I really thought we were in the wrong place at first. Nothing about this building screams “biggest arcade” or really, biggest… anything.
That’s not how you start a post. Let’s begin here: Today, we were here on the outskirts of Chicago, and what would be the last arcade Tom would be joining me for.
Note: Tom’s been doing this on every post since we started, and I’ve had to cobble together an intro.
Galloping Ghost arcade in Brookfield, IL. I am told this is the biggest arcade in the world. How true is this claim to fame?
Several websites mistakenly list Funspot as the most giant arcade in the world because it was bigger until a year or two ago. Galloping Ghost has long since surpassed in number of games. Funspot’s still bigger in terms of floor space, though.
How many cabinets total are we talking here?
That’s a complicated question we’ll need to discuss once we get in, but they claim to have over 600 games.
It’s such an unassuming building. I was picturing something a lot more conspicuous when I heard about it.
Yeah, as Tom said in the premature intro, you can sorta-kinda see the arcade in that photo if you squint.
Here’s a closer look at it. A big part of what makes it look so small is that both the brick and white buildings are part of it.
Still, it would be easy to overlook. It seems like it could be just any old small town arcade.
It doesn’t even look like an arcade, period. It seems more like a bar or pool hall…
I mean, the sign out front does ID it as an arcade… but it’s not an exactly audacious piece of signage, so you could walk right by without realizing it.
While we’re on the subject of outside, there were a group of people hanging out outside of the door. While I’m not old enough to remember 80s arcades, I’m told that was a common thing back in the day.
That’s the cliche, right? Nice to see an old tradition is still alive and well somewhere.
Galloping Ghost is one of those pay-at-the-door places
The screen displays high scores for most (all?) games, and you can buy a random assortment of trinkets at the front display cases too.
Speaking of that high-score screen, Galloping Ghost bought out aurcade a year or two back. Aurcade is that arcade game listing site I linked to you during the last blog post.
Go on.
It’s a super useful resource I use to find arcades in the middle of nowhere, but after they acquired it, they converted it into a high-score tracking site, and the listings don’t really get updated much anymore. What you see on that screen is linked to the current Aurcade, and a few other similar arcades also use it.
Tough competition to get on the board, then.
Yes, on the one hand, I respect them for it, given all of the controversy surrounding 80s players, but I wish they hadn’t let Aurcade’s map fall by the wayside to do it.
Speaking of controversial 80s arcade figures, they keep a photo of every famous person who comes to visit.
I’m sure I should recognize them, but I don’t!
The only ones I recognise are Ed Boon and Warren Davis. Warren Davis is the guy who made Q-Bert, and Ed Boon is the guy behind Mortal Kombat. I know they had others hanging around, like James Rolfe and the King of Con.
King of Con, hah.
He fully deserves that title. Imagine being able to pull that off for decades without anyone calling bullshit, even getting your own movie. He’s a legend.
Good ties, too.
This is the closest I got to a “good” shot of the place.
It’s hard to capture a good shot of the place because it’s squat, crowded, and SO cramped. They really jammed as many machines into the real estate as they could, and then some.
It doesn’t help that the place is divided into rooms.
That too. You get the sense that the place kind of gobbled up adjacent buildings over time as it grew. I’m sure they’re eyeing that chinese takeout place next door…
We’ll get to the various rooms as we go through it, but the general gist is that this is the main room here. It has primarily 80s and early 90s games that didn’t go anywhere else.
But before that, there was a side wing to the left as you walk in that only had a handful of games.
PRIMAL RAAAAAGEEE (I don’t recall Primal Rage)
(good, because it’s the same game you didn’t recall the last time we saw it)
As you can see, many of the mid-90s super violent fighters were kept here. There’s Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, and Primal Rage.
Seems like the formula for a 90s fighter was [violent adjective] + [violent noun]
Speaking of which, there’s something Galloping Ghost is particularly known for.
Which is?
They have a handful of unreleased prototype arcade machines scattered about.
And this would be one of them.
Yes, this is the killed-near-the-end-of-development sequel to Primal Rage. It has absolutely nothing to do with the original.
Dude on the marquee looks like the Green Goblin.
While the original game was about monsters like dinosaurs and such fighting, this game is about humans who transform into beasts when you activate certain conditions.
It’s a very 90s conceit. This was the era of Animorphs after all. Even Mortal Kombat introduced animalities.
Animorphs was good shit.
Fully agreed.
Anyhow, we played this one a bit, but I think we both agreed it wasn’t particularly good.
I guess through the lens of being an unfinished game, you can cut it a little slack, but still… ehhh. I can see why it got scrapped.
Now this one, on the other hand…
I was never a big fan of Sonic, so I had no idea something like this existed. The gimmick is that you control the character with a big track ball rather than something wholesome and sane like a joystick.
Yep, this is SegaSonic the Hedgehog, a game that’s pretty notorious among Sonic fans because it introduced Mighty the Armadillo and Ray the Flying Squirrel.
It took a little while to get used to the bizarre controls, plus the isometric graphics, but once you do adapt, it actually captures the spirit of Sonic quite well… which is of course, uncontrollable speed.
This game is an import, so very, VERY few arcades in the west have it. This was my first time playing it too, and I was surprised by how fun it was. The gameplay is very frantic.
The levels are autoscrolling to a degree and you have to stay ahead of the encroaching hazard du jour or you’re dead. So there’s always an impending oh-shit sense to the gameplay.
I was expecting to play it once for the novelty, then move on, but we got a decent way into it…
I have to agree that it was a lot more fun than I expected going in. It’s wacky but definitely a charming game.
While we’re on the subject, this is probably the only time I’ll ever get to bring up the name. It’s SegaSonic the Hedgehog.
Why the weird naming convention there?
Some weird trademark thing with the name “Sonic”, so they had to call all of Sonic’s early arcade outings “SegaSonic”. This is the fourth game to use it, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fGFjoeyc6I
The others are mostly things like kiddie attractions like SegaSonic popcorn maker, but two were cancelled games. One of them, SegaSonic Bros, finally leaked onto the internet a few months ago.
Now that title definitely reminds me of some sort of other classic game besides Sonic…
You’d think so, but it’s a generic puzzle game. These SegaSonic games were released SUPER early in Sonic’s life, so his supporting cast wasn’t yet established. Hence, we get Ray and Mighty in this game and three multicoloured “Sonic Bros” in that one.
These sorts of things fascinate me because you see a franchise before it established its familiar formulas, trying out a bunch of different things that feel so alien today.
Ray and Mighty essentially never appeared again after this (although Mighty did appear in a couple of spin-offs), but they developed a cult following for some reason. Sonic Mania recently added them as DLC characters.
You know what this is, yeah?
I actually do.
That’s surprising. Go ahead.
It’s a terrible arcade port of the PC game… or not really a port, as far as I understand it, but I’ve never actually played it. It was Japan-only or only a limited release in the US, yeah?
Japan-only, and it wasn’t quite a port. This is Left 4 Dead: Survivors, which is pretty much exactly what you said it was.
What struck me at the time, and again looking at this photo, is it actually uses a mouse. Never seen that in an arcade cabinet before.
That’s definitely uncommon, but not really unheard-of. I can’t really think of any examples of mouse-using games off the top of my head, but I know typing games were popular in Japan for a while.
So that’s why Mario Teaches Typing happened. Also Typing of the Dead.
The later, yes. The former, no. Anyhow, L4D: Survivors is basically L4D2, except streamlined to make it a bit more arcade-friendly. They also replaced the four characters with new Japanese people.
I seem to recall the cabinet at Galloping Ghost didn’t work.
Judging by the screen there, it just needed to be reset.
Quake live but for an arcade.
Midway Games’ The Grid, one of their last few arcade outings before being shut down.
I had a lot of fun with this one, actually… it’s an arena style shooter that you can hop in and out of against other players at adjacent machines. Rounds are quick, and while we there it seemed like a popular machine.
Yeah, when I read articles about Galloping Ghost, they almost always bring up this machine. It seems to be EXTREMELY popular. A big part of that probably has to do with how small the game’s release was, so most people have never played it before. I can’t imagine this game being fun unless you were in a pretty crowded arcade, though.
It certainly relies on the multiplayer element… and not only that but having several people around, since the fun is in how hectic it gets. Like any good arena shooter.
I should also mention that this setup is for six players, even though you can only see the big 3-person machine and one smaller one in the back. The other two are converted from other games.
You didn’t play this one, I don’t think, but this is Boogie Wings.
You’re right, so tell us about it.
Basically, it’s a standard side-scrolling plane shooter, except you can’t shoot at all. Your plane has a ball and chain hanging off the bottom, and your only way to attack with it is to maneuver the aircraft around in a way that swings the ball.
Wrecking ball style. Nice.
Yeah, it’s a very physics-dependent game. I don’t know what it had to do with the other games in this wing, though.
Boogie Wings dances to the beat of its own drum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V91Y7MRw7eo
“Tell me more!”
This is Deathstalker, the game that’s being parodied in that clip. You know those early CD PC FMV games like Phantasmagoria?
Yeah, there was also Night Trap which caused such a kerfuffle.
That’s precisely what Deathstalker is. You watch an FMV, and every once in a while, it’ll present you with three choices and you try to pick the one that won’t get you killed.
Riveting stuff.
Fittingly, I think more people are familiar with the My Dinner with Andre parody than this game.
Dariusburst EX!
The EX makes it cooler.
This gigantic cabinet is the most recent entry in the Darius Shoot-em-up series.
Galloping Ghost has a lot of these bygone cultural artifacts, from both sides of the Pacific.
Yes, and it had even more of something else. Broken machines.
It was pretty bad. I’d estimate maybe… 1/5 or so? Were either legitimately busted, powered off, or physically inaccessible.
I think 1/5 is a bit of an overshot, given the sheer number of games they had, but it was particularly annoying because most of the broken machines were rare sit-down cabs or imports that you can’t find anywhere else in the states.
Maybe it felt like it was worse than that because of what you said… a lot of the coolest machines just weren’t working. Disappointing.
I think that’s the biggest problem with Galloping Ghost overall: There are just too many machines. They can barely fit them all and can’t keep the more specialised ones working.
Absolutely. There were lots of places where machines were stuffed into a corner with literally no way to even get to them.
Notably, they had a broken Brave Firefighters sitting right next to this. Thank GOD we found that machine at Gameworks, or I’d have legitimately been pissed.
I’m glad I got the chance to experience it too. But that goes back to the problem with Galloping Ghost, all these broken machines really kind of tarnish the claim of having the most machines. Because… does it really count if a significant fraction of them aren’t actually available to play?
That’s true, but the second biggest arcade has been downsized the hell and back in recent years, so they’ve got the claim to most games by a wide enough margin that it doesn’t make a difference.
Fair enough. Still, it was a dampener on an otherwise really great arcade experience.
Anyway, this was your first time seeing these.
Outside of a Stanley Kubrick movie, yes. They’re very retro-futuristic in form and function.
You probably don’t know this, but these were a HUGE deal when they came out
I’m sure they were. 3D graphics! Virtual reality! The future is now!
You can even go on Youtube and find news reports of when people were lined up to play these. They were high-end machines that generally cost a whole dollar to play.
What year?
1991
Closing in on 2 bucks a pop in today’s dollars. Pretty expensive, and credits go fast.
Only two games were ever released for this hardware. The one on the left is the standard Time Traveler, while the one on the right is the slightly more obscure Holosseum.
I got a good photo of the gameplay this time around.
I have to say, from the jaded perspective of a person in 2018, this game was… not fun. Maybe if I was experiencing it in the primitive days of 1991, I’d have felt differently, but all you really did was… dodge attacks occasionally? It was clunky and not engaging beyond its gimmick.
Holosseum was a terrible fighting game, while Time Traveler was a bad Dragon’s Lair clone where it was never clear which button made you not die. Even then, they were poorly received once the novelty wore off.
Holosseum was the better of the two.
Moving on, this was a small room behind the counter.
Pretty roomy compared to some of the other areas.
There seemed to be some theme here, but I can’t put my finger on it. There were a lot of curtain shooters, though. Now’s probably a good time to mention that I’m not versed in 80s arcade games.
That makes two of us.
Most of my knowledge of arcades has been accumulated through looking up information while writing this blog, so games I haven’t run into before are a bit of a blind spot. And most of the 80s arcade games they had here were still too obscure for anyone to have nowadays. But this place had so damn many games that it was just outright overwhelming. We had to throw out a third of the photos I took just because I couldn’t remember anything about the game. So from this point on, we’ll be skimming through the more notable machines (that I recognised as such) instead of going over all 600 games.
Good call.
You knew this one, what was it?
Gunsmoke. Based on a TV series. Actually it was the longest running TV series in history before being dethroned by The Simpsons.
Oh, it’s actually based on the show?
Edit: As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the show. It does have some ties with the Red Dead series, strangely.
Well it uses the name, but I know nothing of the show itself so I can’t say for certain. The game itself was a generic shoot-em-up and really didn’t warrant any attention besides the novelty of an arcade cabinet ostensibly based on a 50s TV show.
Was this the one you were playing or the one next to it?
Yeah, I played Gunsmoke. It struck me as a sort of low-rent Sunset Riders, from a top-down perspective.
I see. I was off taking pictures during that.
Ikaruga arcade
Ikaruga was fun as hell on the GCN and fun as hell in its arcade format too. Unfiltered bullet hell as satan intended.
It was initially a Japanese arcade game that had a Dreamcast port, although Japan didn’t much care for it. The Dreamcast version was an extremely popular (pirated) import, so the game got a big following in the west. The Gamecube port was the first time it was brought over, and it turned out America liked it a hell of a lot more than Japan.
Not the first time. Cultural exchange is funny like that. You generally think of shooters like this as having their niche in Japan more than the states.
I hear Japan thought it was bland, probably because bullet hells are so much more popular there.
Note: Tom and I looked through a couple more pictures of machines in this room, but neither of us had anything worthwhile to say about them, so I’ll omit them.
Oh well, here’s Metal Slug.
Old dependable.
Any idea which Metal Slug this was?
III, I wanna say.
They had all of them, but this was the only one in its own machine. We’ve got a local laundromat with Metal Slug, but nobody I know plays it.
It seems like one of those games that’s more ubiquitous than its popularity suggests it should be… I’m a big fan, anyway.
This was one of THE Neo-Geo games, after the puzzle and fighting games.
Any given Neo-Geo MVS had about a 50-50 shot of having a Metal Slug on it.
A lot of times more than one.
Let’s see, where was it… Boulder Station Kids Quest? Or was it Sunset Station?
Could have been either, those places had some sweet arcade and console selections.
Trog is a game I specifically remember one of them having. And it’s not like Kid’s Quest had that many arcade machines. My local one only had 6.
(Note: I’m going to have to explain this exchange, aren’t I? Tom grew up in Vegas, so I was trying to ask if he remembered which Kid’s Quest had Trog since he’s mentioned staying in them. Unfortunately, writing about this arcade took us like a week, and he had to call it quits here for the night, so the conversation ended very abruptly)
Look at this, a piece of history.
I dig the artwork on the cabinet. But I don’t think I played on this one. What’s its mark on arcade history?
Of course you didn’t. Like every other good machine, it was broken.
Oh yeah, I see now, the characteristic dead grey screen. Staring at us mockingly.
This is Space Harrier, one of Yu Suzuki’s very first games. It’s one of the big four AM2 full-motion games that put him on the map. And in the original full-motion cab, no less!
I’m assuming it’s quite rare and therefore difficult to find in the states, so it would be amazing to get the chance to play on it… if it wasn’t broken.
Sorta. This game did get a full release in the states and was extremely popular. The way it moved along with the controls was revolutionary. The reason it’s so rare nowadays because it’s so old, and there aren’t many arcades that would still house agame like this that’s 30 years old.
I’m sure other full-motion cabs have surpassed it so the main reason to keep one is the novelty of its historical significance… but upkeep on an old, complex cabinet like that has got to be prohibitive. Which is why it’s not working.
Believe it or not, a few arcades have managed to keep these kinds of games up for 30 years. Two I know of in New Hamshire and one at Niagra Falls.
I believe it, I mean even Galloping Ghost had a lot of old machines in good condition, but the more of them you have, the more difficult it becomes.
Yeah, but you should see that Niagra Falls arcade. They have almost all of the big four and a few rare full-size sega cabs from that period. It’s spectacular. All are working more often than not.
Keeping a collection like that is a labor of love, I think. Someone there must care a lot about them.
Here’s a game I actually know a little something about. Before the moral panic over Mortal Kombat and Night Trap that brought us the beloved ESRB rating system, there was Death Race. People were freaking out over how violent this game was.
How violent is it?
You run over stick figures with a pong-paddle shaped car.
That reminds me, while we were here, you played another game I didn’t get a picture of, yes?
I’m sure, but you’d have to remind me of some details or there’s no way I’d remember.
I didn’t see it, but from the description, it sounded like you had wandered over to the Chiller machine.
Oh, is that the one where you torture people to death in a weird BDSM sex dungeon?
That’s the one!
I don’t know what kind of controversy it attracted at the time, but even I was pretty weirded out by it and I’ve got a high bar for that kind of thing.
It was so violent that almost no arcades in the US wanted anything to do with it, so it’s not a game you’d ever run into normally. It was extremely popular in Mexico, though.
We didn’t send them our best, apparently. Along with being weirdly fetishistic and violent, it’s not a great game.
No, I didn’t care for it when I ran into it in NYC when I ran into it in NYC, either. But it’s incredible how much of a difference there is between a violent 70s arcade game and a violent 80s arcade game.
It’s a good object lesson in how quickly computer graphics made leaps and bounds in that era. It’s easy to take for granted nowadays, but in the span of 10 years, you went from Pong to the first generation of fully 3D games.
Speaking of Pong.
Pong! Not a lot to say, it’s Pong. It’s… all right.
Really? You don’t notice anything unusual about this?
Well it’s got the Galloping Ghost logo programmed into it.
Yeah, this machine is pretty different. You know more about engineering than I do, so let me know if any of this sounds right: The original Pong had no software. The entire game was hardware-based using binary switches?
That’s what I’ve read, yeah. I don’t think it was programmed in Binary necessarily but a very low level programming language.
Well, that had the side effect of it being REALLY easy to replicate once someone had the board and could see how it was laid out. So hundreds of small companies made reproduction Pong machines for bars back in the day.
Bootleg Pong. I had no idea.
Yeah. I’ve read that this particular machine was made by a local high school student who decided to make a replica Pong board for some kind of school project since they’re so easy to reproduce.
That’s actually really interesting. I guess it makes sense, Pong is so primitive that any old high school programming student can make it, but I never considered that they’d actually be supplying arcades that way.
Galloping Ghost is just that type of arcade. Granted, these days, many people are sticking their homebrew arcade games at random places. We have a cafe in Minnesota that had someone running someone’s homemade candy crush clone.
“Muh Zed-Ex Spectrum. D:”
Why is this called The New Zealand Story, again?
Because the game takes place in New Zealand. It’s about a Kiwi Bird.
Fair enough. It’s some sort of puzzle platformer, and it wasn’t really my jam.
This is one of those games that Brits who grew up in the 80s won’t shut up about because the ZX Spectrum port was supposedly a big deal over there.
Gotta keep that commonwealth solidarity, I guess.
Well, you know how 80s British gamers are. You know the Commodore 64 lasted way longer over there than in the states because they loved primitive PC gaming so much?
Yeah and the NES didn’t make much of an impact.
It was a bizarre culture where people largely made games in their garages and sent them to whoever was willing to publish them. I find that whole period fascinating.
It was the closest video games had to a punk phase. Now it’s all corporate and shit. Although I guess indie games are more popular than ever. So now it’s all twee indie rock from Seattle and shit.
In a sense, they were ahead of the curve on that.
The Neo-Geo aisle.
I don’t know but it seems like Neo-Geo cabinets are essentially random, in terms of number and assortment of games, aside from the odd one that’s like, here’s all the Metal Slug games.
This one?
Exactly.
I liked that they all had custom marquees showing the year each game was released. It puts into perspective just how long the damn thing lasted.
Yeah, that thing was going almost until the PS3/Xbox360/Wii era.
I think it’s the longest-supported arcade board ever. Making it able to hold multiple games as it did was brilliant. It being so economical in terms of space made it so popular.
The Samurai Shodown series was one of the big fighting games on the Neo Geo. As you can clearly see, this particular entry isn’t running on one.
Is it rare to find it on a dedicated cabinet?
It’s rare to find it at all. This game was released in the mid-00s after the Neo Geo MVS finally died. A lot of major Neo Geo series jumped ship to another board called the Atomiswave
A more powerful board, or some other reason for the change?
Well yeah. You can’t keep using a decade-old board forever. The Atomiswave was yet another derivative of the Sega NAOMI, but the exact situation behind its creation I don’t know. It was made by Sammy, though. Ultimately, very few of the games released on it came stateside. This is one of the VERY few that did.
Speaking of SNK fighters, what do you know about King of Fighters?
Very little. I know of the series and some of the characters.
Exactly. The series never really caught on in the states. It was Street Fighter’s main rival in Japan, not Mortal Kombat. A friend down in South America tells me King of Fighters is HUGE down there, too.
Yeah, that makes sense. I always saw KoF as an alternative to Street Fighter.
This particular version was KoF’s answer to Street Fighter IV. It’s a series I wish I knew more about, but fighting games are just so damn inaccessible.
Fighting games in general have a quite high skill barrier. It can be hard to get into them in a real way. I’m sure KoF is just the same.
It sucks. I feel I’m missing out on a big part of arcade history by not being able to experience them first-hand.
Well, did you enjoy that? Too bad, there’s more. The arcade was so big that it wouldn’t fit in one post. This is part one of three. Continue to part 2 ->
