Sega Jet Rocket: The '70s arcade game with no computer or screen | Hacker News Reader

Sega Jet Rocket: The '70s arcade game with no computer or screen

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Recently I discovered Sea Wolf, an arcade video game by Midway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJBu5fGKKpE

Sea Wolf was an electronic update to Midway's electromechanical game Sea Devil, which in turn was inspired by Sega's Periscope, which itself competed with Torpedo Launcher, a similar game that was the first designed by Masaya Nakamura, founder of the NAkamura Manufacturing COmpany -- later, Namco.

Sea Wolf preserves some of the "practical effects" of its predecessors, despite being a microprocessor-based game with a video screen. Aiming and firing is done with a swivelable periscope that has a piece of reflective glass in it and a sight painted on for aiming. Explosions are indicated by lights which are reflected off the glass; reflected lights also indicate how many torpedoes you have left until you need to reload. For this reason, emulating Sea Wolf leaves a lot to be desired, even though the electronic bits are thoroughly emulated.

My dad used to tell me about going to the fair in California and playing an arcade game where you assumed the role of a gunner in like a B-17. Film footage of fighter aircraft in pursuit would roll, and you had to shoot them down. When a hit was registered, it would somehow switch to footage of the enemy aircraft crashing and burning.

From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

The game synced dynamic computer graphics on top of pre-recorded laser disc background video. The "somehow switch to footage of the enemy aircraft crashing and burning" was, unsurprisingly, accomplished by simply jumping to a different track on the laserdisc, and typically happened when you completed one level and were about to begin the next.

I've never played it myself, but the gameplay actually looks surprisingly similar to Atari's vector graphic "Star Wars" game.

Or maybe not surprisingly once you notice that Firefox was created by the same team who had made that Star Wars arcade game the year before, and would go on to make the also-similar Empire Strikes Back arcade game the following year. I guess if you've got a winning formula, don't mess with it too much!

I remember once standing at a booth at the MacWorld Expo looking up at the massive display of a newly released game "Jump Raven" in which you were tasked with flying a hovercraft through city streets, shooting baddies, and all that usual video game stuff. I commented to the random guy standing next to me, "It looks a bit like Apache Strike, doesn't it?", referring to an old helicopter sim from like eight years earlier which had used a very similar viewpoint and game mechanics, albeit with only fairly primitive black and white graphics. And that random guy standing next to me turned and said, "I'm allowed to plagiarize from myself". Oops! (Sorry, Bill, I hadn't realised you were the programmer on Jump Raven too!) :D

> From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

I'm older than you think (and so is my father). The arcade machine he played dates from the 1960s, and did not involve a computer.

Ah, cool, I wasn’t aware of arcade machines using recorded video before the brief laser disc era! If you have any references or links where I could read up about them, I’d be fascinated to learn more!

Yeah, they used to use film reels (not video). The way he described it, it was similar in principle to Nintendo's Sky Hawk from 1976:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLcT5eaUZw0

This is the actual film footage used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-lUgkT2sz4

I don't know if the game my dad remembers worked the same way, but as you can see the footage is divided into two halves: the top half is the footage of the plane flying, and the bottom half has both a spot of light and footage of the plane exploding. A mirror inside the machine normally is positioned such that it reflects only the top half of the picture to the screen. The spot of light on the bottom half corresponds directly to the plane's location in the top half; a light sensor corresponds to the gun's motion such that when the gun is pointed at the plane, the sensor will pick up the spot of light (similar to the NES Zapper) and register a hit. Then at the right moment, if a hit was registered, the mirror will rotate, shifting the image from the top half of the film footage to the bottom half and showing the explosion sequence, before resetting for the next plane.

That's so clever! I would have guessed that film reels would be too fragile for that sort of continuous usage, though I'll confess that I have no personal experience with them.

I was really curious about how they would handle 'rewinding' a film reel between plays; assuming 16mm film, I figured, it would have been about 30 meters of film, so I wondered whether you could splice it together into a full loop and concertina it inside the cabinet so that it doesn't actually require rewinding between plays, and can instead just keep playing it continuously in a forward direction, and... after a bunch of Internet trawling, I found a forum post by somebody who had purchased and restored two units, that's exactly what they'd done! (I had my calculations about the length of the film wrong, though; apparently the full film is only about 10 meters long, which would definitely make it easier to wrangle the loop!)

The world of these older electromechanical arcade games is seriously cool; so much history and ingenuity here that I hadn't been aware of!

Yes, Sea Wolf was the first arcade game I ever played. Even before Space Invaders, which came out a couple years later. You are right about emulations of it being lacking, as they just emulate the electronic part.

There was also 'Sega Helishooter' from 1977, which was the first arcade game I played, it seemed a step backward to see the graphics of Space Invaders a year later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedSuvlFElo

Was recommend Kasco Star V (1975) after watching this video. This has a rotating sphere inside for a map and moving arm with a lens.

https://youtu.be/LekFvp7dByY

Visit "Musée Méchanique" if this tickles your fancy! https://museemecanique.com/

Yep. If you do anything touristy down the area, this is the place to go.

Sega released another electromechanical stand-up, "Killer Shark," at about the same, and apparently using the same technology. Its cameo in Spielberg's Jaws fascinated me as much as anything else in that movie when I was a kid. There's a great write-up, including video of gameplay, here:

https://www.remindmagazine.com/article/15694/jaws-arcade-vid...

If you find the idea of electromechanical arcade games delightful (and why wouldn’t you?) and you’re in London then I’d highly recommend visiting Tim Hunkin’s Novelty Automation Arcade (https://www.novelty-automation.com/). They’re all hand made with a satirical sense of humour, just so much fun to see and play with. And check out Tim Hunkin’s YouTube channel for his Secret Life Of Arcade Machines series where he shows you how they work (https://youtube.com/@timhunkin1?si=fwjrx87fUwNAFJ29). and while you’re there his Secret Life Of Components and his classic Secret Life of Machines (his BBC TV series from the late 80s) are worth a watch too.

Very cool, reminds me a bit of two Tom Scott videos (these ones do use displays though, but combined with little model worlds)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE - 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMlHDnbEIDA - Submarine simulator

I was following the explanation up until:

> This closed the aforementioned circuit, but only if the trigger was currently being pressed. As a result, the light in that zone would flare right as the target passed over it. The sound effect would also be triggered, plus five points would be added to the player's score.

How did they keep a score?

Reminds me of the mechanical flight simulators and other military simulators that were in use in the 60s and 70s.

Small cameras moving on top of a (wall sized) miniature city (or lunar surface). Definitely fun to watch.

The game looks neat and I would have been entranced by it back in the day, but I don’t think the writer knows the meaning of “flight simulator”, “first person shooter”, or “open world.”

I thought there was another 70's screen-free arcade game discussed on HN in the past year, but I've failed to pull it up. At first I thought this article must be about the same thing.

Can you help me remember?

I remember something about a home game that involved dropping bombs. Can't recall the name though.

Maybe "Chutes Away"? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5790/chutes-away

(from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740616)

About one year ago was a little discussion of the much older Nimatron, maybe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36856755

Santa Cruz beachfront had one of these back in the mid 90s. Durban beachfront had one in the 70s.

Great game.

It was always broken.

I remember playing it, but I don’t remember the black lights - in my memory it was a daytime bombing run.

OTOH, I was certainly less than 10.

2 things.

1. That is an amazing design and amazing engineering. I legitimately am astounded by the creativity and thought that went into that.

2. The writing style where the author feels the need to apologize for anything even remotely technical (like: Once again, just bear with us for a bit) comes across as either childish or condescending. What purpose does that serve? Anyone clicking a link about an old arcade game with no computer or screen obviously wants to know how it works. Why write like that?

It’s writing colloquially… the writer has the difficult job of describing something that’s happening inside this cabinet over time and space and other dimensions Imposed by the game and players behavior.

Bear with us means, ‘I’m about to do a bunch of description… shore up your mental banks and prepare to reread the next bit a few times.

Man

2 things

You did the exact same thing that the author of the article did, then criticized him for it?

That's a rip-off of International Mutoscope Corporation's "Atomic Bomber" of 1946.[1][2] Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk used to have one in their arcade.

[1] https://www.arcade-museum.com/Arcade/atomic-bomber

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGL9G9y_yiI

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