oldCinematronics is really two unrelated companies sharing one name, and the catalogue lists both on a single page. The original was a Californian arcade manufacturer of the late seventies. The second was a small Texan studio of the nineties, remembered mostly for a pinball table that ended up bundled with Windows.
The Californian firm mattered because of vectors. Space Wars in 1977 was the first commercially successful vector arcade machine: the beam drew lines directly instead of filling a grid of dots, so the ships stayed razor-sharp while they rotated. The same hardware carried Star Castle, with three counter-rotating shield rings guarding a gun turret, and then Solar Quest, Starhawk and War of the Worlds. Tim Skelly designed most of them, and the house style is unmistakable — white lines on black, no colour, nothing decorative. The vector monitor was at once the best and the worst decision the firm ever made: it looked spectacular and it broke down, which arcade operators noticed long before players did.
Betting the company on laserdisc
In 1983 Cinematronics abandoned all of that. Dragon's Lair rendered nothing at all: it played Don Bluth's hand-drawn animation off a laserdisc and asked the player to push the right direction at the right instant. It looked like nothing else on any arcade floor, charged double the usual coin, and made the company briefly the most talked-about name in the business. Space Ace repeated the trick. The fall was just as quick, and Tradewest bought the firm in 1987.
Not everything on the page fits either box. Zzyzzyxx is a maze game with a courtship plot, Alley Master is ten-pin bowling, and Jack the Giantkiller climbs a beanstalk. Twelve of the cabinets here, both laserdisc titles included, run in the browser through the built-in emulator with nothing to install. Marble Drop, Tail Gunner, Cosmic Chasm and the Space Cadet pinball table appear as catalogue profiles with descriptions and screenshots.
