High Scores Welcomes TRON!

After our long and arduous search, we finally welcome home a TRON machine practically just around the corner. Fellow KLOV member Bungy put a lot of great work into one he had in his garage, and it joined the High Scores family of games yesterday.

Shawn tells a heartbreaking story of when he was a little kid, he tried to get in on the TRON machine but all of the older kids were playing it and he couldn't get a chance. Its like the "when I was your age, I had to..." story but without the snow. Except for some cabinets we've seen here and there over the years, this is the first time he gets to play TRON, uninterrupted. Guess I'll see him in a few months or so.

Hope to see you soon!

Meg

August 28 High Scores

Weekends are the times for erasing and renewing the High Scores Board as skilled gamers come through the door. It started with Phillip B (FIL), who put up a 17,250 in Star Castle. He also bumped up his own record on Joust with 118,000. Nice job, Phillip!

Gary H (GDH) got a 6,072, finally replacing the default score we set for our 4 Aces Pinball, which no one has even come close to getting.

Mike W (MRW) always sneaks in the door and ends up with his name on the board. He now holds the Donkey Kong High Score with 316,800, Pac Man with 161,080, and Ladybug (a new addition to the board) with 212,060. Here he is in the picture showing off :)

New Artwork from TJ Reddick

TJ came around and delivered some ridiculously cool new artwork. We now have designs inspired by Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pac Man, Dragons Lair, Joust, Frogger, QBert, Tempest and Tron. They are all painted with fluorescent oil on canvas, and show up really cool under blacklight. All of TJ's pieces are also for sale!

$50 for the small and $150 for the large!

I have to admit, I did feel a little badly for the girl that wanted to play Donkey Kong yesterday. She had her heart set on playing on the dedicated cabinet (rather than on one of the multicades), and I had to tell her that this was sometimes just the way it goes - we couldn't interrupt Randy Y. (YEG), I saw that he was on a mission.

And on a mission he was, breaking the High Scores record for Donkey Kong with a score of 306,200. Congratulations to Randy!

Also wanted to spread the word about the upcoming 2010 Classic Arcade Gaming Dot Com (CAGDC) World Record Tournament, scheduled for Saturday, September 25 at Richie Knucklez in Flemington, NJ. We were talking to Mark Alpiger (of King of Kong fame, as he likes to say :) ) earlier today about the possibility of High Scores being an official qualifying location to practice for the tournament...the game list is still up in the air, but so far we feature a lot of the contenders in our selection.

Hope to see you guys soon - open again on Wednesday!

Spotlight on Spanish Eyes

Hello all! We keep gaining more and more fans from the streets of Burlington coming to try their hand at competition. Our first weekend open, Sonnie Boy came through and set his score up on the board for the Spanish Eyes pin. Every day he checked to see if his name was still up...yesterday he visited to find out that Bill W came around and made Sonnie's score history with a new High Score of 93,820. Spanish Eyes is a pretty challenging pin, so we're impressed!
We've added some new names to our High Scores "Rookie Board" as well; some are re-polishing their skills that were dusty since the 80's, while others are discovering these games for the first time. Frequent visitor Anthony F. nailed his name up on Championship Baseball and continues to improve on Track and Field, while Stacey works his way up on DK Jr. Proving to be a strong player on most games, Philip had his best score yet on Donkey Kong.

Hoping to see some new scores broken this weekend - we'll keep you posted!

HOLY SH*T! A Kill Screen at High Scores!

Whew! What an awesome day at High Scores. Our new friend Sam (ZAZ) visited us from PA and totally shook down the score board. Sam is a world-class player who is trying to discover the kill screens for all of the different variations of Pac-Man that exist out there. He started his visit out by trying his hand at a little Galaga, and by setting a 98,700 on Mr Do and then, and then....

Then - God help us - he moved on to play the best Ms Pac Man (turbo) game I've ever seen in person - 2+ hours of play on one credit, complete with a kill screen and an overall score of 871,710. We're hoping that Sam will submit his scores officially some day, as this score would have taken #2 in Twin Galaxies. We are so honored to have welcomed such a talented player into our spot. Check out the video here.

Even more fun is that he had about 5-10 people crowding around his game to watch, lots of fun to introduce that level of awe and competition to the little kids who all walk around talking smack because they can beat their friend playing Modern Warfare 2 online. Mike W. came around for some late night gaming and grabbed up the spot on the board for Star Castle at 13,010.

Thanks to all of our visitors tonight - its super sweet to be able to raise the bar on our score board a bit!
Meg

High Scores Board Update

Here is an update of the High Scores Board! Phillip B (FIL) came and clobbered Shawn's JOUST score-today- and took Greg B's Pacman score right away from him. He took it right away. Actually, Shawn says he saw Greg get a Pac-Man score over 100,000 last week at Richie's, so there is some competition to be had there! Myesha also took the current Ms. Pac-Man score down! No one has managed to get close to the World Record on KABOOM! quite yet, but there is a day left. We have seen some newly hatched retro gamers putting some surprising scores up on our Rookie Board (with respectable qualifying scores) and we will post the scores end of week. Special Thanks to Joe, Ron, Gary, and everyone who pitched in to help us have a great week! Meg and Shawn.

Airport Lands at High Scores...and This Week's Highlights!

Today we welcomed a new addition to the arcade museum - Airport, a 1969 Gottlieb. The back glass is in perfect condition, and the characters it features are definitely a lot of fun - busty stewardesses lounging around waiting for you to score points. They might be waiting a little while, as its actually kind of a difficult game with the itty bitty flippers Gottlieb featured back then. Can't wait for some of you to check it out!

Some other updates as High Scores enters our 2nd week open to the public (and our friends!) In addition to Airport, you'll be able to try your hand at Leman Racing and Scramble this week as they get back up and running tomorrow.

For our CAGDC and KLOV friends, we're featuring two contests this week. The first, alas, will bring only braggin rights. We're offering complimentary play of the paddle game KABOOM on a Darth Vader Atari 2600. The High Score will be posted at the end of the week (Sunday, 8/15).

The second contest is running until 9/5: the Pac-Man LOW SCORE contest. Achieve the longest possible game play on Pac-Man without exceeding 950 points. Your time ends when your first man dies and/or you exceed (by ANY increment) 950 points, no tricks barred. Shawn currently holds the house score of 17 mins, 32 seconds.

The winner with the highest time gets to bring up to 8 friends to enjoy 950 free credits for a 3 hour session (to be scheduled by winner pending our availability).

Hope to see you guys this week!

Richie Knucklez Invitational

Richie had his tournament and open house for KLOV forum members this weekend, and Shawn and I were lucky enough to join in today's festivities. As always, the games are A+ and everyone is super welcoming and friendly. Richie and Paige are amazing hosts.

I have to admit that I feel comfortable in a lot of social situations, but I found myself pretty starstruck when I looked over and spotted Robert Mruczek. Of course, we've seen the movies a bunch of times, but even more so, I've been working to try and get my Star Wars score up and was in awe of his skill. Between the youtube videos, "High Score", "Chasing Ghosts" and "King of Kong", we've seen more Mruczek flicks than Tom Cruises movies in our lifetime.

I shook off my nerves and asked if he would teach me a bit about Star Wars and show me how to play. He was super awesome; totally cool and welcome to humor someone of my (currently) marginal skill level. After we got home, I felt determined and immediately started up a game of Star Wars. I was able to break a million for the first time because I was trying out some of the tricks from today. Also awesome to see such good gamers in Richie's place, like current Donkey Kong champ Hank Chien, Donald Hayes, Steve Wagner, Mr. Do champ Jimmy Linderman, and many other awesome players.

Richie hauled out some games to the parking lot and took a shot of all his visitors this weekend, a la Life Magazine. It made for a fun day. I'm sure Richie will be posting some pictures and stuff on his site soon enough!

Daily High Scores

Hello All! Fun Friday night at High Scores! Thanks to all the forum friends who came around to check us out, good to meet you all.

Doing some erasing and re-recording on the High Score board tonight...Mike W (MRW) rocked it out on a few titles tonight, including Donkey Kong (183,600) and a hard-earned Star Castle (11,920). Looks like last night's Star Castle score lasted less than 24 hours! While not on the High Score board, he also recorded our highest on Pengo, which is being added to our High Score house binder of scores.

Local friend Bill W (EWW) snuck up and stole Space Invaders (6,620). TJ Reddick's artwork brought some new peeps from across the bridge, and we have a faithful Ms PacMan contender who's determined to bring down that score.

Thanks to all tonight's visitors!

High Scores Board Gets a Facelift!

Peace!

High Scores had it's first full day 2pm-11:21pm! We almost made it to midnight (three hours passed closing) on a weeknight, and we had an amazing time meeting some fellow gamers who love the classics. We were thrilled to see some folks trickle in from our town throughout the day to play the games, but we were most excited to see a few amazing players come to put a dent in our High Score board! Steve W came through and straight bombed the board! He took Galaga, Jungle King, Centipede, Donkey Kong Jr, and some others- Steve is super nice on a whole BUNCH of games-- not just one or two. After he left, our friend Gary did manage to take down Steve's Star Castle score by a bit... and there is still a Paperboy score to be accounted for which was made after the daily pic of the scoreboard was taken. Greg B (Who now has both the Pac-Man and Asteroids Deluxe scores) and his wife Jess were also in the house- later on we were joined by some game enthusiasts from Atomic City Comics in Philly who have games at their location. It was especially nice to see the KLOV/ClassicArcadeGaming forum folks in the building-- anyone who has 6-15 arcade games in their basement, but still comes out to play those games on quarters really GETS what we're trying to do-- which is get together sometimes to play like the old days! Sincere thanks to everyone who came through to play our games today- we are working toward getting the store where it needs to be and we will try to keep a steady rotation of games to keep it exciting! It was an honor to have gamers of high caliber playing on the machines we used flashlights and guesswork and luck (and gametechs to fix our mistakes) to get running. See you soon! Shawn and Meg

High Scores Welcomes 1970 Williams 4 Aces to the Collection!