I can remember the day I walked into our local Arcade here in our small Canadian town. I walked through the doors and went directly to where for years the Defender machine sat. When I got to the machine I dropped a quarter into the machine and put my hands on the control panel. WTF? The control panel looked weird, next I looked at the screen to see some game I had never seen, after that I can remember looking at the marquee. The Defender had been what I now know as being "Converted". I turned around without even hitting the start button and walked straight to the owner who was sitting at his counter handing out quarters.
I said Hey Gus what did you do to the Defender? He could see I was upset and he got very defensive and rudely snapped back that the game hadn't made money in a few years and added No one cares about Defender anymore. I can clearly remember thinking to myself, well I do!
I walked back to the Defender hit the start button and played the Defender now converted to: Double Dragon.
This was in 1989 or 1990., I guess I was actually lucky that for 10 years I was able to play my fav game, most Defenders were probably converted years before, Gus put it off as long as he could.
A few years later I was down town one day and I ran into the old Tech. that use to repair games in several of the local arcades. I told him that story and how I really miss playing Defender and never see them around anymore. I asked him that if he ever came across a Defender to let me know that I would like to purchase one. This was in 1993 and a week later I owned my 1st Arcade game, Defender!
I still love the game today and now understand better why Gus had to convert the Defender to a newer game. I watched as Gus slowly converted Kangaroo, UniWarS, Bubbles, Q*Bert, Frogger, Asteroids, and many others to new games.
Long live Defender....
I bought the Joust and Bubbles from Gus, he had converted the Joust to Bubble Bobble and the Bubbles to Wonder Boy, I always teased him that he should have converted Bubble Bobble into the Bubbles cab LOL