Demoltion Derby

Midway's "Demolition Derby" was a mainstay of my arcade experience. This was a tabletop cabinet with four spin-all-the-way-around steering wheels for each of up to four players. It was the only tabletop game at the Dream Machine and it outlasted many of its peers.

The reasons for this and the reasons that it was one of the games that I played at least five or six times per visit were twofold: 1) it was a unique gaming experience, providing a real-world analog (the steering wheels) for the in-game control as well as a top-down viewing, making gameplay more intimate — there was only enough room for the four people playing to be looking at the screen, discouraging the sort of spectatorship that other games sought to capitalize on — which is a good thing, especially when 2) the game promised that if you won and continued to win, you would eventually get to see a pixelated facsimile of some scantily-clad woman dubbed the "garage girl."

I don't remember ever winning more than one round on that game, which meant that I probably only saw perhaps down to her very slightly unzipped jumpsuit (the image reveal started at the top, progressing downwards as you won).

But I honestly think that the allure of vehicular destruction was what kept me dropping the quarters. I wasn't much interested in what the rest of that woman's fairly ordinary-looking outfit looked like, but in the idea that this game — and video games in general — would reward me for blowing up (in video game reality) just the sort of thing that I knew (in real reality) ought not be blown up.

And this is, at its core, is, I believe, why video games have been so successful as entertainment. They are an interactive medium through which people get the chance to do all the bad things they know they aren't supposed to do (getting in fights, crashing cars, etc) as well as all the good things they wish they could do but know they would never get the chance to (playing professional sports, defending the Earth from an incoming alien attack, saving the princess).

And then, of course, there are those of us who just want to eat ghosts that have turned blue with fright because we just ate a big dot.

Time Killers

Both released in 1992, I'm not sure if Incredible Technologies' "Time Killers" was emboldened by the overwhelming success of the at-the-time ultra-violent "Mortal Kombat," or if the games were developed in tandem and the arcade landscape was simply ripe for the gruesomeing.

Thirteen at the time, I was happy to see interminable lines forming behind the MK machines because it meant that I was able to play Time Killers without having to worry about some arcade hermit elbowing in on my game, instigating a challenge battle that would effectively end my progress through the story mode.

The reason that I was so enamored of Time Killers was that, though far less "realistic" than MK (MK's use of digitized sprite technology was a large part of its enormous appeal, building on the success of 1990's "Pit Fighter"), it had more gory bang for your buck (or, in this case, for your quarter).

Mortal Kombat may have had blood throughout the matches, but decapitations and more extreme forms of violence were limited mostly to the end of the match, during the "finish him" moment, known in MK as "fatalities." But even then, a fatality could only be performed if you knew the special joystick/button combos, which, if you were only an occasional visitor to the arcade as I was, were more or less a mystery. Time Killers, on the other hand, not only was rife with the kind of darkly comical violence my young mind longed for, it also reacted quite well to button mashing, my preferred method of fighting game gaming (it's five-button configuration controlled each of your character's four limbs and his head, and hitting the two arm or leg buttons at once resulted in a stronger attack).

My favorite character to play as was named "Rancid." He was a punk-looking guy sporting a green flopped-over mohawk with an "x"-shaped scar on his forehead. The best thing about him though, without question, was the fact that his weapon (yes, every character had a weapon, standard) was a chainsaw. And, of course, these weapons could be used to inflict horrendous and wonderful damage to opponents.

And therein lies the beauty of the relatively unknown, severely under-appreciated game because if you inflicted enough damage to your opponent you could sever one or both of his arms, forcing him to fight without a weapon, using only his legs and head, which could also be lopped off, effectively ending the match. What I never would have known then (being the unsophisticated gamer that I was, as mentioned previously) that I know now (thanks only to wikipedia) is that at any time during the match, a player could have executed the "super death move," which would have removed both of the opponent's arms as well as the head in one move.

It wasn't long before the underperforming cabinet was pulled off the floor, like so many of my other favorites, probably in favor of a fourth MK machine.