I've been researching and learning a lot about the early years of arcade gaming lately, and this was so incredibly detailed and informative! It's hard to find basic info half the time, so to have a rundown like this was fantastic. You have a new subscriber :)
Having played both Samus Returns and Metroid Dread this year, the melee counter flash above enemies and bosses in both those games looks exactly like the Wild Gunman tell signal from back in '74. I also didn't know that the nes title Wild Gunman took its name from this original game! Thanks for this incredible piece of video game history!
You just peeled off another layer of a dead brain cells in my old skull: As I saw the various sequences and -- most significantly! -- the flashing over the bad guys’ eyes I’m pretty darn sure that I had stood in front one or two of those while visiting German amusement/theme parks in the mid 70s. I just cant’t remember if I played it myself (kinda feels like it right now) or if I just watched some grown-up doing so. Anyway, thank you for refreshing that memory -- fantastic work and a new sub!
That was a fun video! I actually have vague memories of seeing Gas on TV many years ago and the Wild Gunman scene stuck with me. Thank you for pulling that old memory out of the cobwebs of my mind.
Rockin' video - and YES, it was good you bought that VHS! WG appearing in that movie is a great bit of historical trivia, not covered anywhere else, good for you. I can add some film history trivia as well; that old man playing WG in the Gas movie? That's the freaking legendary Sterling Hayden!!! AKA Col. Jack Ripper from Dr. Strangelove! He played the crooked cop McClusky that Al Pacino whacks in the Godfather (that famous scene with the gun hidden behind the toilet in the restaurant bathroom), and starred in Kubrick's first real film, The Killing! I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that, it makes your inclusion of Gas even better historical trivia. By the time Hayden filmed this, his career had degraded and I think he fled the US from tax evasion, and was living a bohemian pot-smoking hippie lifestyle in East Asia, though perhaps he was back in the US by then if Gas was filmed here.
@@ACriticalHit - lol, I forgot to reply to this - you made me laugh out loud when I read your comment. I remember in college trying to wrap my head around that plot point, it seemed so cartoonishly ludicrous, especially for Kubrick, and it was only later when I learned of the real life "flouridation" conspiracy theories - which were already 'quaint' when I was in college in the 90s, but somehow have gone mainstream today, lol. Still, I love Sterling for that role and for The Killing - have you seen that? - man, he was awesome in those, so glad you shed light on that later, if awful, work he did, I love that he also connects tangentially to arcade history.
Fascinating little bit of History. I actually own a 1970 Sega Gunfight Myself, complete with Operating Manual and advertising literature. Its in Mint condition too..
I'd actually always wondered why I have never seen an arcade cabinet of Wild Gunman like in BttF2, guess now I know why. Its always fascinating to learn about games that have all but been lost to time, specially with companies with vaults as infuriatingly stubborn as Nintendo's, thanks for putting the work on this one :D
This was pretty amazing... for a moment I thought the Gas footage was a fourth-wall breaking thing, which was odd. Anyway - looking forward to seeing what you do next!
Fascinating bit of history... I knew of the bizarre VHS-based Action Max, but to attempt such a thing so much earlier with film projectors is just wild. Would love to see a preservation effort, but I doubt it's even an afterthought on anyone's list of priorities.
Absolutely fantastic Kate 😎👍 Such a well presented video with excellent timelines to all the games. I’ve just subbed to your channel and I’m going to mention you on mine. Many thanks Alex
Very nice video! I love hearing about old electro-mechanical games; they really don't get enough attention. Maybe someday you could do a follow-up on the other Nintendo "FMV" games from that era?
I would have liked to have seen the possible situation in the film Gas when the gun-toting father had his Wild Gunman '74 cabinet fixed! "Hey, there are little holes in this projection screen! Have you been using a real gun on this thing?!?" "I didn't get you here to ask questions, I got you here to fix the goddamn thing. NOW FIX IT!!" (click of gun cocking) "Alright, Jeez...!!"
I remember seeing a Wild Guman '74 cabinet at Walton-on-the-Naze pier as a kid. It's only in the last few years I've been able to find evidence proving its existence. I remember wanting to play it so bad, but I was only about 5 at the time. I wouldn't even have fitted the gunbelt.
5:50 - That's so relatable. You think you're the only one who know something, and then suddenly synchronicity happens and it explodes into the public consciousness like a virus.
Thanks for sharing! As someone who’s not only fascinated by video games, but also my movie projectors, I’m great full! Downside is if they plan on doing preservation of the film, they might wanna hurry. Since they probably used cheap stock, and rapidly approaching being fifty years old, they may wanna hurry. It’s rapidly deteriorating and may have vinegar syndrome. Fortunately there’s plenty of delicate ways to scan it in and color correct it.
No vinegar syndrome for film from the 1970s which is made of plastic not cellulose. The real issue is the colour couplers fading (this is probably Fuji stock so it won't turn pink like Kodak stock does, but it will still fade), scratches and other types of damage to the emulsion. There is a scan of the one of the film loops for this game's sibling Sky Hawk which is very rough looking. Since these were money-making coin-op machines, the machine owners likely would have run the film loops until the projector chewed them up which is probably why they are so rare now. These films actually might be some of the rarest bits of video game ephemera in existence, in that they are so rare they can't even really be assigned a value, and unlike something like Nintendo world championship cart even any knob with too much money can't just buy one on a whim.
I remember seeing this game at a large arcade in Carolina Beach's boardwalk around 1982. Always a crowd around it even 8 years later! Admittedly the film that it played seemed pretty degraded to me even back then. It was still impressive, not sure why Nintendo didn't just make a LaserDisc port of this in the post Dragon's Lair era. I'm sure someone, somewhere who does/will own one of these and will transfer the footage to digital.... There are smart guys in the retro community who could cobble together a version of the game with just that footage.
Arcade Archives doesn’t do fmv games. And they stopped releasing Nintendo’s games. Now they mostly do a weekly format where every Thursday, a new game is added on the Switch and PS4. Side note: they also stopped releasing NEOGEO games, which were the only games the Xbox and PC got.
@@Spin_Music Good eye! Thanks for spotting that. :-) Although I double-checked it against the screencaps of toy commercials in Gorges' history book, and it looks like it's just the commercial for Custom Gunman. Optimistic it might mean they still have the 16mm films though.
I have that VHS tape of “Gas” but it won’t play properly- due to an early copy protection called Stop-Copy the picture rolls on digital displays. Did you use anything to get that transfer?
Hm, I never noticed any picture rolls, but also I think the only time I watched it was while I was doing the transfer. I used an old Samsung DVD/VHS combo, but instead of writing to a DVD-R I hooked the unit up through an Elgato Game Capture HD (so I could record only the one scene I wanted). I think I also had VHD-1X2MN3D in the mix, maybe that split out the old Stop-Copy signal.
Dude, this is crazy. The other night I watched an episode of the 80s tv cop show Hunter. In the episode, the plot involves a fictional arcade game called The Shorter. The episode premiered in January 1985 for the 84/85 season on NBC. It stands to reason that the season was filmed throughout 1983, at the time that laserdisc games were popular. I had thought that perhaps the game depicted was due to that laserdisc craze. Now, upon watching this, I'm betting the writer/s of that episode based it on Wild Gunman. I'm linking the episode below. Great video though and my mind is blown, not just about my theory but the fact that this arcade game even existed! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-91fWFegTEeQ.html
They didn't have the Duck Hunt Shotty!!!- BOOOO... I wanna bring TV Light Guns back... and Lazer Tag and Photon should have had a Red Dot so U could SEE Something!!! Lol TY.
That was interesting actually I just subscribed to you're channel. And don't take this the wrong way but you have a voice I could listen to all day I've never said that before to anyone but you just have it don't know if it's how you sound or the way you talked but do some more like here's a good one tell how Sega CD was manufactured by people who didn't know how to actually make a console. I have double switch on my PS4 and it's a Sega CD game but graphics wise it sucked now it's great you can actually see it and it's not fuzzy distorted or Blocky some smart person actually finally knew how to use the right camera Jesus the very first PlayStation had better FMV graphics than Sega CD.
Have you looked into the Gigaleak from Nintendo? That might have something relating to the footage? Honestly, I have no idea what they grab when they stole that stuff from Nintendo but it could be worth checking out?
I did look into that, but the only Wild Gunman-related thing were elements of a possible SNES sequel to the NES game that would've been included in a Super Scope 6 sequel called Super Scope 15 (the numbering apparently a reference to Nintendo's first consoles, the Color TV-Game 6 and Color TV-Game 15). I might do a video on the future about obscure details in the history of Nintendo's light guns.
Google is your friend here. Nothing that old was stolen as it was mostly GameCube/GBQ and very early 2000's stuff but that does not stop people from screaming about Mother 3 N64 DD every time something is put out from it... *drinks more* Maybe one day we can get the video preserved but I fear it is going to be completely lost.
And yeah, that came out meaner than expected but seriously Google will give you a good idea of the time frame and contents of what was in the Gigaleaks, it's what I hit up to find out what was going on and what to expect.
The leak is big, and not all the content was leaked, rumors says include prototypes for snes, GC and Wii (too N64, like the latest game) Thinks is possible dump this game and runs in mame or daphne emulators
@@Fortuna1 You can't just "Dump" this game and expect to have it play in MAME or an emulator, you have to program it to do so and if you watched the video you would have learned the game operated on two different projection reels. First you would have to capture the footage, clean it up as best you can (If it's salvageable) and then literally program the game from that point. A lot of effort would have to go into it. Now if this game was on LD or something like Us vs Them or Dragon's Lair then yeah, Daphne would do the trick after some working.
