I may have spent my gaming time at home playing the Atari 2600 when I was younger, but I truly cut my gaming teeth in the arcade. My first arcade game was Gun Fight, an ancient, two-player versus, Western-themed gun fighting game. This was back around 1976. I became hooked on arcades at that very moment, and that addiction has lasted for a very large part of my life. Even today, I will go to a random movie theater, spot an upright cabinet, and instinctively reach in my pockets for quarters. Arcades were THE SHIT during my childhood.
I have played and enjoyed many arcade games during my life. My favorites include – but are not limited to – Tron, Donkey Kong, Berzerk, Tempest, Ms. Pac-Man, and Dig Dug. I must have sunk over $5,000 in quarters into these machines during my formative years. But out of all of them, there is one game that still sticks in my head: SINISTAR!!!
The game, a top-down space shoot-em-up, is nothing special in and of itself. Released by Williams in 1982, it looked like the typical quarter muncher of the time. The premise wasn’t even revolutionary: you pilot a spaceship and try to shoot planetoids in order to mine crystals from them. There are little alien creatures that are trying to mine crystals from the planetoids as well, and they’re some tank-looking ships that shoot at you. You can shoot them to get rid of them, and you can collect the crystals from the destroyed aliens that have mined. The crystals you collect are used to make Sinibombs. Cool, bombs. What are they for?
They’re for destroying the thing the aliens are collecting crystals for…the most frightening thing a teenager could ever see in an arcade game back then: SINISTAR!
The main hook for Sinistar was not the gameplay; it was the digitized vocals that began to play whenever Sinistar was fully formed. The following gameplay clip, captured by GARDEN HUGE ARCHIVE and uploaded to YouTube, encapsulates what I mean. When you reach the 1:03 mark…that’s when I would shit my pants!
[youtube id=”xcyBtVwAsfg” autoplay=”no”]
Nowadays, that’s no big deal. But in 1983, this was on the level of Halloween or Friday the 13th in shit-your-pants fright! Berzerk introduced me to digitized sound in arcade games, but Sinistar introduced REAL aural fear! The moment I heard, “BEWARE, I LIVE!”, I knew to dread! When he would follow with, “RUN, COWARD!”, I tried my best to run! When I heard Sinistar’s roar…pure diarrhea!
Sinistar was a technical marvel past the amazing digitized vocals. The sit-down version of the game was the first to feature stereo sound. There were two sound boards, positioned front and back, to pull this off. All cabinets also features Williams’s custom-designed, 49-way optical joystick. This enabled the game’s smooth movements. None of that mattered. When I heard Sinistar’s voice, all that technical goodness went into the toilet, along with my shit!
Past that, there’s nothing to really write home about. You pilot your craft and collect crystals to make Sinibombs, which are the only things that can damage Sinistar. You blow up aliens to prevent them from mining and take whatever they mined as booty. If you manage to destroy Sinistar with your Sinibombs, you are transported to the next level. There, the aliens are more aggressive in mining for Sinibombs, and Sinistar himself is more aggressive. The more you progress, the worse it gets. It’s typical arcade fare; the game is hard as balls, pay us more quarters so you can get further.
The biggest shame about this game is that it was not ported and released to home consoles until 1990’s Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits for the Nintendo SNES and Sega Genesis. Ports for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit computers were worked on and nearly finished but cancelled.
Is it worth playing now? Only for the most nostalgic, like me, and only in its original format. That means emulation, and I can neither condone nor condemn using emulators like MAME to do so. If your hope is to play the original cabinet, traveling shows like California Extreme in Santa Clara or the Houston Arcade Expo are the only options dedicated gamers may have. These types of exhibits occasionally roll by; I remember talking my son to one in my hometown years ago.
The game may not have been amazing in gameplay or visuals, but the haunting voice will never give me peace.
“I AM SINISTAR!”
Good: OH MY GOD, THAT VOICE! The gameplay was pretty decent, but THAT VOICE!!!
Bad: Hard as balls; nothing incredible to write home about other than THAT VOICE!!!
Final score: 6/10
