Level 2: Arcade

The flyer for Mortal Kombat sported the daunting but promising text “So real it hurts!” The digital graphics combined with the rampant, bloody scenes turned Mortal Kombat into one of the most popular...

The high quality of the graphics and the possibility to set up eight machines next to each other makes Daytona USA the most profit-generating coin-op worldwide. The player sits in a tub-like seat in...

Until NBA Jam was released, basketball games were really only for the true enthusiast. After all, everything you could do on screen, you could do in real life as well. However, after 1993 basketball...

In 1999 Konami released the first "Dancing Stage" in Europe. In Japan, where the game had been introduced a year earlier, it went by the name of "Dance Dance Revolution". Since then, clones have been...

The first Pachinko machines appeared in Japan around 1920 and were initially intended as children's toys. A decade later Pachinko became very popular among grown-ups as well. It's highly addictive...

The Tournament Table is basically a multigame arcade with several Pong variations. After inserting a coin, the player is prompted to choose one of the several games available. Breakout, Soccer (2...

Similar to the Jet Rocket from 1970, this arcade game immediately stands out. No big screen or joystick but a small window and two handles mounted on a periscope. The mission can't be more simple:...

Pushing buttons or rolling the trackball as quick as possible, in Hyper Sports (the follow-up of the slightly more popular Track & Field) the player slips into a high class olympic athlete. On this...

Badlands must be one of the most fun racing games out there. The two steering wheels offer such nice game play that it's hard for anyone not to get swept up in the race. Not only do you race each...

What's in a name? In Time Pilot the player shoots his way through several time lines. From biplanes from the 1910s to the next millennium's UFOs: Time Pilot is a highly addicting shoot 'em up (also:...

Pong's success made Atari long for more. Al Alcorn was invited to become project manager, and he subsequently asked Steve Jobs to develop a prototype for a one-player version of Pong. Jobs was...

Vanguard is an ancestor of later shoot 'em ups such as Gradius and R-Type. Vanguard was the first scrolling shooter, in which you can shoot in four different directions. Also, avoiding obstacles...

Under Fire has always remained faithful to its coin-op version: there has never been a console version released for this game.

Perhaps the most simple and effective sequel ever. The design and drawings featuring on the oldest Ms. Pac-Man coin-ops are hand-painted. Later they switched to stickers, which wrongfully spread the...

The shooter Galaga is a successor of Galaxian. The player's spaceship moves from left to right at the bottom of the screen. Just like in Space Invaders, evil comes from above: the extraterrestrial...

A secret agent must rescue his partner from the claws of a terrorist organisation. Rolling Thunder is a horizontal scrolling shooter, and can be situated somewhere between classics like Shinobi and...

In this shooting game you control a laser pistol with a trackball. You have to try to kill a centipede, which gets faster and faster by eating its way through a mushroom field. If you shoot it right...

We have four Japanese gaming machines in our exhibition. In Japan these machines are still being played. The machines are made up out of generic outer casings made by Sega. They're not bound to one...

This is a talking, multi-ball Stern monster of a game. And a great addition to the Arcade exhibition.

Jet Rocket, released by SEGA in 1970, is a flight simulator that makes use of visual techniques which were also used for military flight simulators. By playing with a real controller stick in a...

Gotcha is a 1973 arcade game manufactured by Atari Inc. It was Atari's fourth game after Pong, Space Race and Pong Doubles. This was the first maze arcade game, as well as the very first video game...