A few years back I was fortunate enough to be a part of a rescue mission that took a group of arcade collectors to France to remove multiple arcade cabinets from a run down building. If you missed that write up, check it out here.
Suffice to say, the building was a health hazard, and we really shouldn’t have even gone into it, let alone drag cabinets out of loft and rooms with collapsed ceilings. Without rerunning the whole episode (but do check out the link above), I came away from that raid with an original Atari Europe Steeplechase cabinet:
The cabinet is unusual in that it is different to the USA release, which has more angular shapes. To get an idea of gameplay, check out this video:
The long drive back home up to Northern France and across the channel again, gave me inspiration to restore the cabinet and to get people playing it again.
I did make a start. Check out the work I did when it arrived in this blog post.
After a good clean up it looked like this:
And then a few months later, I realised I had too many projects and decided to put it up for sale. The cabinet changed hands three times after that, with each owner doing a little bit of restoration to get the thing working.
Its final owner was Jon Turner of Pixel Busters arcade in Stoke on Trent here in the UK. Which on reflection is probably the perfect place for it to be – it is a fun multiplayer game, and needs to be in a public arcade setting for it to be enjoyed, rather than sitting out its remaining years at Billy-No-Mates Tony Temple’s games room.
And so Jonathan got to work. I wanted to share this great video with you where Jonathan details the work he did to get this thing back out on the arcade floor:
Watch the whole video for a tour of Pixel Busters towards the end. Great place!
The game has been a big hit at Jonathan’s arcade. These photos were taken by Al’s Arcade at a recent UKVAC meet-up there. The game was busy all weekend!
Al’s Arcade also shot some video footage of the meet. He runs a great arcade channel on YouTube, so give him a follow!
So there you have it – the Atari Steeplechase cabinet that we pulled out of a condemned building in France, is finally restored and up and running in a public arcade which is great news!
Thanks for checking in this week.
Tony
Nice!A bunch of us just got back from playing the US version, and many others, in Idaho. Steeplechase is a hoot! Wicked fun to play with a group. Great job on the save!
Great to see it get more life. Atari knew how to make a fun game out of basic building blocks. First arcade videogame with music too?
Not sure of its popularity in Europe, but here in the US I don’t recall ever seeing it in person. There’s a pretty good 2600 port that was a Sears-exclusive release. Much like Warlords, I don’t think a lot of people realize there was a coin-op version.
I had the US version back in the early 2000s (photo here- http://atari.vg-network.com/public/sc.jpg). I snagged this and Breakout for $150 at a Chicago pinball show, back when b/w games were considered worthless. There was one that was recently restored and posted on Facebook, and I wondered if it was the one I used to own, considering the rarity of the game here (Even Keithen questioned it). Fun game, and it has the coolest buttons of any game I’ve ever played or owned.