Williams MultiGame - This 6-In-1 Arcade Game Uses Original Hardware

Three of my favorite arcade games were Defender, Stargate and Joust. They were all manufactured by Williams, and there was something magical about the gameplay and 19-inch Wells-Gardner display that was absolutely incredible back in 1981. Defender, in particular, took serious effort to master because of the complicated controls and lightning-fast game play. Still, it was a run-away success and is estimated to have grossed over one billion dollars.

Coinop.org is now selling rebuilt Williams games in a 6-in-1 format. The game titles are selected through a menu and run on the original hardware -- no emulation here. You'll find Defender, Stargate, Robotron, Joust, Bubbles, and Splat lurking inside. Each complete rebuild starts with a less-than-ideal Williams cabinet and new 19" Wells-Gardner monitor, power supply, controls, and a refurbished Williams logic board (with additional magic to enable game-switching). The price? A cool $2495. But that buys you the heart and soul of a real Williams arcade machine. Priceless.

Williams MultiGame 6-in-1 arcade machine (coinop.org)

Comments

[bohus blahut]

Wicked. I'm more and more surprised to see retro gaming becoming a more and more viable market. Even Target was selling some repro arcade cabinets, but they ran off emulation and apprently didn't have very good joystick hardware. They also had a pretty astonishing price point in excess of what this 6-in-1 unit costs.

Not only that, but they were much smaller than a real cabinet (an arcade cabinet needs to big enough to beat up on in my opinion), equipped with only a 13" monitor. These mini cabinets dodn't run MAME either, so expansion was only possible by buying expensive add-on packs from the manufacturer. Okay, so you're paying for the ROM's to be all legal and junk, but it just doesn't seem as fun for everything to be legally sanctioned. :)

So this Williams Multigame is really a great idea - the actual hardware for a bunch of games, at what I think is a pretty good price. Individual cabinets for games cost at least $500 a piece, and you need the spaec to devote to them.

I love that the control panel on this unit is the same sort of busy graphics- arts mess that real arcade games had!

[zydeco100]

Then you'd probably be surprised to learn the Multigame and the Target project were engineered by the same guy, Clay Cowgill.

The Target machine has the old hardware distilled down to an ASIC, while the Multigame is a ROM for original hardware sets.

The Multigame started as a bootleg hack for the Williams hardware set. I'm guessing he's all licensed up now and working legit.