Ah, Defender.
My friend Josh Seiden has started a blog just about that old Williams video game. 1981 in the city all over again.
Josh writes:
When Defender came out in 1980, I was 16, and going to high school in Manhattan. Nino's Pizza, on Lexingon at 92 St. had a D in the back. There was also a machine at Optimo on 97th and Madison. But I never got enough.
The mark of a true player; you knew all the machines in your neighborhood. Which were cranked up fast, which had solid sticks, clean buttons. I even knew the machines in other parts of Manhattan. One night after a concert at the old Palladium I played a few hours in the 7-Eleven on East 34th. I walked out around 3:30.
I turned over a bunch of machines when I was good. I learned how to get the 999,975 score by dying as I hit something to score the last points with my last ship. If you did it ten times to a machine before anyone else, you owned that machine because no one else could squeeze a high score up there, just yours. I spent a lot of quarters, time and pinky knuckle skin on that beautiful piece of software.
I bought a PC version from Williams sometime in the ’90s that ran under DOS. That was dangerous. MAME was incredible. MAME was dangerous. I have avoided the temptation to build a console with joystick and everything. A few years back (before the kids were born) I came across a really old beat up game in an arcade at an amusement park and dropped a few quarters. It was like time travel, because all those old reactions came firing back, and just before the first Baiter materialized I had this tingle on the back of my neck and realized it was about to happen. I shredded it, too. What a blast.
I could say a lot about that game, but ultimately it’s what got me into computer science. I wanted to create a game environment that good, that creative and satisfying. I never did, but got sidetracked into software and architecture for business, and…miss the simple pleasures of dropping in a quarter and flying around a planet defending the space folk for a few hours.
Now Robotron, that’s a different thing altogether….what ever happened to that author?
No related posts.
Robotron. Now that wuz my game. perfect for short attention spans and paranoids. I qualified in spades. Surrounded by enemies, capture the smart bomb, nuking all @ once. This being the post-Carter, neutron bomb era. There was an arcade on York Ave in the 70s, near the Sedutto Ice cream shop where Scott Shepard worked that I use to rock hard. One quarter, play for hours. Never had the touch you developed on Defender, Dan. Mostly cuz none of us could get on the damn machine!
Ah, yes, the eternal Bo-tron vs. Defender conflict.
B-t was my game, although I liked Defender a lot (which came out in ’80 , as opposed to B-t in ’82).
I definitely spent a ton of my summer job earnings at the arcade my brother mentions on 1st Av and 77th on both of these, not to mention Star Wars and others. But I never matched Seltzer’s true obsessive twitch factor on Defender, and later, Stargate.
My ultimate B-t game was at an ice cream parlor on Fire Island, summer of ’83.
You can play a shockwave version of Defender and B-t here: http://www.shockwave.com/sw/content/defender
http://www.shockwave.com/sw/content/robotron
and the authentic sound effects cause an almost pavlovian response, twenty years later.