Weird game ID...

MasterFygar

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I need help from someone with The Ultimate History of Videogames! (Weird game id...)

I remember they had one of these at a museum in Virginia many years ago... it was an arcade machine with a built in camera and an oversized monitor, the control panel had only a start button. Once your picture was taken you were sent into a game where you leaned left and right, the camera tracking you, to dodge oncoming houses, cats, cows... I believe the boss was a face in the tornado? The high score list showed only faces and it was extremely creepy. I want to say it had Storm in the name since it was about a giant head flying through a hurricane but I'm not sure. Thanks in advance.
 
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Sounds a lot like the game that was pulled because many arcade ppl would take pictures of 'other' things which would then be bouncing off stuff in the game. I recall reading an article in Electronic Games magazine but don't remember the title. It's been brought up before, i'm sure Mod remembers it and has the flyer already located.
 
Sounds a lot like the game that was pulled because many arcade ppl would take pictures of 'other' things which would then be bouncing off stuff in the game. I recall reading an article in Electronic Games magazine but don't remember the title. It's been brought up before, i'm sure Mod remembers it and has the flyer already located.

That would probably be it... I remember it was in a very rough cab that was obviously a conversion kit (or just a design disaster), it was glitchy as hell and it disturbed me for some reason. I remember a few of the high scores that showed up in the demo were flying boobs so I can see why it was pulled if it was, and I bet it was since I remember going a week before and after the place got it in... the week after, it was gone :eek: If someone can provide the flyer, that'd be great, it'd be cool to see it again especially since it sounds like I had a rare experience of sorts :D
 
Nothings coming up in my searches using your descriptions. I'm downloading Electronic Games magazines now so I can look through them for that article...
 
Bump in case anybody remembers... everything has to be remembered by someone, right? :D
 
I do not recall the name of the game but it is discussed in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Hist..._1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1284079183&sr=8-1

Unfortunately, I lent my copy to someone so I cannot look it up for you.

The game was you remember it - it would take a photo of the player's face and use that for the high score instead of the player's initials. It took a very short amount of time before someone set a high score and had the camera take a photo of something "other" than their face. ;) Once this happened the game was pulled immediately. If the game you played is the one discussed in that book then you did indeed have a rare arcade experience.
 
That would definitely be it! Does anybody else have a copy handy to find a title or do I need to hit up Amazon? heheh
 
Not the game your looking for, but from the KLOV Journey entry trivia:

Originally, this game was not to have the band Journey in it. It would have a digital camera (created by Ralph Baer, the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey home console systems) that would take a picture of the player's face and put it on the character. After some people used unmentionable parts of their body as character heads during tests, this was dropped.
 
Per Ralph Baer:

Years later, Chicago located Bally Midway turned into a very professionally run video arcade game company. In 1985 we had better luck licensing them under my patents for a game system which uses a TV camera to take a picture of the player's face for use in the game and in the score credits. I had come up with that idea and built a simple demo. When I had that working well, I took it to Chicago.

Howard Morrison invited John Peserb, one time major league baseball player and now chief engineer at Bally Midway. He came to look at my demo at Marvin Glass' impressive studios on North LaSalle Street. The demo went off fine. John liked the concept and immediately began to negotiate for a license.

I went home to New Hampshire and designed and built another, more complex board full of TTL IC logic to implement the concept more completely. I wanted to do a better job of digitizing faces - specifically, to provider higher resolution and gray scale. When I had it working well, I shipped that board to John Peserb and Bally's own engineers took it from there. A year later I got the board back and converted it to a scanner for passport size photos. Never waste a nice piece of electronics.

Once Glass and Bally had programmed a game using the camera concept, the machine went on trial at a Chicago arcade where it started out working well. Within a day, however, some idiot got up on a chair, dropped his pants in front of the camera ... and that was the end of the concept of using a TV camera in a coin-op game ... it takes all kinds to make a world.
 
Apparently this prototype was called Clone, but had nothing to do with motion sensors...
 
Thanks Mod, since that's probably what the book's talking about I guess I don't need to get one of those either. The name could be it, but the game I'm thinking of used very primitive 3D effects and photos were in color... so I doubt that's it :( Sounds VERY similar though, and I may be misremembering about the motion control.
 
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