Over 20 Gottlieb Arcade Games In Under 15 Minutes

[@Roboto8088]

Reactor is my all-time favorite. I also loved playing Us vs. Them. I was so good at UvT that I could finish the game on hard mode.. with FULL SHIELDS!

[@SyntheToonz]

They like the bug killing idea. Several games with that theme. Someone at the company was afraid of bugs.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yeah, I noticed this too!!!

[@billcook4768]

Or their building had an infestation problem.

[@retrojoe85]

Love the Q*Bert spots! 🧡 One of my friends is the owner of a great team of arcade preservation here in Italy, and he always said that Gottlieb motherboards are one of the hardest boards to fix because "they were made exactly like the pinball motherboards, which is a serious problem when it comes to fixing all of them". DAMN!

[@TheLairdsLair]

Interesting!

[@retrojoe85]

@@TheLairdsLair the team of my friend is called Arcade Story, but all the videos are all in italian language. In my opinion, it's worth to watch at their videos even just for the cabinets alone! Their warehouse is HUGE!

[@IsaacKuo]

I think that Argus never got released because it didn't test well with playtesters. It's a pity, because I think it fixes the biggest problem I had with Defender - the scrolling. It was just so stressful trying to defend such a wide territory, while only being able to see a fraction of it. I feel like the single screen format is better suited to the concept.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yeah, quite a few of these never got a proper release or only had small test runs.

[@billbyers2344]

Argus was demoed during the pilot of Starcade, which was hosted by Alex Trebek. A shame that TBS picked Mark Richards to host but he was thankfully replaced by the late great Geoff Edwards, who was a fantastic host. RIP Alex Trebek and Geoff Edwards.

[@Kourumeme]

It wasn’t released cause it was too easy meaning less quarters as you play through it more in one coin

[@williamcrowe2576]

M.A.C.H 3 was not without its flaws. Every once in awhile during gameplay, the disc would skip. Then you'd get an error message advising you to remain seated in the cockpit.

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

The problem with Gottlieb/Mylstar is that after Q-Bert and Krull they were never quite able to strike gold again. Pretty much all of their other games were just not that great, IMO. I lump M.A.C.H. 3 in with all the other laser disk games that tried to ride the wave created by Dragon's Lair, unsuccessfully.

[@joejacobsonwales]

only remember qbert, there was a great version for the beeb

[@MrColuber]

I didn't know Gottlieb made more than QBert. That being said, Gridlee looked weird. And indecent.

[@kyleolson8977]

It's an eclectic set of games. Other than Q*bert of course, M.A.C.H. 3 is one of the most memorable, although maybe if I had seen Us vs. Them I would feel the same way. I had seen Krull, but not much. Some of these are just too odd for their own good. Juno First has an awful name (I assume that's on Konami). They had a thing for bugs. And they had an interest in area control/grid control beyond Q*bert.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yeah they loved grids and bugs - they should have released an arcade version of Gridrunner, it would have been their perfect game!

[@norakat]

I didn’t realize so many bad games came out. Understandably you didn’t see them because nobody wanted to buy them and drop a ton of money. Sounds like many of them reused sounds from other games.

[@mymomsaysimcool9650]

I only knew of Krull and QBert. Those other games looked kinda “meh”. They were really trying to make Reactor look interesting. Probably only remembered for the commercial.

[@bradleymcavoy3432]

Never played Reactor or Juno First and I want to play them so badly! 😩

[@ShamrockParticle]

Nice presentation, thanks! They definitely made more than I'd expected, and two games I thought were Parker Bros. As for the games: "The Three Stooges" would be a perfect fit for a library - said nobody ever. "Reactor" was awesome! I vaguely remember "Exterminator". Didn't know that Gottlieb made it. They sure did love bugs. "Mach 3" looks like one of those laserdisc games where you're just hitting on more buttons... ditto for "US vs Them". No Man's Land looks like a Tron tanks copy. "TYLZ" looks like a poor Qbert copy. "Wiz Worz" looks like it had more to do with the game crash than Pacman or ET ever had... half these games did. QBert - at 11:52, isn't that the Pepperidge Farm voice-over dude? That board game was another bizarre fad, as was PacMan's... 12:32 sounds like the Twlight Zpne announcer... the make-up for Pinnochio-nose followed by the cosplay for Beaker Muppet were pretty good... I forgot about those 90s 3D reimaginings of the 80s hit games. They did lack a certain charm. Long before the Super Nintendo news snippet that's online, it's nice to see Reactor doing the same shtick.

[@williamcrowe2576]

You oughta have seen the board games for Zaxxon, Pole Position, and Centipede.

[@TheLairdsLair]

I've looked at the Pac-Man one on my channel.

[@eddielegs344]

Hi. Cool June first is from Konami right ? Not Gottlieb.... :-)

[@TheLairdsLair]

Juno First was originally by Konami but distributed in the west by Gottlieb, as the flyer in the video shows.

[@eddielegs344]

@@TheLairdsLair oke Thx

[@mgabrysSF]

A lot of these were never released after the arcades crashed in the early 80s. I only ever saw Exterminator once in the early 90s. Out of ALL of them, only Mad Planets, Reactor, Qbert and Mach III got into any production numbers of note. The rest were a wash. And of those 4 only 2 were considered 'hits' (Qbert and Mach III). Terrible company overall - that was essentially flailing when pinball dried up in the early 80s. One of their last and most infamous pinball outings was Caveman which had a crap video game component.

[@TheLairdsLair]

It's funny because I remember seeing Exterminator everywhere and bought it for the Atari ST because I loved the arcade game so much. Of the early 80s games though the only one I ever saw was Q*bert.

[@IsaacKuo]

I remember seeing Krull out in the wild, back in the day. For some reason I thought it was an Atari game, but I didn't really pay attention so closely.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Probably because Atari did Krull for the 2600.

[@mgabrysSF]

@@TheLairdsLair 'Seeing it everywhere' seems shocking to me considering they only made 250 units. That's far rarer than the hen's teeth games like I-Robot and other very late Atari titles (npt Atari Games machines) which only amounted to 500 units.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Well, I can only speak from personal experience. So they were either distributed in my local area, bootlegs or that figure is totally wrong. I would bet the latter is true, because Audiogenic Software paid a lot to license the game for home computers (I know because I have interviewed them about it) and there's no way they would have paid to license a game nobody knew about or had played. Perhaps that's only a figure for North America and somebody else built cabs in the UK/Europe?