Atari's Famous TEMPEST Arcade Machine In The Lesser Known CABARET Cabinet - Color Vector Monitor

ladies and gentlemen atari has invaded the building here at joe's video games we have in the legendary tempest this was atari's first color vector arcade game and as you can see this is the cabaret version so we'll go over that in a second but we like to videotape cool games we get in and does it get much cooler than tempest i mean that's pretty awesome look it's so cool the people outside are slowing down to look you see that anyway this is atari's tempest and this is the cabaret uh version like i said it was their first uh color vector game and it's working pretty good what a sweet game atari released games three different ways usually like this one they released three different ways there was the upright version with all the side art like a you know a more traditional style arcade game that you've seen you know and maybe the ones that you remember the most and then there were the sit-down games with the glass top they called those pizza hut cabinets a lot of people called them but uh the official name for them was a cocktail cabinet i guess so you could set a cocktail on it right and then these were the cabaret versions you know cabaret is just an old word for bar so these were made for places like bars they don't take up quite as much room it's probably only maybe five feet tall or a little less than five feet tall and the sides as you can see are wood grain this came out in 1980 in 1980 wood grain was classy folks i mean that was you know especially for a bar right fit right in they didn't want anything loud with a bunch of uh crazy graphics on the side so they just wanted wood grain make it look more like furniture but yet it made money proven by the coin door down right there so anyway so they were set up a little bit different than the upright but the the board inside is exactly the same so the game plays exactly the same and atari's cabaret versions actually had the same size monitor so they were 19-inch monitors that looked exactly the same so um it was just like having the upright just the cabinet was a little smaller so i'll show you the atari had this habit too of putting these stickers on the front i don't know why they didn't put them on the back but they put these stickers on the front of the machine with the serial number and everything on it so this is number 1347. these cabarets they usually didn't make as many of i don't know how many tempest cabarets they made but the marquee was right there with a light behind it looks really cool and then atari always gave you like over the top graphics so you know if the thing wasn't turned on you would think that it was going to look like that when you played it but it really looked like that which is still cool but you know you have to use your imagination to get there with it it says 1980 copyright on the screen but i think they all came out in 1981 and these are atari's volcano start buttons or cone buttons they call them it's on free play which is why it's blinking if you put a if you walked up to it i believe they would both be if i remember correctly they're both on um and then whenever you drop a quarter in only the first one comes on or something like that i can't maybe the first one starts blinking and then if you drop a second quarter they both start blinking or if it's in free play they both just standard continuously blink like that and so it's really simple controls you had a spinner one of the coolest controls ever check this out and they don't work as good if they don't make that little winding noise right and then of course a fire button and the super zapper very important so you're scoring here foosball fuse ball 250 500 700 points zips up and down the line the pulsars 200 points pulsate adjacent lines very dangerous those pulsars the flippers that's the ones that you're used to you see those all the time the tankers 100 points splits into two flippers whenever you hit it and then the spiker 50 points it builds a green spike which the player must shoot away all right instructions insert coin push one or two player select whatever's flashing right pick the difficulty of your starting surface with the rotary control then push fire to start the game win bonus points if you survive the chosen surface it's an interesting way of putting it calling it a surface which i guess it is you walk around the surface shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges player loses a life when he's either caught by an enemy which is usually the flippers hit by a charge or skewered by a spike which usually happens whenever you're going from one surface to another and then they give you they're kind enough to give you some hints to make your quarter last a little bit longer because atari was always thinking about you hold the fire button down for continuous fire use the super zapper to zap all enemies on the tube you'll get one super zap per tube avoid spikes when you zoom down the tube kill enemies at the top by shooting at the enemy as it flips firing into a long enemy spikes for best machine gun effect which will kill enemies flipping towards you kill pulsar by shooting at it when it is not pulsing pulsing lines kill kill fuse ball by shooting as shooting at it shooting it as it crosses between the lines touching a fuse ball is fatal so there you go now the thing about this um is it was atari's first game to use a color vector monitor and so they had there were two types of monitors there were raster monitors which is like your television or the older televisions with the crt tube in it and the way they worked was they would draw the whole screen in a big square dot by dot starting from the top and they'd go all the way across and then they'd draw the next line all the way across and draw the next line and to do that 15 000 times a second so quick you couldn't even see it right and uh that's why whenever you videotape it though you'll see kind of lines rolling through the screen the camera's picking up on it but on these it's a vector monitor which they uh they called a uh xy monitor and basically what it does is the game board tells it to draw a line from this position to this position and so because of that it doesn't scan everything in like that it just draws blinds and so i can draw these really crisp cool looking diagonal jagged lines and they're not really jagged if you see them in person they're they're real straight but on the camera it does look jagged but uh it's just a it's a look that you just can't get um on a raster monitor it just doesn't look the same so uh they're really bright whenever things explode it's just pretty cool so but they only made a few color vector monitors the the monitors at the time weren't that reliable so they eventually figured out years later how to make them more reliable but at the time they would burn up these little uh transistors that are on the the monitor chassis and they cost like fifty dollars a piece back then and if you didn't know what you were doing and it burnt up one of those transistors you would replace it turn the monitor back on and it just burn it up again immediately it'll burn it up as soon as it's plugged in because something else is shorted well years later everybody figures out oh well that's no big deal if you do this and this it makes them really reliable and now those little transistors cost three dollars so it's no big deal but back then the operators just hated it so a lot of these games were just shelved i mean they started they put they'd put four new transistors in it they blew all four of them as soon as they turned it on they went 200 bucks and this the game's still not working so they would part them out turn them off put them store them in the in the room and you know in the warehouse even if they even if uh they got them working again they'd take them off location because they just you know they'd rather turn it into a game with a raster monitor in it so but to people that collect the games these were the coolest ones man i mean everybody wants to color vectors so some of the games uh atari followed this up i don't know if it was the next game or if it was a couple years later but they followed it up with the star wars arcade game and it also had a color vector monitor it was just awesome so but this is tempest there's this was their first one and now other companies had the color vector games too but this was atari's first so we just thought we'd film a little bit of it i'll go get the tripod and then we'll uh we'll shoot a little video of the gameplay see you in a few all right folks we are back with the tempest i'll show you the gameplay a little bit again it's a vector monitor so it's different than most of the other monitors that are out there so it it's kind of hard to get a good tape of or a good uh video of i should say like how the lines look jagged there they don't look like that in person they're real straight just kind of weird but that's how it is um and if you haven't seen one of these in person they don't look anything like a tv looks they're just uh it's just weird they just draw lines and it's just it looks different than anything you've ever seen so you got to check one out if you're near us and we've still got it stop by here you can check this one out so but i'm going to start the game off we'll play a couple uh a couple levels i'm not very good at tempest but i'll play through a couple just so you can see the gameplay basically you've got a spinner a fire button and this super zapper for whenever things get really rough and you just gotta get out of there so i turned the audio up so you can hear less of me and more of the awesome atari-ness that from 1980 so here we go novice i better start there so see the green spikes coming up foreign that was the super zapper so that they wouldn't get me walking around the edge like they just did oh it's getting tough folks wow oh they got me oh i think that's it no i got another man oh you can shoot it enough that it'll disappear oh man not good all right that's that oh they're gonna let me put my initials in i guess i'm the best ever on this machine actually if you look i mean i knew i was good but i didn't know i was that good there we go anyway that's a little bit of tempest if you haven't played it in a while it was released on a few uh home systems the original one like this but uh not with a vector monitor you know so uh these are pretty desirable and we figured we'd videotape one whenever we got in especially since it's this cool cabaret version but uh if you want to check out the other games we've got available right now go to lionsarcade.com or you can stop by our shop we're in downtown rock hill south carolina that's about 15 minutes south of charlotte north carolina and we've got a showroom here and we we buy games that are uh usually not working and we fix them up the guy in the attract mode is better at the game than i am what's up with that but anyway we uh we fix them up and get them working and then we usually sell them to people for their home game rooms but some of them people put out on location still you know we sold to barcades and stuff like that we sold the doctor's offices and skating rinks and all kinds of places so if if you're looking for something check out our website or if not just enjoy the videos if you subscribe to our channel we'll be putting up all kinds of videos if it's something we haven't shot before and it's a decent game we'll take a video of it so you can see it and remember remember what things were like back whenever these were all over the place so all right we'll see you next time have a good one