If you&#;re a regular Arcade Blogger reader, you might recall that back in November , I made my annual trip to The Free Play Florida event in Orlando &#; read my review here.
Each year, I am asked to get involved with the event organisation in some way. This year we decided to try out a panel quiz, where gamers, collectors and developers could pit their wits against each other and answer questions relating to the Golden Age of Classic Arcade Gaming.
So I came up with just under 100 questions in a variety of formats. The panelists had to answer general knowledge arcade questions, and identify arcade cabinets and games from images of screenshots and artwork.
The quiz was a great success! We delivered it in a very informal and irreverent style, and managed to keep a lid on the chaos for the most part. I wanted something that was fun for everyone involved, and to give those people in the audience a chance to not only paticipate, but also perhaps learn something along the way too.
So this week I thought I&#;d share two things: The slides for the quiz itself that were used to pose the questions on the day, so that you guys can have a go at testing your own knowledge of Classic Arcade Gaming. And then further down this page is the video of the quiz itself &#; if you don&#;t fancy challenging yourself, jump straight to that and have a watch.
So here are the questions. You might want to make them full screen in your browser &#; click the box bottom right of the frame to do this. Simply navigate using the arrows at the base of the frame, or you can just click on the image to get to the next slide. In each case, one slide will have the question, screenshot or artwork, and the next will give you the answer:
If you manage to keep a running score, let us know in the comments below how you got on.
But if that feels like too much hard work, just sit back and check out how our panelists got on below:
Bertillo contains other products and information you need, so please check it out.
Many thanks to the two teams who were great sports and delivered a few laughs along the way: Nathan Barnatt, Warren Davis, Jenn May and Billy Mitchell.
Watching back, I&#;ve noticed a couple of factual errors made (mostly by me) &#; see if you can spot them!
Feedback on the day was very positive and we plan to roll this format out further in future, so keep an eye out for the next one at this year&#;s event in Florida.
Have fun &#; let me know your scores in the comments below!
See you next time.
Tony
Ok MaximRecoil,
Here we go again. I think our disagreement comes from our individual differences in what makes a game culturaly significant. Citing POP cultural references to market licensing ploys like kids cereals, and children's shows that most can't remember until they see them on shows like "We Love the 80's." If that's your idea of cutural significance, then sure Pac man, DK, Qbert, Space Ace, Dirk the Daring, & Ms Pac will be more culturaly signicant because they all have characters that are easily marketed. And Galaga has no such character.
But if you consider the culture that is video arcadia as the playing of, the lasting mark a game makes on its industry, the countless times a game is imitated by later games, the effect a game makes on a genre. Then yes, I do believe that Galaga surpassed Space Invaders a long time ago. I don't deny that Space invaders is iconic and culturally significant. But Galaga is more significant. Whereas Space invaders is the birth of the shooter, Galaga is the perfection of the modern shooter that most games from then on evolved from.
In that respect, I did not intend to imply that any of the other games were not culturaly significant. They are, but again, they are no more a classic or significant than galaga. But considering that the point of this thread was to find the utimate classic arcade shooter, I do feel that Galaga is more relevanant than all the others mentioned.
As for DK, its a great game that I intend on finding a copy of the board at some point soon. But the point to my post was that the game has ballooned in popularity since the documentary "King of Kong." Before then, the game was a favorite among collectors, but you just didn't hear about it day in and day out. And considering that their were 3 arcade games to the DK lineage and there were around 7 in the Galaga lineage, it would be easy to argue that Galaga had bigger effect to the arcade industry.
And speaking of markets, lets look at defender. It may have made more money at its initail release(as did SI most likely). I would venture that the reason behind this is that games of SI and Defender were much shorter in duration for most players. But if you talk to operators still out there trying to make a living, they will tell you that Galaga & Ms Pac can earn 30 dollars a month still. And considering how many of them still remain on location and active as a still popular title, I can't believe you can't see that over the course of those games 25 year history that they wouldn't have made more than Defender is mind boggling. I haven't seen a Defender in the wild in 15 years. And its Galaga's staying power, and earning power that add to its cultural significance. The fact that I can go to 2 or 3 places in town and play a galaga says something about its impact. I can't say the same about DK or SFII. I can't say that about pac man come to think about it, although I can say it about Ms Pac.
And a few closing statements. By my recolection the video industry has been in trouble more than once. IIRC, it was Super Mario Brothers that single handedly saved the video game industry when atari nearly drove it into the ground by realeasing too many crappy third party games onto your beloved home console. It was a plumber named mario & his bro luigi and not an over the hill gorilla that came to the rescue. As for SF-II saving the day, I seem to recall it having a little help from Mortal Kombat. Sure, SF-II was the birth of a genre(if you don't count Kung Fu and Karate Champ), but MK perfected that genre. It would be a tough call as to which one was more significant in saving the arcades in the 90s. But that is a whole other conversation.
Its for these reasons that I believe Galaga is "the ultimate classic arcade shooter" which is the answer the Jaded Gamer was looking for.
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit Classic Arcade Shooting Games.