Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Nov 15th, 2007
I must admit here that I’ve never been a huge fan of Attack of the Show!, one of the signature series of the G4 cable network. However, every once in a blue moon they’ll do something worth mentioning, such as the time they built the World’s Largest NES Controller and proceeded to play Super Mario Bros. with it live on the air.
Well, they’ve done it again, this time turning their attention to arcade cabinets.
Presenting, the World’s Largest Arcade Cabinet, recently unveiled on AotS!.
We haven’t been able to verify that it lives up to its name, but this sucker is HUGE to say the least. It stands thirteen feet tall, features about a 70†screen (no typo… seventy inches, amigos; as Strong Bad might say, “The pixels are as big as hams!”), buttons the size of smoke detectors, and joysticks that probably wouldn’t look out of place on an offshore drilling rig. As the drill. This thing is so big you need stepladders just to reach the controls! At its core appears to be a normal PC running (I assume) MAME via an autobooting frontend. The pictures show two of the AotS! hosts going at each other in a round of Rampage (the classic game of movie monsters trashing America one city at a time, and a longtime personal favorite of yours truly).
AotS! may be the palest shadow of its former self (when it was called The Screen Savers and the channel it was on was called TechTV), but even I have to admit, this is pretty cool. As an old-school game show fan, it actually reminds me of The Magnificent Marble Machine, which for about sixteen weeks in 1975-76 brought to NBC Daytime a pinball machine (I kid you not) the size of a TV studio. It was fully functional, even though it required at least two people just to play one ball (one taking each set of flippers) and (call me crazy) I’m guessing that “tilting†this beast may not have been an option.
You have to be impressed by an arcade cabinet bigger than the arcade “nooks†in a lot of corner 7-Elevens back in the ‘80s, however. It does kind of beg the question, though, of exactly what you’d use for tokens… Hubcaps? Dinner plates? Copies of TRON or The Last Starfighter on LaserDisc? The mind boggles…
Posted in games, gear, geek
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