Previously: Tom and I had spent a goddamn week writing these blog posts. Half of the machines were broken, giving us little to write about. It was now Friday, and we wanted to get through them, so we did the rest in one sitting. But that’s probably the last of the broken machines…
Before going any further, they had an empty-ish room in the back.
I was super psyched when I saw this cabinet. Then — you’ll never guess what we found out when we took a closer look.
Yep, just like most of the cool import games, it wasn’t working.
Silent Hill has been one of my favorite series for a long time, and I didn’t know it had an arcade edition. It was one of the biggest disappointments of the trip to not get to experience it.
On the bright side, I’m 90% sure they had this at Round 1 in Philadelphia, so a few R1s have it. You’d probably have to find one of their early locations, though, since the newer ones are much more uniform in their game selection.
I assume you haven’t had the chance to experience it personally, but what can you tell us about the game itself?
Yeah, Philadelphia was a disaster, or I’d have played it. I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about this entry since it’s heavily tied to console gaming, which I know very little about.
All I know is it’s a light gun game, which isn’t my cup of tea usually, but you can slap pyramid head into any old thing and I’ll be there.
I’m sure he’s in there somewhere.
He definitely is. I looked up some gameplay after the trip and saw him in there.
Oh, what kind of game is it?
It’s just an autoscrolling light gun game. There’s a full playthrough on youtube – in keeping with the spirit of silent hill, it seems like it’s heavier on story than most arcade games.
I see. Hopefully, you can find one of these machines that works someday.
Just kidding.
This was sitting right next to it.
And guess what!
Yep, another machine that didn’t work.
We’re sounding really negative about this place, and I want to reiterate that Galloping Ghost is an amazing experience overall, but its number one issue is by far the number of non-functional machines. I don’t know if we came at a particularly bad period of time or if this is just typical for them, but it really surprised me.
From what I hear, it’s pretty standard. Anyway, I do know a little bit about this one. It’s a particularly big cab because you play it with a “whip” instead of a standard controller. Although by “whip”, I mean you swing around something akin to that PS3 controller with the glowing ball on top.
Is this a Castlevania game?
Yeah, it’s Castlevania.
Do you know if it has that Metroidvania style structure where you have to explore and backtrack, or is it a more linear, traditional arcade experience?
No, but I assume it’s a standard rail shooter-esque game. It’s also worth mentioning that this game DID get an English release.
But this is an import version.
The English version was only released in Europe, and it’s pretty rare. The Japanese version may have an English option, though.
Can’t go wrong with Q-bert.
Right. See, the game on the right has the updated marquee, while the game on the left has the swearing marquee.
Was the cartoony swearing controversial?
No, as I told you last time, it’s because people thought that the random symbols were the title of the game, which was confusing.
That’s right. Like a sort of Artist Formerly Known as Prince-ian thing. “Hey guys, wanna go play a round of Unpronouncable Symbols?”
One of those machines is running Q-Bert, while the other is running Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q-Bert.
Cue the Daft Punk here.
FHMC Q-Bert is technically an unreleased game, but the creator later dumped the rom of it online, so it’s not like you can only play it here or anything.
It’s still kind of interesting to see an actual arcade running these unreleased games, homebrew boards and romhacks. It feels very grunge in a way.
That reminds me, they had some art pages for sale up front that I assume were drawn by the guy who did the marquee art for Q-Bert.
I didn’t notice. That would have been cool to own. Marquee art is almost as interesting to me as the games themselves.
I considered getting one, but it’s better to leave them for people who care more adamant about Q-Bert than I am.
Note: That’s also Q-Bert’s Qubes next to them, but I forgot to mention it when we were writing this post. It’s the sequel to Q-Bert.
These are a pair of Midway 3D fighters, War Gods and Bio Freaks.
I know nothing about either game, but I will say that Bio Freaks is an awesome name.
War Gods was Midway’s first 3D fighter, even predating Mortal Kombat 4. It’s a game you can’t play without going, “yeah; this is obviously Mortal Kombat.”
Sounds like it was sort of a test run for bringing MK to 3D.
Basically. Especially since they did this “thing” to try to bring Mortal Kombat’s digitised art into 3D. Imagine the sprites from the first three MK games, except they’re 3D models.
It always seemed like MK was trying to be more pseudo 3D even in its 2D era, in a way Street Fighter and other similar fighters weren’t. So it would have been an easier leap.
Well, it looked weird, so they either scrapped the idea or toned it down considerably when it came time to make Mortal Kombat 4. War Gods looked more like Mortal Kombat than the 3D Mortal Kombats.
An uncanny valley type of situation, then?
Pretty much. The other one is an N64 game called Bio Freaks. The N64 version is a port of this arcade game, but the arcade game was never actually released.
Is it a light gun game? What is it?
It’s just another super violent 3D fighting game. And not a particularly good one.
I have to imagine because I owned an N64 and a ton of games and never heard of it.
There’s a good reason they scrapped the arcade release altogether.
The original After Burner in its full cab! Another one of the big Sega 80s full-motion games, like Space Harrier!
Was this also broken?
Of course.
Of course.
I played this and still have no idea what the hell it is.
What is this… some sort of golfing game?
No. It was in Japanese, so I didn’t fully understand it, but you pick a character at the beginning and go directly into some minigame. What’s on-screen was the game for the character I picked, but I assume each character has a different one. I figured it would be some kind of mini-game marathon, but it was just the one game you picked, as far as I could tell. It was also loaded with very, very Japanese humour, as you can probably tell from the characters on the marquee.
Which would explain its import only status.
Yeah, most of the imports at Galloping Ghost were notable for one reason or another. This one stood out to me because, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it. It’s just an imported game they seem to have gotten their hands on for some reason.
Galloping Ghost is nothing if not eclectic. I guess you just roll with whatever when you’re shooting for the world record.
I feel the need to mention this game since I read somewhere that it was unreleased. But this game was released in Japan, so maybe it’s an unreleased US version?
What is it? What’s up with the bull frogs on the marquee?
Oh, it’s just Ribbit, a Frogger clone made by Sega back in the era when every game was a clone of another game. As you can see, it was broken, though.
Of course.
We’re jumping around a bit, but there was a small room in the corner I didn’t get a good shot of.
And in frame, Tazzmania, featuring what I can only assume to be a green furry knockoff of Taz the Tasmanian Devil.
Yeah, pretty much. This game isn’t very noteworthy other than being reasonably obscure because of how old it is, but I only kept the picture around because it was as close as I got for an establishing shot of this room. This room was chaotic as hell, without much rhyme or reason to what they put in here.
Galloping Ghost’s land of misfit toys.
Speaking of which, this also happened to be housed in it.
This game sucks. Huhhuhuhuh.
Be nice; it’s one of the only places in the world you can play it.
Just trying to live up to the legacy of my childhood heroes there.
The story behind this game is that it was in development, and MTV had 12 beta copies set up at one of their MTV summer pool party things. Then they cancelled the game, so those 12 machines are the only ones that exist.
It seems like such a sure recipe for success, two of the most popular staples of the 1990s together at last: arcades and Beavis & Butthead. I wonder where it all went so wrong.
To make matters worse, quite a few of those 12 are unaccounted for. Most of the known copies are in the hands of private collectors. Only two machines make rounds in public: This one and one they sometimes pull out for gaming cons on the west coast. Plus, there’s no rom dump of it, so it’s particularly elusive. (edit: there was also a third one at Hyperspace Arcade around the time this post was originally written, but it’s long gone now)
If anyone out there is itching to play it, don’t set your expectations high. It’s a platformer sort of like the Simpsons arcade game that actually took off, only it doesn’t work. I was determined that we would play through the entire game, and I think you were too, but it froze after the second level and wouldn’t let us progress. The game is literally unplayable past a certain point.
No, it’s not literally unplayable. You can “finish” it, but it randomly loops back to the first level after a certain point. But it does crash easily.
In any case it’s pretty evident that this is not a complete, finished product. And the parts that do work are… not fun.
You can definitely see why this one got scrapped so late in production. But on the bright side, it was one of the few rare games here that (technically) worked!
It worked as well as it possibly could, so its issues are 100% on the devs, not on Galloping Ghost in this case. And although the game blows (huhuhuhuh), it was pretty wild. Like mainlining pure, distilled 90s.
This was Galloping Ghost’s 600th game, Star Wars.
As you can see from the guy inside it, this was a full sized cab that actually worked. I think it was surprisingly older than it looks on first blush.
They hyped the ever-loving hell out of the reveal of what their 600th game would be, so I was expecting something more spectacular. Unlike most of the broken-down full-size machines, this one doesn’t have a moving seat or anything, which is probably why it’s working.
Back in the corner behind Star Wars was all this.
The junkyard.
A whole bunch of broken games were shoved back here, implying that they’re trying to fix them up and add them to the arcade, I think? I think Galloping Ghost has way more games than here, but they’re in a separate storage facility, if I understand right.
Literally so many games they don’t know what to do with them all. There’s not a lot of room left in the arcade for them to add more cabinets.
Almost every inch of the building was part of the arcade, so they didn’t even have much room for machines like this.
I mean, look at this. That storage corner is so packed that there are games you just outright can’t get to because they have broken machines sitting in front of them.
It’s crazy. I wonder what they’ll do to defend their title in the future as other arcades seek to usurp them.
Again, they have so damn many games that no other arcade is anywhere close to 600. Plus, all of the dual-board machines make it very hard to compete for its title.
Nothing lasts forever. Someone’s gonna go gunning for the title one day. But for now, Galloping Ghost reigns.
Anyway, this is the final room. Which also kind of bleeds into the last room?
It was all sort of conglomerated in this section, not a clear differentiation between rooms.
This area stood out because it felt like there was some kind of coherence to the games kept here. I’m not sure what, but they felt like they “belonged” in this area. By the way, we’re not DONE with the main room; I’m just posting the photos in the order we wandered around.
It’s very easy to wander around aimlessly through Galloping Ghost. You get kind of hypnotized by the selection.
I kinda wanted to get the photos taken before we started playing, but oh well. I ultimately did miss getting shots of a few games, like… crap, what was the name of it… Heat-something? Burning-something? It was a Gradius spin-off.
Can’t say it’s ringing a bell.
It was back by Silent Hill and Castlevania. I couldn’t get a shot because there was a big group of high school friends hanging out at it and I generally don’t like getting people in my photos if I can avoid it.
Do you know anything about this one?
No, other than it was broken – of course.
I know Metal Gear has a big fanbase, so I’m sure people would have liked to know what this game is about.
It appears to be a pretty generic light gun rail shooter.
The only game in the series I’ve played had like 20 minutes of cutscenes at the beginning, and then they drop you in a jungle. So I ran around the jungle looking for something to fight and got my ass beat by an alligator. I think I just turned it off at that point.
SNAAAAAAKE EAAAAATERRRR
Yeah, I didn’t understand the hype.
It’s a thing you either love or don’t get at all.
Well, I’m not really much of a gamer.
What was this one again?
Rad Mobile.
Oh, it’s a game you’re familiar with?
Reverse image search engines are quite powerful nowadays.
It was one of Sega’s early Super Scaler games, even if I’ve never seen the deluxe version. I want to point this out because it’s another one of their exclusive machines in working conditions. There were so few that they all really stuck out.
Oh, Solar Assault! The name of that game I didn’t get a photo of was Solar Assault!
One of the shittier DBZ fighting games, and that’s saying something. Still, we had to try it.
Well, you had to try it. Nearly every anime con in Minneapolis has one of these that they bring out. Although sometimes they mix it up and bring out the Fate/Stay Night arcade game instead.
In any case, it was underwhelming.
It’s very popular at the cons, though. The other game paired with it is Psychic Force 2012, a game I don’t know anything about other than it has a cult following.
I’m still mad.
Oh man. This dude was at this cabinet the ENTIRE time we were at Galloping Ghost. Actually he was playing through with a buddy, right?
Be nice. It wasn’t just this dude. There was another group that jumped in after him.
I get it. It’s Sailor Moon, it’s a beat em up, what more could you want? Of course it’s going to be popular. But I wanted to play too, damn it.
Considering it’s tucked away in the furthest corner of the arcade, I’m amazed that it was occupied the entire time we were here.
I watched a longplay online and in addition to the hook of a Sailor Moon beat em up, it looks like a solidly fun game too.
Yep, this game is very popular among belt-scroller enthusiasts. The Super Famicom RPG, too. Sailor Moon has a lot of really good games for some reason.
We tried to play this one.
This was the platform fighter, right?
Yes, it was very Smash Bros-esque.
For the short time we played it, we never got a hang of how it actually works. We ended up in different parts of the stage that were separated by a wall that we couldn’t really pass through.
I think a big part of that was that my shoot button didn’t work, so I couldn’t do anything but run and jump. And you did eventually make it to me and start beating up my guy until you realized my controls were broken.
Another semi-busted game.
Shame, I’d have liked to play it.
Here’s a game I’ve been curious about for over a decade.
Go on.
Once upon I played the Japanese version of a Korean MMORPG, and only ten gaijin played it, so we were a pretty close-knit group. The highest-level player among us was a massive fan of this game. Rival Schools is a fighting game where each character is a manga school archetype, so you’ve got characters from different clubs. For example, a baseball club guy fights precisely as you’d expect.
Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of Rival Schools. I think we even spent some time on this machine too, didn’t we?
Yes, although not much. You cannot get a good feel for fighting gamesfrom one or two matches. I think the thing the series is most remembered for is that the artist would later go on to do the Phoenix Wright games, so the characters are all drawn in his highly exaggerated style.
Oh right, the oddity that is Cliff Hanger.
I guess this was given a western release before anyone in the west knew or cared what Lupin III was.
It uses footage from Castle of Cagliostro and some other movie I’m not familiar with.
In any case, surprise surprise: not playable during our visit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hghol1iG2DQ
Welp, there won’t ever be a more perfect reference to that scene.
Nope. So I’m just gonna say, “this is Dragon’s Lair, Dragon’s Lair 2, and Space Ace. They’re all the same kinda ‘push the button not to die’ FMV game, just like Cliff Hanger”, and move on.
Resident Evil Gun Survivor 2, I think, is the full title of this one?
Horrible title.
Well, the title is for a reason. This is the second game in the Gun Survivor series. The second arcade adaption of Resident Evil.
It’s a pretty obvious choice. Take a popular console series and make a quick rail shooter out of it for the arcade market. It has a built-in audience.
The first game in the series was also Resident Evil. And the fourth. The third entry in the series was Dino Crisis, of all things, so I guess this was meant to be an anthology series of sorts. As you can see, this game was broken, so we couldn’t play it.
Of course.
Oh, hey, Stun Runner. This is an early 3D polygonal game that’s exceptionally fast-paced for the time it was released. In tunnels, you can even drive on the walls and ceilings.
Do you know the year of release?
1989
Damn. That’s legitimately impressive. It looks like something from the mid to late 90s.
Yeah, it’s extremely underrated.
Ah, this one. It’s the second time I’ve run into this game, but the first time I’ve seen a working version. Ironically.
B A N A N A S T I C K
You’re a fan of this game, so go ahead.
Super Monkey Ball was a punishingly difficult game on the Gamecube, and it’s absolutely no different in the arcade version. The slightest motion of the stick can send your poor character careening at an uncontrollable speed and angle straight off the side of the level. It’s great.
The Gamecube version is a port of this.
Which I never knew until you told me at the time. I had thought the console version was the original. It was a lot of fun to go back to the series roots, in that light.
This is obviously a game from Sega’s weird late 90s/early 00s experimental era. I suspect there was a Dreamcast port in the works that was killed for obvious reasons. I know the Gamecube version was one of the system’s earliest titles. It may have even been Sega’s first game outside a Sega console unless I’m forgetting one.
Remember that Invasion game we ran into at Garcade?
Sure.
This is the original gun I mentioned back then.
Dig the 50s-future look.
Yeah, I had to get a photo of it. It’s really striking.
I really wanted to know what The Fallen Angels was.
We couldn’t get it to play, could we?
More specifically, the button that switches games was broken. It was stuck on that Martial Arts game.
Right.
Well, it turns out Fallen Angels was a fighting game where all the characters are really pale and emo-looking. The character designer would later do some major characters in KoF.
Super Chemical Romance Bros
Something like that. Still, I’d have liked to play it at the time.
Did… Did you want to keep this photo or did I?
It’s not really doing anything for me, so I dunno. Who can forget such arcade classics as “unidentifiable game with a wheel” and “unidentifiable game with three wheels”?
Come on; you should recognise Off-Road. That game was EVERYWHERE in the 90s. But it’s also one I’ve talked about on this blog before so I wouldn’t have kept this photo. For those reading, there were originally 130+ photos of Galloping Ghost. We had to cull like a third of them because we had nothing to say about the game in them. It took like two hours.
You’re thorough, that’s for sure.
It’s a habit I got in because of how easily arcades tend to die suddenly. I like to preserve them the best I can. By the way, we’ve also been writing this damn blog post every night for a week. We’re tired.
It’s all for love of the game, Tash.
I know that better than anyone, but still. I’m probably going to have to split this up into three posts.
But thankfully, this is the last game.
I’ve always loved Mega Man, so there was no way I’d pass this up.
Wait, they didn’t have this at that one anime con you came into town for? I could have sworn it was in the back, behind Smash.
Maybe it was and I missed it. Anyway, this game is a sort of boss rush.
Imagine just fighting a bunch of Megaman bosses in a row, and that’s the entire game.
It was a lot of fun, though. We even managed to beat the entire thing.
No, I accidentally reset it because the button to add more credits wasn’t working, and I accidentally hit the “switch game” button, thinking that might have been it. So we didn’t beat the final boss.
My mind invented a false memory to spare me the memory of the heartache.
Well, both of these games are on the Megaman Anniversary Collection if you ever want to play them at home. That’s where I know them from.
And then there was pizza.
A fitting end to the day. But it wasn’t as good as a Chicago pizza should be.
It was really good; it just wasn’t the super deep dish I wanted. When you’re in Chicago, you gotta get an authentic Chicago-style pizza, you know?
Absolutely. If you’re not questioning whether you were accidentally served a casserole, it’s not a real Chicago pizza experience.
The pizza was good, though. Tom was supposed to be around the entire weekend, but something came up, and he had to leave after this, so this is where his story ends.
The requisite arcade outing slurpee.
We managed to get my traditional Slurpee before he left. This one was Pepsi-flavored, which I’d never seen at 7-11 before.
Pepsi slurpee… no thanks.
You’re no fun. Anyhow, it’s been a long trip, so let’s have some nice long closing thoughts now. I’m going to do my own later, but only after finishing the other arcades I saw in Chicago. It’s probably better to do this now while this post is still fresh in your mind.
As far as Galloping Ghost is concerned, it was still the best arcade of the trip for me despite all the busted machines. I was looking forward to it a lot and I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer number of cabinets. Sure, a lot of them were broken, but there were enough games there to spend hours and hours and still only get to a fraction of them. The pictures really don’t do it justice because it’s just so crammed full of so many different things to experience.
Tell me, what do you think I thought of it?
You’ve been to enough high quality arcades that I figure you probably wouldn’t award it an “S-Class” ranking. But I know you were impressed by so much of what you saw, anyway.
Oh good, you understand. Tell me, have you been to Funset yet?
Nope. It’s too cold to make trips to things that aren’t strictly necessary right now.
It’s too bad; I was hoping you’d have been there before we made this post, so it would be easy to explain my reasoning. Galloping Ghost made me think long and hard about what an S-class ranking is. It’s a term I originally came up with to lump Circus Circus and the two good arcades I found on the East Coast together. Funset comes very close to getting the rating, even though it’s kind of a worn down arcade.
I ultimately concluded that it’s not about quality but my personal affiliation for the arcade. Like, finding new arcades is a hobby of mine. An S-class arcade is the type of arcade I’m excited to find. Like a huge arcade that’s been around for decades with a lot of weird old machines, you don’t see anywhere else. One with years of history you can experience just by walking through it. Galloping Ghost is a fantastic arcade, but it just doesn’t have any of that. Does that make sense?
It does. Although for me, who doesn’t go to many arcades, it’s definitely the most impressive and the overall best one I’ve experienced.
I’m glad you liked it. I liked it too. There were loads of machines I’ll never see anywhere else. But again, it wasn’t a place I felt any personal connection to.
As to the trip overall, it was like nothing I’d done before. I’ve never gone on this sort of arcade tour or really thought much about how arcades differ from one another. We saw the very corporate, glitzy type of arcade and the more down to earth, labor-of-love small town type of arcade, and everything between – which is sort of where I’d put Galloping Ghost – and every arcade had its own unique charm. I didn’t expect that, to come away from it with a distinct impression of each arcade we visited, but that was definitely the case.
Too bad you didn’t get to see any of the later ones. They were REALLY something else. Especially the one after next was an arcade I honestly didn’t think could still exist in modern times.
It gave me an appreciation for it as a hobby, because it goes a lot further than just the games themselves, it’s really like going to different museums in a way.
Right. You’re finally starting to see what I see.
I wish I could have seen the later arcades too, but it’s not necessarily the end of the line. I’d definitely be willing to try something like this again in the future.
This was the first time I ever brought someone with me on an expedition. It was a nice change of pace. If you ever have some time off, I know of quite a few interesting arcades around the Great Lakes area. Even two that I strongly suspect might be S-ranks.
With a hook like that, we’ll have to meet up and do it sometime soon. If Galloping Ghost doesn’t quite clear the bar to S-class, I need to see first hand what does.
Maybe not “soon”, as I’m still recovering from the cost of this one, but definitely sometime this year. Even writing these posts with someone else has been really refreshing.
It cuts the work in half! Sort of. Let me know when your wallet can take the hit, Tash.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I hope we can find a way to do it on the cheap. Well, anyway, the blog post is almost done. Any last words?
Fuck all those people who hogged the Sailor Moon cabinet.
Perfect.
And so ends the story of the World’s Biggest Arcade, along with Tom’s time on the trip. However, I’ve only been to half of the arcades on the Chicago hit list. Join me whenever I get around to typing them up for the last five.
