Sad news to report on the blog this week. Midway’s Director of Marketing during the Golden Era of classic arcade gaming passed away on 14 May 2024 aged 94. He lived out his later years in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Midway’s Stanley Jarocki pictured here in 1982 Jarocki’s influence on the industry should not be underestimated. He was the king of the Japanese licence, bringing many games over from the East and introducing them to American arcade gamers across the nation. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Rally X to name a few, and of course he oversaw the most successful arcade game ever to be released in ..read more

Episode 34 of the Ted Dabney Experience podcast is available now for your listening pleasure! If you enjoy reading ArcadeBlogger.com, you’ll love the other project I’m involved with: Ted Dabney Experience Podcast episode 34. Click the image to listen in! For this episode we speak with none other than Allan Alcorn, Atari employee number three after Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, and the engineer of Pong, one of the very first video arcade games. You can check out this episode on our website:  Here Or find us on your favourite podcast platforms, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podc ..read more

I recently came across a few interesting and previously unseen rejected artwork examples from the original cabinet design of Puck Man. So this week, I figured I’d do a follow up to the last blog entry about the Puck Man PCB, by sharing some of the great artwork originally created for the game’s release. You can read the previous article here. Puck Man‘s artwork was created by Namco artist Tadashi Yamashita. He joined Namco as a student in 1969 after responding to an advertisement in a newspaper. One successfully landing the job, he mainly focused on designing artwork, logos, and typefaces for ..read more

44 years ago (22 May 1980 to be precise), the first Puck Man machine was placed in an arcade in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, starting a worldwide global videogaming phenomenon. Today, Namco’s Pac-Man remains one of the most recognisable video game characters, transcending popular culture. Namco’s sales flyer for the Japanese market for Puck Man I won’t rehash the story, but I wrote about the development of Pac-Man a few years back – you can pick up that background by reading that article on this link. And from that post, we can quickly summarise some context here: The original game’s title subse ..read more

Episode 33 of the Ted Dabney Experience podcast is available now for your listening pleasure! If you enjoy reading ArcadeBlogger.com, you’ll love the other project I’m involved with: Ted Dabney Experience, episode 33: Roger Hector – Click to listen in! Senior corporate executive, serial entrepreneur, automotive designer and fine artist. Roger Hector is not only a successful businessman but a bona fide creative polymath. A long time ago, Roger sharpened his pencils at Atari Inc, working alongside co-founder Nolan Bushnell and creative director George Opperman on a vast range of videogame projec ..read more

I’ll start with an apology – I’m rather ashamed that its taken me this long to post my review of last year’s event! It completely passed me by, and its only the recent announcement of the 2024 dates, that reminded me I didn’t share this write up. So let’s put that right! I’ve been flying stateside for a few years now to attend Florida’s premier arcade gaming event, Free Play Florida. Check out some previous recaps here. After missing a couple of years due to Covid and illness, I was excited to get back in November last year to catch up with everyone and soak up a bit of winter sunshine. Free ..read more

You may have noticed that I don’t share many repairs here on the blog. Although useful (and I’m glad people do share their knowledge) I think they’re pretty dry to read and I don’t tend to tackle repairs – and when I do, they aren’t always successful! My arcade technical expertise is rather limited – I can research a problem, follow instructions and solder and swap things out, but diagnosing an issue with a board from scratch isn’t something I’m very good at. That said, I thought this was an interesting process worth sharing. I picked up a nice Super Pang Jamma PCB a few months back and it’s b ..read more

Episode 32 of the Ted Dabney Experience podcast is available now for your listening pleasure! If you enjoy reading ArcadeBlogger.com, you’ll love the other project I’m involved with: Ted Dabney Experience, episode 32: Eugene Jarvis Eugene Jarvis cut his teeth in the Atari pinball division before going on to produce the groundbreaking Defender for Williams Electronics. Also for Williams (contracted as Vid Kids, his new company with Defender co-creator Larry DeMar) was Stargate, Robotron: 2084 and Blaster. Jarvis left Vid Kids in 1984 to attend Stanford University where he gained an MBA in 1986 ..read more

Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Make Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whilst we never met, he was always on the other end of an email answering my questions and providing really valuable input into my articles here on the blog, and especially so for my book Missile Commander. Mike has always been approachable and happy to share his knowledge and deep insight into the industrial design processes at Atari. Learning his craft at San Jose State University, Mike joined Atari’s Industr ..read more

A few weeks back I wrote about Automatic Services and the arcade cabinets that a group of us were able to acquire, after its owner Mark Shepherd passed away. If you missed that post, go here. This post is something of a follow up to that one. You may recall that I made reference to the Universal cabinets that were designed and built by the company to be placed out on location. We discovered 25 or so of these, and managed to rescue most of them – I ended up with three which have been sitting in my garage for a few weeks now. The Automatic Services Universal arcade cabinet I remarked at the time ..read more