I felt that Defender and Robotron (designed by the same team) were on another plane of difficulty compared to other games of the era. They required more visual processing ability and faster reflexes owing to the speed and number of objects on the screen trying to kill you.
Asteroids and Galaga were walks in the park by comparison.
Most of the people I knew that liked Defender and Robotron also liked Joust. Also Williams Electronics produced, though it doesn't mention Jarvis or DeMar as being involved.
Just watched. Yeah, great film. Sure glad you mentioned it. Hearing from those guys is a real treat. Lol, Eugene: Crush the Player, but make them want and pay for more.
To the Williams team:
For a time, I had Playstation, Dreamcast, in one corner of a living room, and MAME loaded up with the best of Coin OP in another.
It would ebb and flow, but the Coin OP side always saw a lot of play. At the time, MAME was running on a pretty great PC, big ass SONY Trinitron CRT with solid keyboard, mouse, other controllers. Sometimes I would make one if a game proved compelling enough for the kids, not just mine. Neighborhood kids. They would come to play on the killer MAME setup.
In my bedroom, during those times, I had an SGI Indy that I built XMame on, and it would just play Smash TV, when compiled with aggressive optimization. That was my machine to play classics on, Defender, Asteroids, Smash TV, Robotron...
To be fair, the console side was on an even bigger, like 200 plus pound SONY WEGA.
Might as well make the most of the tech at the time.
Those Coin OP games worked even when it was not about hard won quarters. And we (family) toured the local arcades as long as we could. And did drive in movies too.
The Internet did a similar thing at home. It encroached on gaming time, then became gaming time. Quake 3 Arena displaced all of it for quite a while. Networked FPS is amazing, as we all know.
Cell phones had an impact too. Suddenly young people could talk away from parents, without having to have a place to meet up. This aligned roughly with the Internet, and maybe gets missed. Text was huge. I used to teach other parents how to read all the shorthand lingo. Many parents had no idea.
SMS and chats of various kinds were as intoxicating as the best video games were, Coin OP or not.
As an 70's and 80's era kid, I saw the arcades from later pinball (which I still find amazing and fun), to old black and white arcade games, vectors (another experience worth having if you can on a CRT in an arcade), through Defender and all that we see in this film. For a little while, arcades felt new again when the bigger machines and more body movement games, Dance Dance and others, got people moving in many ways, not just flogging controls and a few buttons. I liked that time as much as I did the often smoke filled arcades where I could find hard core, Star Castle, Rip Off, Defender, Tempest, and many others.
At the arcade, we could play, talk, live out parts of ourselves, share that, and do it away from parents. Same goes for cruising around in cars, until that was made illegal... networks were a concept many knew about and few experienced. Phones had wires and or were an expensive resource, often including watchful eyes and ears.
Cell Phones, home consoles, Internet really did take out the arcade, but for a few today able to exist reasonably.
Also, see those 1up cabinets? People really like them, even when the game experience is sub par. Seems like the arcade experience is still relevant, but with poor economics. And annoying ticket / prize schemes.
It all was a fun time. Glad I was there. Sometimes want to go back.
I went out of my way to get a dual joystick (and marble ball) game controller when I built my mame box, specifically to play robotron (it also works for two player games).
As a kid at that time, I remember seeing Defender appear at the local pizza place. At one point, that little corner arcade had a Defender, Asteroids, PAC Man, and eventually a Star Wars cabinet.
Defender was a stand out experience. At that time, there was nothing like it.
Needless to say, getting pizza was amazing! We, friends and I, would wolf it down and run off to dump the money we saved and whatever we could mooch from the always intrigued, and somewhat confused adults at the table.
Curiously, one remarked to the effect of the pizza being a side show with the real money going into beer and games. I do not recall them playing much, content to drink and enjoy our antics.
The very first time I saw Defender, a friend and I had been studying the games, reading about graphics, and thought it was something special just from attract mode. Good resolution for the time, color cycling, 16 colors, and the motion spoke to something intense.
Of course it totally was!
Those sounds pumped out of a respectable amp, lots of bass, and bang on clarity were the kind of experience one does not forget. Same goes for the visuals. That particular cabinet was not totally new. It has seen some love.
All combined, little bits of dust on the CRT, great, worked in controls, other artifacts one would see from a machine seeing consistent and aggressive plays, the only way I can describe our impressions was like that of a powerful sports car, idling after a pro worked it in on the track, and then... our turn.
I say, we, our... because the first few runs was a two player experience. One would be watching, trying to understand all the baddies, flow, what happens, when, why, all while the other is staying in game, blasting away, hoping to clear the level.
We would alternate too. Play every other level, whatever made sense as we gained the skill needed to play through.
But the real show was an older kid who showed up one day able to play for a considerable time. Game difficulty ramps for a while. New players have no real idea what is to come, and the moment they do, they crave it again and again. A person can get into flow just watching someone play this game.
Raw games like this, and by that I mean having really solid basics along with slowdowns, and such that would normally take one out of the experience, ended up taking one deeper into it all. Soon, those are known, expected, a sign of mastery.
For an example, see the original "Star Raiders" on Atari 8 bit computers. It is similarly raw, with similar slowdowns. Years later that game was fixed with highly optimized particle computations and would run at a solid 50 / 60hz depending on whatever region it was played.
Some appreciated it, but a surprising number of people, myself included, found it more sterile. It just is not the same.
Stargate is kind of like that, but is also a different game, so it does not detract like the fix to Star Raiders did.
And through all this, I just wanted to convey how those early experiences went. This game is remarkable, and for many, again myself included, an experience worth having anytime. This title gets a player into flow, the zone, whatever people call it, rapidly.
Asteroids and Galaga were walks in the park by comparison.