Tony's Arcade

The Chicago Coin Rodeo Shooting Gallery is finally finished!

This has probably been the most time consuming game I’ve worked on and yet the easiest. Rodeo was my first electro-mechanical (EM) game that I restored and was a lot of fun. Don’t get me wrong — the restoration process had the requisite headaches that come with restoring any classic arcade game. Compared to solid state games, repairing an EM game was like looking at giant logic chips that you could see working. Watching the score reels reset to zero was like watching electrons moving along at five volts, except at 110 volts with solenoids ker-chunking circuits through different states! I’ve been told that most arcade hobbyists like restoring EM games because all the workings are “there”. I know what they mean — you can see what is stuck, what is dirty, and what is gummed up. No logic probe or oscilloscope needed — it’s great.

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1972. Back when 15 cents got you one credit and a quarter got you two! Ever since I got Future Spa up and running and hooked on pinballs, I began to get the itch for EM — electro-mechanical games. Before games that were completely solid state burst on the scene around 1976, arcade games were mostly if not all electro-mechanical. Instead of bit shifters and adders, the brains of a game were coils, steppers, and bakelite contact boards. It’s amazing to think (nowadays, anyway) that a whole game could operate on different states of machinery.

I decided to be on the lookout for an EM rifle game. I remember playing those as a kid and (since I was 5 years old) not knowing what I was doing. Two Guys department store in New London had Haunted House, which I would have my dad help me play. That was an eerie game, with an 8-track player for sound effects!

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