Save Your Quarters for These 12 Arcade Bangers for Whenever You’re Trapped in a Bowling Alley in the Early 1990s

Bowling alleys will always be weird to me. Like the long low shots of tumbleweeds panning through dead clapboard towns in Westerns before all hell breaks loose as everyone kicks out windows and starts going ripshit with Winchester 1873s and Remington 1858s. I’ve been turned away from bowling alleys empty save for the monastic leaguers who demanded a hermetically sealed and silent space to slam balls into pins, and other times I couldn’t escape the convergence of multiple school districts worth of screaming norovirus-shedding children. No other business seemed to vacillate so wildly between the precipice of absolute financial ruin and a cacophonous overabundance. But that’s the prerogative of empire, right?

Bowling may have begun taking shape millennia ago in far-off countries, but few things feel as hideously American as the bowling alley. Since their proliferation in the early 19th century, bowling alleys were quick to draw the ire of busybodies, clergy, politicians, and the frustrated wives who saw them as little more than parlors for boozing, whoring, and general masculine mischief. Taking the carefree frivolity of the outdoor pastime from German immigrants, and ramming it through the corpuscular American identity, bowling became a thick-necked gentleman’s club. How anyone ever thought it was a good idea to combine sport based on the kinetic potential of heavy objects with waxed floors, alcohol, and bare-knuckle, handlebar bravado is beyond me. But much of the early life of the American bowling alley seems like a war between men wanting their jollies and everyone else wanting them to get their shit together.

Eventually bowling got organized, became a real sport, and before too long beer companies started sponsoring teams. Nothing will insulate you but also forever limit you like a beer company slapping their seal of approval up and down your hobby.

Much to the annoyance of real ass professional, semi-professional, and dedicated amateur (meaning “for the love of”) bowlers, what chance to become proper sporting dens was about to be shot to hell when children and families invaded.

Commercial bowling lanes offered something that Chuck E. Cheese could not. A space for adults to drink heavily, eat reflux-inducing food, and have their children become someone else’s problem for a couple hours—but without the obnoxious kid shit.

Bowling alleys were a harbor in a world full of 1980s and ‘90s hellscapes that catered towards (and insisted on) being a present yuppie in your child’s lives. But here, you could be a dutiful parent with a degree of separation, throw a successful birthday party for your spawn and his shitty friends, and no animatronic fucking rodent was going to spring to life and sing at you while you were just trying to enjoy a rapidly-warming Coors Light. No, if a child’s birthday party had to be contained in a public space, this was preferable to many of the alternatives.

I never liked bowling. I also hated other kids’ birthday parties (to be fair, I didn’t like my own birthday parties much either). But there was a time when the bowling alley was its own thing of mystery and potential. It was the last bastion of a defeated and weakened single father who had absolutely run out of ideas. Bowling was so much cheaper than a trip to Kings Dominion, after all. And when every summer blockbuster had been seen, and there were no more B-2 Liberators or diorama kits of miniature Waffen-SS being crushed by the terrifying might of a Revell plastic M4 Sherman tank still oozing Testor model cement, there was Sunset Lanes, or Bowl-a-Rama, or whatever the latest, desperate attempt at a successful bowling alley rebrand called itself. While fever-dream cutscenes that played during strikes always delighted me, bowling was always too loud, too slow, and too haphazard an activity for me to care about. But if there’s one thing I love, it’s an arcade. Good or bad, they’re always interesting; like an Arthurian king and his land, they always find a way to reflect and inform the spaces they exist in. Bowling alley arcades weren’t a main attraction. While they brought in some money, they didn’t bring in as much as warm beer, lousy pizza, and shoe rentals. Between budget constraints, and an inconsistent level of interest and care, the videogame alcove of your local bowling establishment was a wild card of the past, present, and deeply discounted. And if I’m honest, for this reason, I will always cherish them more than even some of the best dedicated arcades.

So, if you should find yourself trapped in a 1990s bowling alley, and you just can’t bring yourself to put your hands in someone else’s ball holes, don’t worry. I got you. Check the pay phone coin returns, shakedown a distracted and buzzed parent, and go sink some quarters into these bangers.

12. Smash TV

Of all the games veteran game designer Eugene Jarvis made with Williams, Smash TV is arguably the worst. But that doesn’t mean it’s without its charms.

Whenever there’s a nightmare pizza party, this twin stick shooter is bound to be a hot commodity. Guns, blood, and money: Smash TV is a post-Running Man, pre-Squid Game murder and cash grab simulator that turns the mechanics from Eugene Jarvis’ early Robotron 2084 into a cynical hellscape of the future of America (it’s set in 1999).

While I’d never in a million years rate Smash TV over its simpler, more compelling ancestor, there is something burned into the American psyche that responds in a salivating, Pavlovian way when told “kill mfs, get cash.” Smash TV understands this and capitalizes on it. I’ve seen preteen boys go full Bill Laimbeer over who gets to play this first.

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11. Pit-Fighter

Sure, I’ll bet your bowling alley had a Street Fighter II Champion Edition cabinet, maybe Mortal Kombat, or even Tekken! But those have nothing on Atari’s monstrosity made with digitized footage of real actors.

Two years before Shang Tsung would descend upon the world, what it lacked in Fatalities, it made up for in three-player moxie and a 25″ screen (look, this was a big deal at the time) with a camera that panned and zoomed around to follow the flow of action. True to its brutal, backroom vision of martial arts, there was none of the finesse and skill that Street Fighter required. As Warren Zevon once sang, “the name of the game is be hit and hit back.”

Pit-Fighter had none of the smoothness or comic book cool of other fighters then or since. It only had three buttons, and if I’m honest, it looked ugly, even then. What if sprites could be the embodiment of squiggly cauliflower ear? But also had burly guys beating it out for cash?. What more could you ask for?

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10. Spy Hunter

It almost was a James Bond arcade game, but when the licensing deal fell through the Aston Martin got turned into some kind of nightmare hybrid between a DMC DeLorean and a Ferrari Testarossa with just a hint of Countach (truly ‘80s was an automotive hellscape at times), and the game picked up a chiptune version of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme that looped endlessly until you simply ran out of lives in this otherwise endless vehicular shooter.

Rear-mounted oil slick ejectors to make your rivals spin out of control. Dual front-fire machine guns with great range to mow-down enemy cars rather than avoid them. Surface-to-air missiles for when some Tiger-Heli looking mf decides to show up and ruin your day. This car had it all, even a smoke screen! In certain stretches, the game lets you enter a boathouse and turn into a speedboat with a flamethrower instead of oil slicks as you cruise down intercoastal waterways towards no destination in particular. The endless drive of machine guns, chiptune horns, and a singular pulsing guitar riff.

While they should have swung entirely the other way and given us Frank Lupo’s inimitable ‘80s TV series, Hunter, complete with Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer art slapped on the side of the cabinet, I’ll forgive them because this vertical scrolling cart shooter is the right kind of satisfying an American scrolling shooter can provide. 1942 and Legendary Wings and the like required concentration. UN Squadron would soundly beat your ass, and the soundtrack went too hard to let itself be washed out in the cacophony of balls, pins, and children screaming. Sure, it required balancing the yoke-like steering wheel, a gear shift, an accelerator pedal, and buttons for regular and special weapons. But Spy Hunter is still a game where you could crush the leaderboard while eating a slice of room-temperature punishment pizza.

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9. Operation Wolf

In 1995, Flux Magazine declared Terminator 2: Judgment Day to be “the current gun-game standard.” And sure, it may have been that. But the average bowling alley was not spending the kind of money on an arcade cabinet that would get you a four-year-old, blockbuster movie tie-in from Midway. No. You weren’t even going to get Operation Thunderbolt with its dual machine guns unless you were extremely lucky or at one of those fancy AMF establishments in the nice suburbs. Bowling alleys had arcades, but they were side-shows to the main event of waxed lanes, heavy balls, and dads drinking beer while narrowly avoiding crush injuries.

By the time it hit your local bowling alley, even the Operation Wolf console port was old and had spawned much more capable sequels, but in this chaotic afterthought of an arcade it had lost none of its potency. Taito’s original single-player, arcade light gun shooter was an instant classic with a single, vibrating Uzi-like emplacement. No more cartoon ducks or the tin cans and weirdos from Hogan’s Alley. These were Real Dudes who shot at you. Right at YOU. You could look them right in their pixelated faces, glaring down the iron sights, and immediately chip a tooth as the simulated recoil rocketed the metal gun right into your mouth with a tremendous amount of poorly maintained kick. Unlike most light gun shooters that simply ended abruptly when you sustained too much damage, Operation Wolf announced that you had sustained a lethal injury, but it also would abruptly end if you mismanaged your ammo by either gunning too aggressively or failing to pick up more magazines. It was a clever and frustrating mechanic to balance on top of simply not dying, and like the “you are finished here” text from the death screen, the image of the player character withering away in prison as the game taunts “Since you have no ammunition, you must join the hostages” felt like a taunt to put one more quarter in as a small rebellious middle finger against the game.

Inevitably, there was some jingoistic dad who hadn’t let go of the Cold War and had seated his nightmare toddler astride the gun emplacement. “Get those Roos-kies!” he’d cheer as if it was some kind of Red Dawn simulator/anti-communist operant conditioning experiment. Inevitably the child would burst into tears. A mother would yell. And the machine would be yours until people started screaming at you to bowl.

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8. Black Knight 2000

“Black Knight 2000 launches you into the ’90s with a Steve Ritchie masterpiece that’s fast but friendly,” is how Williams sold this beautiful, easy to understand, and immediately dated-looking piece of machinery.

Where your average arcade might get a wall of pinball machines, bowling alleys rarely had the room for something that took up so much floor space (that was reserved for our #1 entry). You got one pinball game, usually disused, dejected, but surprisingly in good shape because the Nightmare Children of the Bowling Alley Birthday Party wouldn’t be caught dead putting money in one of these. Especially not something that looked like a ‘70s British metal band album cover.

Heathens.

Sure, Black Knight 2000 wasn’t the best seller that the original Black Knight was, but it was as solid a gateway into pinball as any. Simple enough to learn the basics of scoring, with a playfield that was lively and chaotic. I couldn’t tell you who veteran pinball designer (and then-future voice of Shao Khan) Steve Ritchie was in 1989 when I first wrapped my grubby hands around the front of this machine, but you can feel the “Master of Flow” at work here all the same. You could also be sure it was always never going to be more than one quarter, and your playtimes would last way longer than playing Mortal Kombat against high school seniors.

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7. Moon Patrol

You know the scene in Aliens where the salvage team finds Ripley’s pod and there’s the shot of the one gloved hand wiping off the cryopod to reveal Sigourney Weaver’s ageless face below?

That’s how I first found this game. Tucked way back in a corner next to the last cigarette vending machine in all of Virginia. I was 17, and avoiding my bitchy first stepmother and her terrible kids at the bowling alley they liked. I wiped the dust off, and underneath found this ageless, beautiful derelict.

There’s nothing complicated about Takashi Nishiyama‘s Moon Patrol. You are a little purple bean of a lunar rover. You have a gun on top that shoots up, and a gun in front that shoots forward. Sometimes you jump over obstacles, sometimes you just shoot them. It’s a simple game that’s just beautifully handled, and one of the first to do full parallax scrolling.

I really love the animation of the rover’s wheels. They give movement a jolly enthusiasm. Few things bring me this much joy. Moon Patrol could just be a game about bopping along the orange surface of a green and teal planet and I’d be happy.

We don’t talk nearly enough about what a bop Ichiro Takagi’s theme for Moon Patrol is. Truly one of the understated greats, with a jaunty bassline melody and ticky upbeat percussion.

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6. NARC

Does your videogame have a b-side cover of your theme song by The Pixies? No, I didn’t think so. NARC does. If you asked a Chat GPT to give you a War on Drugs, Just Say No videogame about color-coordinated cops with machine guns, it might actually get pretty close to what Eugene Jarvis (yes, again) came up with when he used his very own human-intelligence creative mind to do exactly that.

While players can choose to arrest the various enemies they’ll run into in NARC for a score multiplier, it’s much easier to machine gun them down, or use one of your limited but dynamic rockets that erupt bodies into corpse volcanoes of bones.

The goal of NARC is, as stated on the control deck of the cabinet: Bust MR. BIG and Destroy his K.R.A.K Criminal Empire, Apprehend ALL Crime Suspects, and Seize Contraband Drugs, $$$, and Weapons.

The game tasks you additionally with Protecting the innocent, and punishing the guilty. But when you’re literally mowing down the dozens and dozens of K.R.A.K. heads on the highway in your convertible red Porsche, is anyone truly innocent?

NARC was a hyper-violent Robocop 2 level disaster of a game that was as joyful to play as it was a hot fucking mess. Parents and educators hated it, and kids loved it all the more because of that. I got detention, and a phone call to my mother, specifically because on a school trip a friend and I got busted sneaking away during our lunch break to play NARC. Much like the D.A.R.E. officer who came to our school every year to give us an updated laundry list of substances that we couldn’t wait to try in high school and college, I’m not sure that whatever anti-drug message the game hoped to send was received. Despite being the first to bear the “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” splash screen, with the outlandish production and its absurdist approach to the War on Drugs, it’s impossible to say whether or not this was truly on First Lady Gawk-Gawk‘s side.

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5. Out Run

In 1975, BMW’s Bob Lutz joined forces with Ammirati & Puris’ Martin Puris to create the “The Ultimate Driving Machine” campaign for BMW. This, along with other steps that Lutz implemented during his time with the German luxury car manufacturer, is credited as saving the company and launching them into a new era. But like most marketing, it was a lie. No matter how luxuriously appointed or beautifully they handled, no matter how much they set themselves apart from American muscle, the comfortable efficiency of Japan, or the Italians, they were not the ultimate driving machine. That is a position reserved for one, and one alone: Yu Suzuki’s Out Run.

When you need to escape a nightmare pizza party when the birthday boy throws a tantrum or a fight with a parent who has been hitting the Coors Light pitcher a little too heavily, the city pop tinged Latin and Jazz grooves of a seaside drive with your girlfriend will always be there for you. Sure, no bowling alley would ever spring for the full-size, or even the feedback cabinet. But you didn’t need all that, you had imagination and the low-riding camera that modeled the feel of driving in a Ferrari Testarossa, and deliberately limited your view over the horizon and around turns.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about Out Run is its abandoning of the classic racing circuit, opting instead for a free-flowing branched drive limited only by time between checkpoints. Whether you drove through the alps to the Old Capital on your way to Death Valley or went straight down from Coconut City for the sunset Lake Side drive, Out Run was always the ultimate dissociative experience.

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4. Dig Dug

Don’t you just want to feel full? Or are you a filler? We don’t kink shame here at the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company. Some of us dig for the love of digging. There’s a sokoban purity to Dig Dug: make tunnels, collapse rocks (watch out!), inflate Pookas and Fygars until they pop. Building your own ant-hill maze to try and confound and corner a simple AI is a delightful riff on Pac-Man sensibilities.

Perhaps one of the most charming aspects of Dig Dug is Yuriko Keino’s walking melody in lieu of footsteps which ultimately forms the soundtrack for the game.

Whatever your feelings about unlicensed drilling or nonconsensually inflating monsters until they burst, the most important thing to know is that Dig Dug is canonically a part of the same universe as Ace Combat.

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3. Cyclone

In the backglass of Cyclone, one doesn’t have to look too hard to make out Nancy and Ronald Reagan riding the titular rollercoaster. It was 1988 and it’s only natural that after being rescued from ninjas, the Gipper and his Throat Goat would want to run off to Coney Island.

As with Black Knight 2000, Cyclone was one of those games that ended up as the “classic” gaming option tucked into a corner and largely abandoned at your average bowling alley. Sure, a stray kid would come by and give the plunger a mighty tug with no ball in play—but no.

Cyclone would wait expectantly for a true connoisseur. Someone who appreciated the ghosts of the Spook House to get a spin on the backglass’ light up Mystery Wheel, and wanted to take a shot at nailing all three ducks in the Shooting Gallery, and lit up with glee when the ball got picked up by the Ferris wheel. And, of course, you simply had to Ride the Comet (5 times if you want a cool million points).

Are you a bad enough dude to Ride the Cyclone with Ronnie or not?

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2. Robotron: 2084

 

In the year 2084, robots have risen up against humans. You, with your top-down, rudimentary color graphic view and twin sticks, must rescue the handful of human survivors of the Robotron revolution.

While not the first twin-stick shooter (earlier games like Gun Fight and Space Dungeon use similar controls), Robotron is the twin stick shooter that truly nailed it. Dividing the player between avoiding enemy gunfire, while clearing waves, AND rescuing humans produces a game that is as exhilarating as it is stressful.

While Eugene Jarvis would go on to iterate on expressive shooting both in NARC and Smash TV, and others would come along to clone and iterate, Robotron is simply the best to ever do it.

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1. Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road

There is no game that screams out its place as the king of AMF Bowling Lanes harder. With three steering wheel and pedals layout, the Super Off Road cabinet dominated any closet or cul-du-sac a bowling alley called their arcade. Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s digitized likeness would peer out from the extra-wide 25″ CRT letting you know that Winners truly did not use drugs, but they sure as hell liked to go fast and get muddy in big sporty 4x4s.

Super Off Road was a simple game from a simpler time and owes a great deal to R.C. Pro-Am. Cars bounce around corners with a swingy looseness, and cresting hills has this delightful pause as gravity is ignored and then re-realized in a second.

So much of the feel of Super Off-Road is honestly dictated by how well-worn the cabinet was. Fresh off the delivery van, these off-roaders had a much tighter degree of control. But this loosened up considerably after three months of summer vacation, a dozen birthday parties each with 30 kids and 720 sticky-greasy hands all abusing the poor steering wheels, making for a much sloppier muddin’ experience. Figuring out the actual play in your wheel quickly was as significant a component of success as knowing when to slam the Nitro button to smoke the competition. Fucking over the kid next to you was the final pillar of champions. You could reach over, grab a hold of their wheel, give it a solid wrenching, and spin them completely out of control, sending them four-wheelin’ in the wrong direction. In Super Off Road, everything was permitted. Off-roading is serious business. Ankles were kicked. Elbows were thrown. Nitro buttons were pushed non-consensually and without warning. Despite the angled design of the Super Off-Road cabinet, it needed at least another two or three feet of room for the ego and impulse control problems of 9-14 year old boys.

You’d almost never find Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s grinning digitized face anywhere else but the bowling alley. Oh sure, someone will slide into my DMs to gotcha me about how their arcade had a cabinet. While I can’t attest to every arcade in the continental United States in the ‘90s, I can say this: Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off-Road is the game that perfectly encapsulates the American Family Bowling Experience. The chaos and propensity towards violence both friendly and truly malevolent. The overriding impulse to crush competition. The grandeur and spectacle of a cabinet so large and booming but woefully supported and maintained. The soul of the American Bowling Alley is inside Super Off Road. This is the only true place it belongs.

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Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.