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.
Defender
Defender
Defender
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.
Then they took the console away.
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