Midway Arcade Origins Review

I don’t remember much about the golden age of arcades, but I am utterly obsessed with games from that era. It’s not nostalgia; my earliest gaming memories begin with the NES generation. It wasn’t until I began writing about and researching game history that it occurred to me that it would be awesome to have a refrigerator-sized video game in my living room. I now have 12 large 1980s arcade machines in my modest San Francisco flat, from BurgerTime to Star Wars.

You would think, then, that I would be enamored with a collection of golden age classics like the 30 contained in Midway Arcade Origins. Unfortunately, this collection makes many of the same (somewhat unavoidable) mistakes that emulators and re-releases of yore have. Contemporary consoles or computers don’t do a very good job at recreating the experience of playing an arcade machine, tactually speaking. You can emulate the sights and sounds, but when you remove the joystick, the steering wheel or the trackball — not to mention the massive, art-slathered machine — you can too easily lose a game’s soul.