Arcade cabinet | Retro Video Gaming

I got my first arcade cabinet! And it’s a classic! :D Also one of my favorite games ^_^ I have over 20 different Tetris games for various systems, and up until now my favorite has been Tetris BPS for the Famicom, but now I think my ‘new’ Atari Tetris arcade is my favorite! :D I might be biased, because it’s just so big and pretty and my highscores stay on there, but it’s definitely a great Tetris game!

The cabinet is in good condition. The control panel, the top light and the screen is in very good condition! But I will have to do some work on the sides to restore it to it’s former glory, it’s gotten a bit chipped around the edges. Nothing some wood filler and paint can’t fix ^_^ I haven’t moved it into my game room yet, I’m waiting to finish restoring it first.

The game is divided into missions, compared to regular Tetris which is usually just endless. The missions are to clear certain amount of lines, and the stages get harder by adding obstacles (bricks) in your path. You can play two people against each other and race to see who finished the lines first! :D

There’s also three different difficulty settings you can set it to. Easy, medium or hard. I’m slowly taking over all the previous highscores on the machine ^____^ Thankfully I can open the coin holder so I can re-use my quarters ;D

This Tetris cabinet was developed by Atari and released in the arcades back in 1988. This version of Tetris was later ported and released by Tengen for the NES in 1989. That’s one of the few Tetris games I actually don’t have yet :( But now I have the original version of it anyway ;D ……. writing about this here just made me go to eBay and pick myself up a copy of Tengen Tetris for the NES.. so I will have it soon ^___^

There was a lot of controversy around the Tengen version for the NES, after some legal disputes about publishing rights Nintendo won the publishing rights and Tengen had to recall their game from stores and destroy remaining inventory. There’s apparently less than 100,000 copies of the game in existence! I can’t wait to try the Tengen version out as well!

I love all puzzle games, especially Tetris! The objectives of this arcade Tetris game are fun and the music is great! It’s also very special to play on an arcade cabinet instead of through a console.. I think I might be hooked… already scouting for an SNK cab for my Neo Geo MVS games ;D

I will take some more pictures of my Atari Tetris arcade once I’ve fixed it up :)

This weekend I’ve been to Berlin with my friend NinjaBrite, we had a relaxing weekend with a lot of fun. One of the best things we experienced though was the Computerspielemuseum (Video Game Museum). It’s a permanent museum on Karl Marx Allee in central Berlin and it’s got a lot to offer!

They had loads of retro gaming consoles on display in pretty green boxes, all labeled with the name of the system. I photographed mainly all the ones I didn’t own, so I would remember what to look for next ;D There was only one game displayed in these green boxes, which was Atari’s E.T.! But there were lots of other games there that you could play in other areas.

They also had an arcade area with original old arcade cabinets that were free to play!! This was totally exciting for me since I’ve hardly ever gotten to play any arcade machines, except when I was in Japan. The coolest one was of course the original Pong arcade cabinet, and an old spacey green arcade cabinet with some kind of shooter. You only got the try these out on mondays though and we were there on a thursday :( but we got to play a lot of Donkey Kong, Space Invaders II, Frogger, Gauntlet, Asteroids and others ^^

There were a lot of cool things to see, read about and experience. For example they had 4 computers playing Ludo against eachother, a 5 player pong you could try out, a computer you could ask anything and another computer which was impossible to beat!

Immediately at the entrance there were life sized statues of famous characters such as Link from Zelda, Rayman, Jak & Daxter and Lara Croft ^_^

They also had a GIANT Atari Joystick! It was even working and hooked up to an Atari 2600 Junior and you could play Pacman with it ^_^ I of course had to try it out! It was difficult but worked well!

Another cool game we tried out was Rom Check Fail! This was a recently made game (don’t remember by who..) that was basically a bunch of old classic games merged together in one big glitch! Really hard but really fun to play ^^ One second you’re playing as Pacman in Mario world, the next your the Asteroids ship flying around in Hyrule haha ^_^