Atari’s Battlezone arcade game released in 1981 was an immediate classic. This first-person wire frame vector shoot-em-up, puts the player at the controls of a tank wandering the wilderness of a futuristic-looking battlefield, shooting down enemy tanks, UFOs and missiles. Around 15,000 machines were rolled out of Atari’s factory in both upright and cabaret form. Here,…
Tag: atari
Atari Battlezone Restoration 1
You’ll have read about this cab in a previous “Weekend Pickup” post here. It was one of the cabinets from the late Pete Davies’ collection, which you can read about here. It’s in a pretty sorry state, but shouldn’t take too much work to get things sorted out. (I don’t know why I always say that, because…
Atari Centipede Upright Restoration 4
So we should now be in the home straight on the restoration of this Atari Centipede. What started as a “light restore” has turned into quite the job. I under-estimated just how much work I had to do to get this cabinet up and running and looking decent again. But things are coming together, and…
Atari Battlezone: Weekend Pickup!
A few weeks back you will have read here on the blog about Pete Davies, the UK-based collector who sadly passed away last year. A group of us travelled up to his house in Scotland and were able to rescue his collection and distribute the cabinets amongst the community. My own pickup from that weekend…
Arcade Raid! Old Trafford, UK
Fortune favours the brave they say. I’ve written on this blog here before that the collectors who do the hunting and investigating are the ones who tend to come across large stashes of abandoned arcade cabinets. But sometimes arcade collectors are just plain fortunate and can stumble across amazing opportunities. You make your own luck…
Atari Centipede Upright Restoration 3
So here we go then with part 3 of the restoration of this Centipede Upright cabinet. Some good news to start off with – the monitor is back from the repair guy (thanks again Grant!). You’ll recall we had vertical collapse on the screen. It turned out that all of the High Voltage caps were…
More Missile Command Talk
A few months back I was asked to be interviewed by a friend of mine Alan Stewart (aka “Mamemeister”) who runs a cracking YouTube channel covering all things retro gaming. The interview went on a bit, and before we knew it, we’d talked for a good two hours about Missile Command and 80s arcade machines….
Atari Gravitar: Weekend Pickup!
I’ve been eyeing up these third generation Atari Vector cabinets for some time now. Space Duel is a particular favourite of mine, and I’ve been banging on about wanting a Quantum for years. My issue to date has been twofold: Space. I have very little of it, and these vector cabs are large beasts. These…
Pete Davies: The ‘Invadar’ Arcade Collection
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that I knew him on a personal level (I’m not sure that many people did), but was obviously aware…
The Secret History of the Arcade Trackball
The trackball as a method of user interface control has been around for some time. In terms of public consciousness, I would argue that arcade games pioneered their widespread use by getting them literally in the hands of a mainstream consumer audience. The best way to get someone using a new device, is to put…
The Arcade Blogger 