em laugh at your weak ass when you lost. While Arm Champs II had a wider distribution and a few more characters to arm wrestle, I prefer the cabinet of the original simply because it had a molded, muscular upper torso and the monitor blended in with it much better. The original one also had lights on top of it which flashed at the end of each match, which could be extra embarrassing for you if you lost. Oh and if you're wondering why Arm Champs II had a robotic arm, it's because the final opponent in the game was an android named "Specks" who looked kinda like Robocop.
#21: Caveman
You're probably asking yourself, "Why the hell is there a pinball machine on this list? That's not the same as an arcade game!" Well before your head explodes with bewilderment, take a closer look at the machine. Notice anything different? That's right, Caveman was the first Pinball machine to have an arcade game built directly into it. After you hit some of the proper targets with your pinball, it would place the ball in a holding location while it switched to the video game mode. You would then grab a hold of the joystick and try to guide your caveman to hunt down some food, but if the T-Rex ate you during your game time you'd lose a ball. While the idea of creating a pinball/arcade hybrid game was unique, it unfortunately never really caught on and only a few more games of this nature were ever created.
#20: Death Race
I had always believed Carmageddon to be the father of vehicular homicide-themed racing, but that was before I found Death Race. Though the art on the cabinet itself gives the impression that this is just a friendly race between two grim reapers, but in truth, the goal is to run down as many pedestrians as possible. And if you had a friend, you could compete to see who could run over the most people in a limited amount of time! It all sounds quite grand, until you consider that the 70's era screen could only render black and white stick figures. Plus, the bezel itself was at least as big as the screen that actually showed the game you were playing. Still, it was quite upsetting to people back then, though that may be due to the fact that the game became linked to the hilariously bad Sylvester Stallone/David Carradine vehicle (no pun intended), Death Race 2000. Perhaps they could've sold a few more of these cabinets if those two had appeared on the side of the cabinet. Then again, Death Race was banned due to its violent (stick figure) content, so it's unlikely they would've sold many either way.
#19: Star Trek
This game came in the standard, garden variety, mom-and-pop upright cabinet, but for my money, you'll be much better off if you experience it through the "captain's chair" model. Granted, the captain shouldn't have to push his own "photon", "warp" and "thrust" buttons to get things done, but this is at least a step in the right direction. A "Strategic Operations Simulator" must be designed to prepare you as a captain to take over in case your button-pushers are burned by hortas. You even got Scotty and Mr. Spock to introduce you to the game and call you "the captain". I guess they were willing to take anyone over Shatner.
#18: T-Mek
Competition. It'll spice up even the most mundane trip to the arcade. I brought my younger brother along with my whenever I went in part because he brought his own quarters, but also because I could persuade him to try just about any game with my as long as it had some sort of gimmick. In the case of T-Mek, it was the chairs with the speakers built into the headrests, and the two joysticks you'd push and pull in various combinations to get your T-Mek in gear, use your special weapons, etc. Sure, other games would come along where you used two joysticks to pilot a tank, or a giant robot, or something (but usually one of those two), but they didn't have the tank/robot that you piloted painted on the sides of the cabinet like a bitchin' van mural! Plus, there was a light above each player's chair that let everyone standing nearby know that someone was handing out an ass-kicking.
#17: F-114
This cabinet was easily one of the largest ever made. The player would sit in a swiveling chair and steer with the aid of a joystick mounted on the right side of the chair (sorry all you southpaws). All the action was displayed on a large curved projection screen, and all the sound effects came from, believe it or not, an 8-track player within the cabinet. I'm not overly familiar with 8-track players, as they were created and phased out before I was even born, but apparently someone knew of a way to wire one into the cabinet of an arcade game. There was also an area just below the screen made to look like the console of an aircraft, albeit with light-up hit counters that I doubt are included in real military aircraft. Or maybe I just need to watch Iron Eagle again. While I'm at it, you think the soundtrack is available on 8-track?
#16: Sonic Blast Man
We've all played those games where you test your punching strength by hitting a target and it tells you how many pounds of pressure you contacted with. Well, the Sonic Blast Man game took it a step further by actually making a real video game out of it instead of just a way for you to show people you could hit hard as Ivan Drago. In Sonic Blast Man, you play the role of a superhero who has to fight crime and basically save the planet. So you strap on the pair of boxing gloves, punch the target as hard as you can and then see if you did enough damage to the enemy on the screen. Enemies included a purse snatcher, a runaway semi-truck, a skyscraper, a giant mutated crab, and a meteor headed for earth. While the moon was the hardest, I always thought the giant mutated crab was a really random thing to throw in there. The game always drew lots of crowds and laughs as some people would get a running start before throwing their punches. I actually saw a guy practically miss the entire target once and man oh man did he ever feel like an ass! The one drawback of this game was that, even with all of the padding on the cabinet, it was out of order all too often. I guess you just can't make an electronic machine that people are supposed to wail on and not expect it to malfunction at some point. Even better, because some people are complete idiots when it comes to throwing punches, "Taito lost a class action suit for $50,000 to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) because of injuries sustained by players of Sonic Blast Man. The CPSC alleges that between 1991 and 1994, Taito failed to report about 70 cases in which young players fractured or injured wrists and arms as a result of hitting Sonic Blast Man's punching pad." And these people had the nerve to put on those boxing gloves and call themselves superheroes. Pfft.
#15: 720o
Long before Tony Hawk realized how much cash there was in the virtual skating market, the king of the skating games was 720 (that's two 360's for our less mathematically-inclined readers). You controlled a skater with a joystick and two buttons for performing tricks (and dodging killer bees). Here's the catch: normal joysticks work when you tilt them away from the center in the direction you want your player to move. The joystick for 720, however, could only be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise. To the casual observer, it looked like the joystick was broken since it was fixed tilted as far from the center as it could be. Not so, gentle readers. The funky-shaped cabinet also included a couple speakers at the top to give you real stereo sound and the look of a boombox! That meant you could enjoy all the best video game skateboard music the 1980s had to offer, so long as the arcade was willing to supply all the proper cable hookups. At the very least, you could enjoy the sounds of a digitized "Skate or DIE!" voice in full stereo sound.
#14: X-Men
I remember walking into a small arcade and seeing this X-Men machine for the first time. I was absolutely floored by it. At the time (around 1992), it was easily the biggest multiplayer arcade machine I had ever seen in person. This beast was covered in bright X-Men character graphics and had two monitors connected together which gave you a 50" wide viewing screen. It had 3 coin slots on the left side and 3 coin slots on the right side. And if you were fortunate enough to get in on a 6-player co-op game and play it all the way 'til the end, it would probably end up being one of the greatest arcade gaming experiences of your life. Partially because it could get pretty crowded with 6-people standing around the machine at once and you'd often end up getting in some major shoving matches. But hey, that only added to the excitement of playing the game. A big colorful machine that took up more space than any other arcade game at the time... is it really any surprise that this massive arcade cabinet made it on the top 50 list?
#13: Star Wars
There are a lot of movie tie-in video games that people avoid the plague, and rightfully so, but the original Star Wars arcade game was not one of them. While there was a stand-up version of this game, the truly nice one was the sit-down cockpit environmental one. Combined with the nice artwork, a cockpit reminiscent of the inside of an X-Wing, the lighting, the music and sound effects directly from the movie, this game really made you feel like you were Luke Skywalker flying towards the Death Star in your trusty X-Wing. The only thing the game was missing was an R2-D2 unit on top and an X-Wing pilot helmet for you to wear while playing.
#12: Shark Jaws
While this cabinet looks fine 'n all as far as classic games go, what's truly great about it is how they avoided being sued by the filmmakers of "Jaws". If you look closely, to the top left of the word "Jaws" is the word "Shark" written in tiny letters. What this accomplished is the average kid back in 1975 would walk by the arcade game and only really see the word "Jaws" and think it was some official game based on the hit movie. Smart move! The added screaming sound effects whenever the shark ate a diver didn't hurt either.
#11: Ms. Pac-Man
If there was ever another standard arcade cabinet that stood out more than Ms. Pac-Man, I honestly don't remember it. In a sea of standard cabinets that were almost always black with some artwork on the side, Ms. Pac-Man defied our comfortable corneas with a bright blue, pink and yellow cabinet that just screamed "Hey you! Yeah YOU! Get over here and play me!" to anybody that crossed its path. This thing was so bright that it almost appeared to be neon. And hey, there's no denying that Ms. Pac-Man is far sexier than Pac-Man could ever dream of being... even the ghosts are in love with her for chrissakes! This game didn't just look good, it also made guys comfortable enough in their manliness to be able to play a game that had pink all over the cabinet. Viva la Pac!
#10: Time Traveler
In the early nineties, the lead designers at a lot of game companies got the idea into their heads that the future of video game graphics was Full Motion Video (FMV). Essentially, rather than hire artists and programmers to create characters and settings for your games, you could just hire actors, shoot them doing scenes as you would for TV/movies, compress those video files into ugly little bits of footage, and then string them together with a little interaction from the player to make what is generously called a "game". Sega, however, decided to take all this a step further. Anyone could make a plain, old, two-dimensional FMV game. Instead, they decided to take a step into the field of holograms. Kind of. In reality, the game just used mirrors to make two-dimensional projections appear to be on different plains, thus creating a "3-D" effect. Pretty weenie, Sega. And you didn't even bother to make a decent game to go along with this "innovation." For shame.
#9: After Burner
With the popularity of movies like "Top Gun" and "Iron Eagle" at the time, it's no surprise that people wanted a chance to get in on some of their own realistic dogfighting action. After Burner allowed you to do just that with this cockpit-style arcade machine which rotated in 4 different ways depending on how you were flying your jet. John Connor even played this arcade game in the movie "Terminator 2"; perhaps as a testament to his skills as a future leader of the resistance.
#8: Sinistar
Sinistar was well-known mostly for its steep difficulty creepy voiceovers. However, almost completely overlooked is the stuff on the outside. The most basic Sinistar machine was just a plain old upright machine, but if your local arcade was willing to spring for the high-end model, you were in for a real treat. The entire cabinet was made up to look like a spaceship. If you ask me, though, the thing looked more like a solid black semi truck cabin with a muffler on the driver and passenger side windows. You'd think that if they were going to make the cabinet look like a spaceship, they would make it look at least a little like the spaceship in the game, a wimpy triangular ship. Hey, but what do I know? Maybe you felt better about being pursued by a shrieking monster if you thought you were in a hulking, boxy starship. Could this be the true origin of the SUV?
#7: Pong
Many people believe Pong to be the first arcade game ever created, but that honor belongs to Computer Space which was released a year earlier in 1971. Still, Pong was the first successful arcade game that had a really wide distribution and was eventually released n a home console version as well. In addition to being a simple game that anybody could pick up in an instant, Pong came in a much more basic (and lighter) cabinet than Computer Space, so that might help partially explain why it was successful. You didn't need a forklift to move the thing. Granted, it didn't look nearly as futuristic or flashy as Computer Space, what with the wood paneling 'n all, but this game is what really brought arcade games into the mainstream and we owe a lot to it for that reason. When you think about it, a game as simple as Pong probably should have a cabinet that matches it in terms of simplicity. Well, you can't get much simpler than a cabinet covered in wood paneling.
#6: Baby Pac-Man
Not to be confused with Pac-Man Jr., Baby Pac-Man was a whole new spin on the Pac-Man series combining both video game and pinball gameplay into one machine. While the Caveman pinball/video game hybrid came out earlier, Baby Pac-Man was the first to combine the two into a standard upright arcade machine rather than a bulky pinball machine. The way the game worked is you started out in a standard Pac-Man maze, but the ghosts in this game were far more intelligent than in any other Pac-Man game, so you often wanted to make a run for the escape tunnels. Once you made it into an escape tunnel, the pinball game down below would launch and that's where you could score yourself some much needed power pellets. While the game itself only enjoyed moderate success (primarily because it was extremely hard), it sure looked damned nice with 100% completely unique layout.
#5: Fire Truck
Now here's an old game from 1978 that took two-player cooperative gaming to a whole new level. Player one got to control the cab of the fire truck, while player two stood behind and drove the trailer. It was just like driving a real fire truck! Ok not really, but the idea was still good. The object of the game was to drive to your destination as quickly as possible while avoiding hazards in the streets. What's funny about the cabinet is that the steering wheels and the gas pedal were the only things that had any effect on the actual gameplay. The additional buttons you see would simply make bell and horn sound effects. Player two also had the option of smacking player one on the head from behind and annoying the living hell out of him, thus Fire Truck never became a big hit. If you ask me though, this game is begging to be remade for modern arcades complete with fully-functional fire hoses.
#4: Tank 8
Tank 8 was the follow-up to Atari's hit "Tank" game and it was about as unique as arcade gaming experiences got at the time it was released in 1976. An unheard of 8-person multiplayer game in which you have 8 different colored tanks to control. It also featured two modes of play; you could play on a team, or you could play as a lone tank hell bent on destroying every other tank in your path. As you can see, the layout of this machine was really different - a cube with 2 sets of controllers on each side and a 25" color screen in the center. Each controller set consisted of two joysticks for you to maneuver your tank with in the same way that you'd drive a real tank (ie: pushing one joystick forward while pulling the other one back to make a sharp right turn). I call dibs on the green tank!
#3: Computer Space
This one should come as no surprise to any video game history buff. "Computer Space" was the first commercially available arcade game ever, released back in 1971. With its molded retro sci-fi look, this fiberglass cabinet is an absolute gem in the minds of collectors whether it's the original 1-player or the 2-player version. While the game itself was never a big hit, people are always excited by the chance to see one of these rare machines in person. And a true testament to just how awesome the build of the cabinet is, even though there weren't a ton of these machines produced, they still made their way into popular culture. The "Computer Space" game appeared in the movies "Jaws" and "Soylent Green".
#2: Maneater
Another game created to cash in on the "Jaws" craze, Maneater didn't need to try and trick people with its name like "Shark Jaws" did. Maneater had more than enough visual charm to attract just about anybody at the time. The screen and controls are brilliantly nestled inside the jaws of a big fiberglass shark! You just know this design made some young children too scared to even play the game. Gotta also love how they didn't even consider the fact that some people like resting their arms on arcade cabinet surfaces. They may not be sharp, but I doubt those shark teeth are a comfortable place to rest your arms while playing the game. Unfortunately, these machines are really hard to come by these days so don't count on finding one at your average arcade. They have been on display at some retro gaming exhibits before though, and if there's any arcade game cabinet worth taking a picture of with your head in it, this just might be the one.
#1: Discs Of Tron
This is it. The creme de la creme of all arcade video cabinets. Weighing in at over 730 lbs of pure video gaming joy, the environmental cabinet version of Discs Of Tron was in a class all its own. Unlike other environmental cabinets at the time, Discs Of Tron didn't have you sit inside of it. Instead, you stood up and leaned back in it, just like your disc-chucking character on the screen as you listened to everything in full stereo sound and enjoyed the badass glow of the blacklight enhanced artwork. It's truly one hell of a fun time standing inside one of these bad boys and if you ever have the chance to do so, do not pass it up. What really horrifies both myself and arcade collectors worldwide is how many of these amazing machines were eventually sawed in half. You see, not every arcade could afford to have a machine that weighed so much shipped to them, nor did they all have the space for this behemoth. So, what Bally Midway did with many of the unsold larger environmental versions of the game, was saw it in half and ship only the front part (it wasn't built to split apart even though looking at it would make you think otherwise). As a result, finding a complete version of this game that wasn't sawed in half has become increasingly difficult over the years. Even worse, I've heard tales that many of these machines ended up in landfills, much like the legend of Atari's infamous dumping of countless E.T. cartridges. Another interesting note is that Discs Of Tron was originally supposed to be a fifth game in the original Tron arcade machine (which also had the same stylings as this cabinet, but sadly didn't come in an environmental version). While there's no doubt that the original was great, I think we're all glad that Bally took the time to keep Discs as a separate game of its own. After you've had a chance to look at this cabinet inside and out, you'll quickly realize it wasn't just another cool game... it was a true work of art through and through and I've yet to see another arcade machine that comes anywhere close to it.kly realize it wasn't just another cool game... it was a true work of art through and through and I've yet to see another arcade machine that comes anywhere close to it.
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