Wacko

Wacko is a 1983 arcade machine from Bally Midway, one of the largest American names of the coin-op era. It is a single-player game played on a single screen with a side-on view, and the title makes no claim to seriousness.

The year is interesting in itself. In 1983 the American games industry was entering a serious crisis and arcades were emptying out. Manufacturers responded in one of two ways: through technology, or through the strength of an idea, because plain shooting galleries no longer pulled anyone in from the street. Cartoonish, deliberately silly machines belonged to the second group.

The coin-op design shows in the structure. Play runs in short rounds, difficulty escalates quickly, and everything is arranged so that a game lasts a few minutes and the player reaches for another coin. That looks harsh today, but it was the business model: a cabinet had to earn the floor space it occupied.

The graphics are colourful and cartoon-like, the controls are simple, and the rules can be grasped during the first attempt, which in an arcade was a requirement rather than a virtue.

How machines like this survived is a story in itself. Arcade boards were manufactured in limited numbers and were frequently scrapped once a cabinet left the floor, so what can be run today depends entirely on what was rescued from them. Emulation of arcade systems is therefore not a technical hobby but the only route to games that were never released for home hardware at all.

This one goes beyond a description: it runs in your browser here, so you can try first-hand how coins were extracted from players in 1983.