Bigfoot Bonkers

Bigfoot Bonkers was released in 1976 by Meadows Games and is among the oldest entries you will find in this archive. A 1976 date means a cabinet built either from ordinary logic chips or from a very early processor board, with a black-and-white picture and a handful of sounds generated by the electronics themselves rather than stored anywhere.

The player field matters here: the record lists multiplayer only. That was normal for the mid-seventies. A machine with no computer-controlled opponent needs two people, which conveniently meant two coins per round from the operator's point of view.

Designs of this kind were extremely spare. Two controllable figures, a clearly bounded area, one rule defining defeat, and a round measured in tens of seconds. Everything entertaining happens between the two players, because the hardware simulates no adversary of its own.

Meadows Games was one of the smaller American manufacturers filling arcades with cheaper cabinets in the years after Pong. Most of that output vanished, so a surviving, emulated 1976 title is valuable chiefly as evidence of what an arcade looked like before screens filled up with sprites.

Emulating games from this period is a different technical discipline as well. If a cabinet had no processor, there is no program to run; the behaviour of the circuits themselves has to be reproduced. That is why far fewer mid-seventies titles survive in playable form than those from the years immediately after.

Bigfoot Bonkers starts directly in your browser here, which makes this piece of early arcade engineering something you can operate rather than only read about.