Arcade Blogger

The artist for the image on the basic programming cart was Rick Guidice. He did a lot of art for Nasa in the same style. [1]

A big reason video artwork from that period is so interesting is that the game graphics were limited, forcing a lot of artistic interpretation. Semi related, I recently found this, which seems like a futuristic reimagining of the original Atari style. [2]

Atari was a real pioneer in this space. They got their start doing arcade games for the midway. Which necessitates having eye popping attraction art to draw in players and collect their quarters. The quickly developed their own style which was pretty much copied all over the industry.

There's a great book called Art of Atari which is I highly recommend if you are interested in the history of this stuff. [3]

[1] https://www.rickguidice.com/nasaart/nasaarti.html

[2] https://arcadeblogger.com/2022/12/04/what-if-ataris-pong-was-a-sci-fi-movie/

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Atari-Tim-Lapetino/dp/1524101036

The Pinball Hall of Fame is notable for having a working Pinball Circus[1], of which there were only 2 ever built. I try to give it a play every time I'm in town. It's also got quite a few other rare games that are very difficult to find elsewhere, including a significant collection of electromechanical games that usually don't get much representation in arcades. I do agree that the level of maintenance isn't great, but that's basically true for almost any place with more than ~10 machines. I have a comment here[2] about the state of the places I go to regularly in San Francisco, but basically the only one that's consistently good is the one where the owner is onsite and does the maintenance himself.

[1]: https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35965664

I like the old machines. I enjoy reading about those brave collectors that buy these machines and try to keep them running.

For me I think the arcade experience is now more about the controls map to the games. (track ball/ nob/ flight yoke) for games like missile command/centipede , tempest, star wars).

The have "shows" now were people haul their machines to a hall and let the public play. For example the "california extreme expo"

https://arcadeblogger.com/2017/08/04/california-extreme-2017-arcade-expo/

I find this blog about restoring and finding old machines fun :
https://arcadeblogger.com/

I'd find it easier to believe this comment is AI generated, given that the account is only 53 minutes old. The text on the t-shirt looks totally normal to me.

The fact that this blogger, who's blog I'm reading for the first time today, has been posting archive footage and imagery, using a pretty similar format, from the same factory since at least 2019 (https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-footage/), and also the fact that the new post is his first blog post in 18th months, makes me think it's highly unlikely that this the post AI generated in any way.

While I am not implying these were used as such, another purpose these complicated sequences can hold is as a code trap for clone detection.

Code Traps:

https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/06/29/atari-centipedes-hidden-code-trap/

And the discussion here a month ago about code traps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312256

Along similar lines in both the digital and non-digital world people would include false landmarks and roads on maps to detect copying, since while facts are not protected, fake places are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Yes, screen printing, but there's more to it than those two words!

And the video in the post was sourced and uploaded by...the blog post author.

Also, let's be serious, that blog has been writing about arcade related things for over a decade https://arcadeblogger.com/2013/04/01/1814065/ and running a podcast since 2020, and the author wrote a book in 2020.

One could say he puts real effort into all this, you know?