The Push Start Play arcade I went to in Lewisville, TX was so big I had to split this article into two parts!  So here’s part two of my tour of the arcade!

These are two Williams arcade games: Bubbles and Blaster. I’ve seen Bubbles in arcades before.  I like the unique premise in that you are a scrubbing bubble in a sink.  Blaster I’ve only ever seen at a coin op museum I went to a long time ago.  Blaster is a spin off from Robotron and is kind of a 3D on rails shooter.  But the unique thing about these games are the cabinets they are in.  I saw in an interview on one of the Williams arcade collections that they made these single piece plastic cabinets for some of their games, but they stopped using them when an arcade operator complained that when the arcade was closed, the plastic on the machine shrunk enough to force out the monitor and hit another machine!  I hope that doesn’t happen with these!

Right next to it was another rare Williams arcade game called Wacko.  I’ve only ever seen this one on the TV game show Starcade (anyone remember that) and at a gas station when I was a kid.  The unique thing about this cabinet, as you can see, is that the marquee and stand are lopsided.  It’s also a sequel to another arcade game that I’ve never seen called Kozmik Kroos’r.

They also had both Q*bert machines.  Only other place I’ve seen Q*bert’s Qubes is at the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, TX that I actually helped set up.

One of my favorites is Bubble Bobble, which I actually haven’t seen in very many arcades.

Most of the arcade games were organized by either theme or company.  So you’d have a row of a certain game series, a certainly style of game, or from a certain game company.  Here’s a row of laser disc games, including two I’ve never seen before: Super Don Quixote and Cliff Hanger.  Cliff Hanger actually uses footage from Lupin the Third cartoons.  And of course they also had Space Ace and both Dragon’s Lair games.

They also had all three Double Dragon arcade games right next to each other.

If I had to complain about anything about this arcade, is that I wish they would’ve had more Pac-Man representation and had them organized like the other games.  I’m kind of surprised they didn’t.  They had a machine that had Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man combined into it, and a few new ones, but no dedicated original Pac-Man series cabinets!  But one of the new ones they had was Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship Edition.  It came out a few years ago but I’ve never seen one until now.   I thought it would be the same as the original Pac-Man Battle Royale, just with 8 players.  But it’s actually a totally different game.  The focus is more on eating dots than the other players.  You can get all sorts of unique power-ups and get power pellets as well as the super power pellets from Super Pac-Man!  I hope they make a home console version of this someday.

They also had a new Pac-Man themed Skee-Ball called Rolling With the Ghosties (love that name). It had these neat screens on either side that would show Pac-Man animations as well as how much points you earned for each ball rolled!

One unique thing they had here was a room with a light up floor.  You could pick game modes and step on the lights for points.  And at the end of the game, a voice would say, “Congratulations, you’ve won!  Now leave the room!”  We thought that was pretty funny.

One neat thing about this arcade is that they even had some super rare machines that were only used in test markets, but never released.  Sometimes an arcade company will make a few test machines to see how they do before they spend the money to mass produce them.  So the unsuccessful ones can be pretty rare.  One was a Beavis and Butthead arcade game they had here. It was a beat ‘em up where you could play as either character.  You could kick, jump, pick up weapons, and press both buttons to burp or fart.  It had flat 2D characters moving on a 3D background.  You could tell this was a prototype, as the controls were pretty janky and stopped after only one level.  I can see why this didn’t make it past test markets.

Another famous test market game, and probably my favorite rare game to play here, was Marble Madness 2: Marble Man.  I’m a huge fan of the original arcade Marble Madness (which they had right beside this), so I was glad to finally be able to play it.  They had two versions, one with trackball controls and one with joysticks.  The one here was with joysticks.  It was fun, but I guess I can kind of see why it didn’t make it past test markets, seeing as though everyone was playing fighting games at the time.  I think this one would’ve fared better as a home console release.  I certainly would’ve gotten it then!

And that’s pretty much all the pictures I took.  Other arcade games they had there that I didn’t take pictures of include both TRON and Discs of TRON, Spy Hunter, pretty much all the Nintendo arcade games, including Arm Wrestling, other Williams games like Sinistar and Joust, the Mega Man arcade game as well as other Capcom fighters, Ladybug, Circus Charlie and Rock N Rope, Bagman, Mappy, Jr. Pac-Man, Monkey Ball, and much, much more!  Of course the best part of the arcade was being there with my good friend.  So if you are ever in the Lewisville, TX area, you should come check it out.  And maybe visit me, too!  –Cary

Tags: Misc