Remember Starcade?
One of the items in my personal gift guide is a homebrew arcade machine. I have a feeling that it’s going to be my “midlife crisis” acquisition (though I’m hoping midlife won’t hit me for another thirty years). I didn’t really grow up inside arcades, but arcades certainly grew up with and around me. I still remember walking into Happy Joe’s pizza parlour and begging Dad to let us play a few rounds of Donkey Kong.
So, while I was surfing around for the ultimate home arcade game cabinet, I stumbled across Starcade.tv. What a blast from the past! If you never watched the show, you can view a few of the episodes in this archive. Starcade was one of my favorite TV programs when I was a kid – right after G.I. Joe and The Transformers, of course. I wonder what happened to all those old Starcade contestants? Did they ever get proper haircuts? I remember watching them play Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, thinking that video games couldn’t get any better than that.
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5 Comments
Welcome
November 26th, 2006
at 11:24am
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Lunabean
November 26th, 2006
at 9:29am
Happy Joe’s…that’s too funny. Not two days ago was I telling my husband about Happy Joe’s, and the pizza window, where you could watch them toss the dough for hours on end. I spent many a birthday there…then moved it to Showbiz Pizza, where robot animals became more entertaining than dough tossing. It was around that time that, I believe, when Happy Joe’s went out of business. I feel like they came back again, but ultimately failed.
Ah, Des Moines.
b1gg33k
November 27th, 2006
at 8:03am
Ah, Starcade! This brings back some great memories. Now my daughteres (8 & 4 years old) can watch this and laugh at me more than they already do when I tell them about how video games were once in big boxes and there was only one game per box. They just don’t understand why I get misty-eyed when I described the first time I played Space Invaders or Pac-Man.
-b1gg33k
Aaron
November 29th, 2006
at 12:07am
I do not think this show was shown in the Seattle area in its prime. It is fun to watch now though.
Kris "The Nine" Roley
December 4th, 2006
at 10:57am
I was a 11 year old kid living in Guantanamo, and my swim team had come to Jacksonville to compete in an event. Since AFRTS was the bastion of must see TV in the early 80’s (Combat and Space 1999 was prime time, for example), I was dying to see some current TV. I caught Starcade and got hooked. Sadly, it would be two years before we moved back to the states so cable could even be a possibility, and the show ended somewhere around that time. What a great show! Thanks for bringing it up!