Arcade news you can abuse for the weekend

If you’re in the US then you are possibly travelling somewhere, or hosting visitors for the 4th of July weekend. If not, it’s still a 4-day weekend which is always great to take advantage of. I’m going to be spending at least a few hours everyday at the arcade, perhaps I can level up my Gauntlet characters if I get a chance. Or set a high score on Terminator’s expert mode since few are playing that so far. Anyways, here’s some arcade news I’ve come across today.

Stinger Newsfeed 1067 for this item: Raw Thrills has announced a “Cash for Clunkers” trade-in program for the month of July. No details are given, just to contact a Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix distributors for the rundown. I certainly wouldn’t mind trading in my kitted out Crusin cabs which are running Drift, but I doubt that would apply. Dang it.

Also, Namco has launched a new Facebook page for Dead Heat, it looks like they are going to give it the same FB treatment they have given for Pac-Man Battle Royale, which includes a location finder. Almost 3000 people follow the PMBR page so it’s certainly proving useful. More of this please! Social networking is one of the best way to promote arcade gaming, thanks to the millions and millions of people who use the sites.

For you game historians, Atari fans or arcade aficionados out there this will be of interest. Scott of Atarigames.com has posted a production list of every Atari arcade game made since Pong which includes the initial price and for most machines, how many were actually made. It is significant enough that it dashes common-held beliefs about certain games (such as I,Robot’s production numbers). Asteroids is still Atari’s best selling game ever(the number always cited is 70,000 but this list doesn’t show how many cabaret units were made which could have made up the difference from the 56,000 or so listed), with Centipede pulling a close second – I actually had thought that the numbers would have been higher on games like Star Wars and T-Mek, but SW came out about crash time which certainly hurt it. T-Mek was just a huge game that was hard for small locations to have (the primary reason I had to get rid of mine). Equally fascinating are the prices – Pong originally sold for $700 in 1972 dollars; Atari’s first really expensive game, Indy 8 and Tank 8 sold for $6475 in 1975/76 dollars(which as Atariscott points out would be $24594.30 in 2010 $$$). The highest priced item on the list is Namco-made 4 Trax, which came in at $14995, 1988 $$$ (Atari would license and build a lot of Namco games through the 80’s which is why games like Dig Dug and Dragon Spirit are on there). It would be awesome to see lists of this nature from other companies like Sega, Midway, Taito, Konami, etc. I’m sure someone out there has them.

Scoot has also shared some original Atari ads he has, which you can see here on Flickr. I never knew at one point there was plans for Atari to build and sell both Time Pilot and Popeye machines. Via KLOV.

Taito has released a promotional video showing how their new Kickthrough Racers game works in practice. This looks like it would have a better chance internationally than Hopping Road did. Speaking of Taito, they also just released Battle Fantasia to the NESiCAxLIVE online arcade service.

And last but not least, Dave & Busters has rolled out a Summer Play-cation program, which is a $10 coupon you can print out for to use at their locations. Check it out here.