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Ever since seeing King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters I’ve wanted to go visit the American Classic Arcade Museum at FunSpot in Laconia, New Hampshire. The original plan was to spend my birthday weekend up there but getting a broken ankle back in February put a damper on that plan.

After a lengthy project at work I finally put in for some vacation time and was determined to get myself up to FunSpot. It was a little over 5 hours away but after a recent drive to Florida and back that seemed like nothing. As long as I had some good music to listen to it wasn’t going to a long drive. I left around 10:30am and made good time with the help of iPhone’s Maps application. That is until I got about an hour away from Laconia.

That’s when my cell service suddenly disappeared. Given that it’s AT&T I was honestly surprised that it was with me for the majority of the trip. It’s at this point that I got a little lost but realized that I still had G-Map on my phone as well. I’ve complained about G-Map via Twitter before – my first time using it it sent me on the most roundabout route just to get back on the road I was originally on. The one upside it has versus Apple’s Maps application is that all the maps are stored on the phone so as long as you have GPS reception (which I get even when my cell service is dead) you are good to go. It did the same thing again where it wanted me to go down some side street, up another street, back up another street JUST to get back on the road I was already on, so I just ignored it this time and kept going straight. I eventually arrived at FunSpot and decided to check it out before looking for a hotel.

I went on a Tuesday so that place itself was pretty dead. At any point during my gaming there I didn’t see more than 10 people in the upstairs “museum” section of FunSpot. This meant it was pretty quiet and I wouldn’t look too foolish taking pictures of each game before I played it.

Before the trip I debated trying to play every game there at least once but with over 200 games it would’ve required at least 2 days straight playing video games (assuming about 5 minutes for each game, time for eating, bathroom trips) and while that might’ve been fun to document via video and such I don’t know that it would’ve been much fun. Instead I decided to just play the games that caught my eye. The ones that triggered memories just by looking at them. I got $10 worth of tokens and made my way through the arcade.

Marble Madness (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames | Marble Madness Homepage)

There was one game I definitely wanted to play before I left and I made it the first (and last) game I played at FunSpot. I remember playing this every time my family went to Fuddruckers (oh the naughty jokes we made about that name!) on Central Avenue in Yonkers when I was a kid. I’ve always been drawn to this game for some reason, so much so that I eventually created a Marble Madness modification for Unreal Tournament called Marble Mania with the helper of an UnrealScript programmer a few years ago. I think I just loved the idea of an abstract geometric world and at the time I thought the graphics were pretty damn cool. It’s funny how over the years better resolutions and color depths seem like the best things could get.

The machine was in pretty good condition though the left speaker was being flakey and would turn on and off on it’s own, resulting in the music sometimes just blasting away in my face. If you know the music for Marble Madness you know that it can make you a bit tense and anxious while you’re playing, moreso at loud volumes. I only managed to make it to level 4 while playing but did end up knocking all the lower scoring players off the high score list. Still, my 24,000 score was nowhere near the 110,000+ scores of the top 4 spots. By the next day I was debating trying to obtain my own Marble Madness arcade machine so I could practice like some Steve Wiebe wannabe. I still may do it one day…

Dragon’s Lair (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames

Speaking of state of the art graphics, how much better could things get than actual cartoon animation in a video game?! Dragon’s Lair was the first in a line of laserdisc-based video games that, at the time, seemed pretty amazing. In truth it was nothing more that Memory + Choose Your Own Adventure really – an animation was played and you had to either push the joystick in the correct direction or press the buttons at the right moment. Doing so took you further in the storyline. You could lose a lot of quarters trying to memorize all the moves needed to finish the game.

I think my first exposure of this type of game was Cliff Hanger which my brother and I saw as kids at Kiawa Island in South Carolina. They might’ve had a Dragon’s Lair as well – it was a posh resort where hot dogs cost like $5 so they could afford to have two state of the art laserdisc games.

Unfortunately the audio level on this game was very low making it difficult to hear where I was supposed to in a certain direction. I didn’t last very long at all and didn’t feel like dumping too many tokens into it.

Krull (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames)

As if the movie Krull was enough exciting adventure for one person, apparently a video game was also made of this riveting story of a guy with a neat dagger-disc and annoyingly upbeat perspective on life. I never actually heard of the game until I saw it at FunSpot but wanted to give it a try considering how crappy the movie is.

Unlike the movie you actually get to use the Glaive for most of the game. The first level consists of you collecting the 5 pieces of it strewn across a boulder infested mountain. Once you have the weapon you can use the right joystick to fire it off in different directions. It seemed like you could fire up to 5 of them at a time but I wasn’t paying close enough attention. The next level has you saving soldiers in a forest, the next saving soldiers in a cave and then a level where you are trying to break your way through a set of hexagonal barriers constantly changing colors. You had to hit it when it was black or you glaives would get stuck in it. I sucked at that part. I gave the game another try later in the night but didn’t fare any better.

Continue? 10… 9… 8…

I was thinking I could squeeze all the games I played into one post but it’s turning out to be longer and more work than I thought it would be so I think it’s better to break this up into multiple posts.

Next time: Patrolling the moon buggy-style, bears looking for gems in castles (what?!), strong aversions to aliens and racing way too fast in a tube (no, not the london underground)