This story...
..is worthless without screenshots.
The holiday spirit is still strong with This Old Box — or rather, the nog we're drinking this evening has some pretty strong spirits in it. Just semantics really. This old box logo But as the shopping days until C-day dwindle, there's computer games on many-a-reader's mind. And with Atari's latest resurrection in swing, we …
According to TheWife[tm]: "That's not knickers. It's a trick of light and shadow. Or 'shopped. The geometry is just plain wrong." (Her words, not mine.)
I disagreed ... Fiddling with a camera & lighting & some flimsy nightwear (and a largish dresser as stand-in for the fiberglass shell that I last saw at Straw Hat Pizza on San Antonio, between
Charleston & Middlefield on the Palo Alto/Mountain View border, in probably '73ish) , we can duplicate the picture ... but we only get the same effect sans knickers ... With pants, we get weird shadows that ruin the effect.
So I'm sorry, the model isn't wearing panties ... wait ... Is that good, or bad?
No, I'm not going to post pics as proof. Do your own fscking detective work :-)
My brother told me about one of those machines in one of the first shopping malls, Southland at Hayward, California. Apparently it sat in the mall just outside of the Woolworth's. It was weird enough looking that he conned my parents into letting him try it for a dollar or two while they were shopping. I was about five at the time, so my memories are limited.
I ran into my own version of this visiting my grandparents in about 1982 in the video arcade at Bell's Amusement Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It wasn't a bad game at all, and not nearly as hard as this makes it sound. I wonder if it's still there...
I recognized those curves immediately as the game in Soylent Green. I had always assumed that thing was a prop created solely for the movie set. It had that look of "this is what the future will be like" from the perspective of the early 70s. Pretty funny that those were actually built. The fiberglass and the metal flake paint makes me think of a sidecar or a custom trike from that era.
Having made simple circuits (LED 7segment controllers) from 7400 quad nands as part of a project at college, I am seriously impressed that this machine was made from these. The logic must have been a complete nightmare to work out/debug and the box must have been stuffed with circuitry. Pictures would have been nice?
@ Bob Merkin:
Well the funny thing is that the makers of Soylent Green (which is set in 2022), couldn't have known what the future of gaming would be like. So they used "Computer Space" and maybe thought "yeah, in the future people will have such cool games for their homes" :) and now just imagine where we are today in 2008, and what the games already look like :) I'm sure they wouldn't have imagined that (think of Crysis etc)