Space Invaders & Qix Twinned For Silver Anniversary Cabinet

Thanks to ClassicGaming for pointing out that Namco is producing a Space Invaders/Qix Silver Anniversary arcade cabinet, combining these two Taito-licensed classics into one arcade machine. The PDF brochure for the machine boasts: "The game that caused a national shortage of coins in Japan is back!", as Namco continues its classic arcade cabinet series that's also spawned Ms. PacMan/Galaga, explaining: "Why bring back these hits from the past? For the past few years, our distributors and we have received comments from operators all over the USA about how well their [classic arcade] games continue to perform, but how beat up the hardware had become." As for Ms. PacMan/Galaga, the info page reveals "the original PacMan is in the game", unlocked by a mutant version of the Konami Code.

Classic Games

[Justin Ames]

Those are by far my favorite things to play at the arcades.

Pac-Man? Pac-Man? There was Pac-Man on that thing?

[GreenHell]

I was recently trapped on a rather boring boat ride where the ferry had a mini arcade consisting of a bunch of the multi-game cabinets and a pinball machine. (How you're supposed to play pinball on a boat that keeps rocking is beyond me, but it was on there.)

One of the machines was the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinet. I wasted a couple quarters on it, but had I known that Pac-Man was on there I probably would have wasted more.

Instead I spent most of my pocket change in the Missile Command/Centipede/Millipede c

50 cents a game.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah now Arcade managers can continue to charge 50 cents a game for games that are older than 90 percent of their clientele.

I think the sad partt is seeing original Ms. Pac-Man machines that cost 50 cents a play. I almost feel like smacking my local Arcade manager when I see that.

Re:50 cents a game.

[Zathrus]

I looked into these multi-game cabinets recently (as in, the last week) since it might be cool to have one in our newly refinished basement.

The consumer versions start at about $2500, if you find them at a good price -- you can pay another $1000 if you don't do your searching carefully. The commercial versions are an additional $500 (they're slightly larger, have a coin door, and are much, much heavier). The cocktail table version is another $300-500.

There's also some mega-multi game cabinets out there --

Re:50 cents a game.

[Firehawke]

Don't give up yet. You can get a single game cabinet relatively cheap if you know the price curve. Extremely old and new stuff is expensive, but it dips towards the center; games of about the SF2 vintage should be cheapest right now.

After that, all you need to do is make a few adjustments to the cabinet and wiring harness; there are converters for old machines to JAMMA out there. In any case, any mods you have to make should be relatively cheap-- it's just a matter of getting any game boards you want, adap

Re:50 cents a game.

[jesse.k]

$2500 would build a very nice MAME cabinet with actual Happ controls and monitor instead.

That would have several thousand games then.

Re:50 cents a game.

[stuph]

not if you own the boards.. which ya can often buy really, really cheaply, but don't feel like switching them out over and over again when ya wanna play games..

Re:50 cents a game.

[Firehawke]

I picked up a SF2CE machine for $300. I'm thinking it'd cost me less than $500 to do the rest of the mods I'd mentioned to it, including the cost of obtaining additional boards.

Re:50 cents a game.

[GwabbaWabba]

Factoring in inflation, $.50 seems pretty reasonable to me.It's not exactly analagous to $.25 twenty years ago but I suspect it's close enough for jazz... and I'd give a lot more than $.50 to sit down in a resaurant and play on a cocktail cabinet. For some reason those things were always up by the bar (where I couldn't go) when I was a kid.

Ground Kontrol rocks the house

[raygundan]

Great atmosphere, great vintage machines (lots of restored vector cabinets, too!), occasional nuts like that trying to break arcade records, and so forth. Go there and give 'em some quarters-- it's roughly the coolest thing you can do while maintaining your geekdom.

Re:Awesome

[FauxReal]

I stopped by Ground Kontrol before work tonight... the high score the guy left on Asteroids is 22,222,220 points! There were also a few other interesting scores in between left by the same guy such as 16,666,660... I think the next closest person to him had somewhere around 160,000 points. Darn I wish I remembered his initials... CEB I think?

Re:And the price for one of these is?

[madopal]

You can buy them through Brookstone. Here's [brookstone.com] the link to the Ms. Pac/Galaga cabaret.

Everyone who's into these things, keep asking locations about them. This is a shameless plug, as I work for the company that did Ms.Pac/Galaga and Centipede/Millipede/Missile Command/Let's Go Bowling.

Qix: so underrated

[GuyMannDude]

Yeah, I always thought Qix rocked and was surprised that it wasn't a bigger hit. Man, the sense of accomplishment you got whenever you finished building your tower of little skinny blocks with the Fast Draw and then finish with an inch worth of Slow Draw and seal off a huge fuckin' chunk of the screen in that wonderful brown color. "Boo-yeah! How do you like 'dat you little twirly motherfuckin' freak?" you'd shout at the top of your lungs, paying no mind to all the other kids staring and laughing at you.

Re:Qix: so underrated

[gmhowell]

Qix is definately one of my favorite games to pull up on Mame. Look through the MAME roms, and you'll find tons and tons of variations, many of which reveal pixelated porn.

The Cabinet

[Saige]

What's really cool about this is that the cabinet is the same as the original Space Invaders cabinet! This is a big difference from the cabinets that we've been used to seeing arcade games in for so long. It will REALLY stand out at an arcade.

Re:It's cool BUT...

[madopal]

Very simple...the higher ups at Taito are trying to rekindle some old magic. The Ms.Pac/Galaga combo is selling VERY well, and now everyone is trying to get into that market.

Once again, product-whore that I am, I worked on these. We did the Ms.Pac/Galaga, Centipede/Millipede/Missile Command/Let's Go Bowling, and Robotron/Joust - Defender/Defender 2(don't call me Stargate). I'll tell you this...Ms.Pac/Galaga is outselling those others 10-1.

Ask A Child

[robbway]

My nephews, ages 7 and 3, absolutely love the Namco Museum and Pac Man Collection on Gameboy Advance SP. But when we played other, more modern games, they lost interest quickly. There is something very primal in those original games that tweaks people the right way. The colors are high-contrast. The sounds are brash. The emphasis is on game play, not graphics or quarter-crunching. That probably says a lot.

So the new game sounds great, except Qix didn't seem to be widely distributed in the USA. This