Tony's Arcade

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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Thanks to Bill, a fellow collector and the “Trainmaster”, I was able to bring one of the more interesting games from the Golden Age into Tony’s Arcade. He picked up the game and brought it to his garage in 1998, where it waited to be worked on among Bill’s other numerous arcade projects. Bill was willing to part with such a unique game only because it was going to a good home. Space Encounters is one of those games I don’t remember seeing in the Arcades back in the day. Looking at it in person and seeing how well thought out the game as a whole makes me wonder why. Timothy at the Outerworld Arcade has some thoughts on why he thinks this game wasn’t around in many arcades. One of his ideas is that it was one of the last games to have a black and white raster display and this probably contributed to its lack of popularity. I speculate that in late 1979, Midway probably had a huge inventory of black and white monitors as well as the “L shaped” 8080 motherboard/sound boards. It’s possible company execs asked programmers to “do something with our inventory” since their crowning champion, Space Invaders, had been around for almost 2 years. Enter Space Invaders Deluxe and Space Encounters — both black and white games that used the 8080 boardset. (Space Invaders Deluxe was actually Taito’s Space Invaders II, just converted from color to black and white!)

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