For a lot of you, arcades might just seem like something that old people like me talk about but there was a time when they were just one of the most awesome places for a gaming fan to visit. Back then we had consoles, but they were nowhere near as powerful as the arcade machines. Even games that existed both in arcades and on home consoles there was a very real and noticeable difference between the two with the arcade version obviously being a lot better.
There was also the question of the actual interface being a lot more fun and this was the case with a unique game called Cyberball 2072 made by Atari of all people. There were two versions of this game in arcades but the best one was the premium one that was called Tournament Cyberball 2072 because it had two sets of monitors where you could play head-to-head against another player.
This was basically an American football game but instead of human players you controlled a team of robotic players and this was a very good idea on Atari's part (one of the few good ideas they ever had) because they could avoid any copyright infringement or the need to pay royalties to real world players. They also wouldn't turn off actual fans who were disappointed to not see their favorite players in a game because of course their favorite players aren't in a game that takes place 90 years in the future and consists of robot players.
The game functioned exactly like an American football game would normally, with you selecting plays beforehand and then hoping that it was the correct choice based on what your opponent chose. The difference here was that since if you were playing a human opponent they wouldn't be able to see your play selection which was always a bit of a problem when playing 2-player football games at home.
The 4 down system in American football took an interesting twist in Cyberball because there was much more at stake than just losing possession of the ball on 4th down. The ball became explosive on 4th down and would destroy whatever robot was holding it if they didn't get a 1st down. This isn't so devastating at first, but later on when you upgrade certain bots on your team, it can mean the destruction of a valuable "player" on your side.
Unlike home games or genuine NFL products, there wasn't a huge amount of plays to choose from and that was just fine because this wasn't designed to be a fever-dream for hardcore American football fans, this was designed to be able to be played by everyone...and it was for the most part. For a certain amount of tokens you could play an entire 1/4 of a match which meant that normally, for $1 you could play an entire game.
There were other aspects of it that you had to keep your eyes on as well such as wear and tear on the bots. After a certain amount of hits your most used offensive players would start to have damage and if they had smoke or fire coming out of them, this meant there was a chance if they were tackled hard they would explode and therefore a turnover would happen. You could replace or upgrade players only during certain points in the game, so often you found yourself in a position where a certain ball recipient was very dangerous to give the ball to.
If these graphics look primitive to you, well, they should. This arcade machine was released in 1989, well before home consoles completely took over the market.
The game itself wasn't terribly complex but this was by design I think. It was meant to be a game where anyone could just pick up and play it and this encouraged people to put more tokens into the machines - which given the cost of such a large piece of hardware, needed to be a lot of tokens/quarters in order to pay for the several thousand dollar machine. I found a functioning arcade machine for sale on Ebay, and it was selling for $2200 today. I have no idea what it cost when it was released but I would imagine that the cabinets must have been profitable because there were sanctioned tournaments hosted across the USA, one of which was in my city and I attended, but didn't participate as a player.
They did a good job encouraging people to put more coins in because you wanted to see who would win the entire game if it was close and we had our suspicions that the game was intentionally kept close by giving some "cheese" opportunities to one side that was leading as the 3rd quarter came to a close in almost all instances.
I don't expect anyone to watch the full 17 minutes video but if you watch just a bit of it you will see that they speed the clock up to much faster than real time so it could eat up as much of the clock as possible and burn your quarters thereby encouraging you to put more in. At the time though, I still thought it was a pretty fair thing for $1 to get you an entire game of robot football.
Between the sound, the easy to pick up gameplay, and the unique interface, this remains one of my favorite arcade games of all time. I suppose because I know a bit about American football increased the chances that I was going to enjoy this anyway.
I miss those days of going to the arcade to see what new machines they were going to have and it was a real letdown in my life when the were no longer economically viable and there was no reason to go to them anymore. Believe it or not arcades used to be everywhere and definitely were in every shopping mall. These days they only exist in some sort of museum sort of setting because even popular places like Dave and Busters rarely have any sort of real arcade games.
There isn't much reason for them to exist I guess since if you really want the stand-up arcade experience, you can purchase a cabinet that is capable of playing almost anything that was ever made for the cost of a single game cabinet back in the day.
These memories will have to remain in my mind I'm afraid, but I am very happy that I was alive during their heyday.