King of Kong

Erika and I were up in Meredith, NH the other day meeting with our wedding band leader.

Anyways, we got up there a bit early, so I made her take me to Funspot, which was just down the street.  If you’ve watched the King of Kong – the documentary about the guys who are battling to set the all-time Donkey Kong high score – this is where the official tournament was held.

In the upstairs portion, they have an amazing collection of old arcade games. They call it the American Classic Arcade Museum. The cool part is that all these old arcade games are actually working. They must have some guy working full time to maintain these machines – I can’t imagine that you can get most of the parts anywhere anymore.  Anyways, I made Erika take some pictures of me playing some games that have personal meaning for me.

The first game I played was Asteroids. It’s actually the first time I’ve played it – it was a bit before my time.  It’s actually pretty fun (and really challenging).  When you moved the spaceship, you could see a white streak like you used to be able to see in old tube TVs when you shut them off.

Kickman was a game that me and friends found when we were screwing around with an old Commodore 64 system.  The premise of the game is that you’re on a unicycle, and you have to keep kicking these balloons up in the air.  I don’t know where the ideas for some of these games came from.  The one thing about the 80′s was that you had to be way more creative when you made games – or people were just doing a ton of drugs.

I used to play Burgertime with my cousin on Nintendo. It’s a Loadrunnerish game where you’re a chef trying to construct burgers by running around on top of the burger ingredients. Meanwhile you’re getting chased by hotdogs but you can kill them by pouring salt or pepper on them.

I was pretty excited to see this game. My sister and I used to have epic 2-player Mario Bros head to head matches on the Apple IIe.  Most people probably remember this as the game you play in Super Mario Bros 3 when you challenge your friend who’s trying to step over you on the map to a duel, but I remember the green screen version…

The name says it all on this one.  What I didn’t realize is that they made a “Pong II” which basically meant you could play with four players. Rad.

I never actually got into Donkey Kong. I had it for the Apple IIe, but frankly, I preferred Hard Hat Mack. Ok, one more…

So apparently they made an arcade version of Punch-Out. Now, one of my greatest triumphs in college was when I beat Mike Tyson four days into Freshman year (during orientation week, naturally).  I consider myself pretty damn good at this game. But I almost got knocked out by Glass Joe because the gameplay is completely different in the arcade version. Not to mention in the arcade version there’s a crackhead announcer who’s screaming your every move – I was rattled.  Ultimately, I made it to Bald Bull, but he destroyed me because he threw out like 3 consecutive bull charges and I had no idea how to time it.

Overall, if you like video games and you were born before 1984, I would definitely recommend hitting up Funspot at some point in your life.