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More Golden Age Tournaments
Here's a summary of a few other major 1980s video game tournaments.Putt Putt National TournamentsPutt Putt $10,000 Pac-Man Tournament On of the earliest big-money national tournaments was...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 7
Victory and Victor BananaAnother now-rare game was Victory, a game similar to Defenderthat featured excellent gameplay and some of the best sound and speech for a video game at the time but was almost...
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Dave Needle and Jerry Lawson - Two Early Independent Video Game Designers
Way back when I stared this blog, I posted about Dave Needle's one-off Star Trek video game. That post was only part of a longer chapter in my book about independent video game designers. Today, I am...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 8
Max-a-FlexBy this time, the crash was in full effect and Exidy tried anything it could to turn a profit. In April, the company released their new interchangeable "Max-A-Flex" system. The system...
View ArticleRePlay Magazine Chart Summary - Part 1
Today's post is another that may only be of interest to me. RePlay and Play Meter magazines both published monthly and yearly charts listing the highest performing video games (based on earnings). I...
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Who Was the First Person To Come Up With the Idea For A Coin-Op...
Recently I came across some info about some possible early attempts at a coin-op video game that I thought some might find interesting (note that here I use the term "video game" in its current...
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Early Unknown Computer Games Mentioned in the Magnavox Suit(s)
Recently, I was going through some of the Magnavox Vs. Activision documents that are available at the University of New Hampshire School of Law website (it looks like they were donated by Ralph...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Exidy - Part 9
Today's post is the final installment of my history of Exidy (not counting the errata and statistics). Unfortunately, it won't be nearly as complete as the other posts since a) it's after the time...
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Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 1: Release Dates and...
Recently, I've been looking through some annual reports and 10Ks for Allied Leisure/Centuri and across some interesting info. These things seem boring at first but they sometimes contain a treasure...
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Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 2: The Leisure...
A few months back, I posted about the "blue sky" ripoff artists of the early 80s like Potomac Mortgage, Fascination International, and Leisure Time Electronics. You can read the post for details, but...
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Centuri/Allied Leisure Annual Report Goodies - Part 3: What Was Allied's...
The third thing I found interesting in Allied's reports was not a video game topic but a pinball one - Allied's cocktail pins and when they started making them? Most sources list Take Five, released in...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 1
Not all video game and coin-op companies were located in Silicon Valley or Chicago. Allied Leisure Industries was located in faraway Hialeah Florida. Today, not many people remember the...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 2
Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney - The Video Game Era Begins In November of 1972, Atari released Pong and Allied engineers quickly purchased a copy of the game then had it shipped to their Florida...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 3
1974 - Disaster StrikesWith the success of Paddle Battle and Tennis Tourney, Allied seemed poised to become a major player in the video game jungle. They had built more Pong games than perhaps anyone...
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The Ultimate (So Far) History of Allied Leisure/Centuri - Part 4
1977 - Bankruptcy and Skateboard Parks Financially, 1975 and 76 had not been good years for Allied. The company lost almost $700 thousand in 1975 and a whopping $3 million in 1976. Total revenues had...
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Photo Odds and Ends and Undocumented Games
Not much narrative this time, just some interesting photos I've found in various trade magazines: May, 1978 Jews For Jesus was sued by Bally/Midway for infringement over this Pac-Man-themed religious...
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What Was the First Cocktail Video Game (Redux)
Last November, I posted a preliminary report on the first cocktail video game: (http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/11/preliminary-report-what-was-first.html) Since then, I have gathered...
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Forgotten Gems - Stern's Dark Planet
Chicago’s Stern Electronics may not have had as many coin-op hits as Atari, Midway, or Nintendo, but during the video game heyday of the 1980s they produced a number of solid efforts, both...
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More Photos And Undocumented Games
Donkey Kong on the production line 1979 ad for Funspot Another shot of the Atari Theatre Unit, from April, 1976 Some undocumented games:Electrocoin's Minesweep (1977) Infinity 1 from Nova Games of...
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URL's Video Action - The First US Consumer Video Game after Odyssey?
Today’s post is about Video Action, a line of consumer/arcade video games made by URL from 1974-76. Normally this blog covers arcade games and does not veer into consumer (part of the reason I started...
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