I was working through my stack of podcast shame over the weekend, knocking over a stack of pods while we painted the library. Listening to John Gruber’s The Talk Show, I was momentarily delighted by Gruber and Merlin Mann talking about Defender, the old coin-op console game.
They recalled it as being incredibly difficult. I smiled at that. I learned it by muscle memory. There was a 20c console in the student common room of the Psyche Department at UQ. By some quirk of engineering, my flatmate Jim’s car keys also opened the coin box.
We let the coins be, but if you were willing to take a small electric shock you could stick your hand into the guts of the machine and tweak a tiny wire lever that the 20c piece was supposed to trip, giving you unlimited plays. (Or to be more accurate 99 free plays. If you went too far, the counter flipped back to 00 rather than over to 100 freebies).
I got very, very good at that game.
Not so good at my psyche subjects though.
The console guy switched over the games by swapping out a card. When he saw he just wasn’t making bank on Defender anymore he replaced it with Choplifter.
I still have the muscle memory for playing that bad boy through to the final screen too.
Reminds me of my friend Bill (come to think of it, remotely possible you knew him, he seemed to know everyone at UQ) who had a trick with a coin and a piece of string, and could get free games by letting the coin dangle down far enough to trip the detector, then hauling it back up.
I did my degree later in my 30s so it was all coffee , school runs and questioning my life choices. Arcade games were something I couldn't afford as a 12 year old in small town NZ, and when I did play it wasn't defender , that was way too hard. I made up for it though by playing Call of Duty at home when I should have been studying and not breezing through a law degree with minimal effort.
There’s nothing like a game obsession to get you through uni…for me it was some car race game I can’t quite remember the name of. But it was in the games room of the Plymouth Student Union next to the pool tables and foozball (we called it table football) not far from the bar. But I had to pay for that. Still, I eventually beat it into submission. Quite surprisingly got a degree, too.
There's a life lesson struggling to find its way out, I think.
Did anyone else read “Then they took the console away” in a dramatic voice? Like it was the opening to some tragic redemption story.
Sounds like it was a Skinner Box that the department set up to run an experiment on students as part of a study.
Reminds me of my friend Bill (come to think of it, remotely possible you knew him, he seemed to know everyone at UQ) who had a trick with a coin and a piece of string, and could get free games by letting the coin dangle down far enough to trip the detector, then hauling it back up.
I did my degree later in my 30s so it was all coffee , school runs and questioning my life choices. Arcade games were something I couldn't afford as a 12 year old in small town NZ, and when I did play it wasn't defender , that was way too hard. I made up for it though by playing Call of Duty at home when I should have been studying and not breezing through a law degree with minimal effort.
There’s nothing like a game obsession to get you through uni…for me it was some car race game I can’t quite remember the name of. But it was in the games room of the Plymouth Student Union next to the pool tables and foozball (we called it table football) not far from the bar. But I had to pay for that. Still, I eventually beat it into submission. Quite surprisingly got a degree, too.