Woah, you still have drive-ins? Where?
Are drive-ins rare now? We have 4 less than an hour from where I live
http://www.ruskinfamilydrivein.com/
http://www.silvermoondrivein.com/
The last two are owned by the same company AFAIK.
There’s one a couple towns over in Idaho. I think we have three left in the whole state, but there used to be one just up the road that came down in the early 90’s.
They’re around but almost for the novelty factor - seems they need a big city to support them, at least here in Canada, where they only work six months a year.
And up north it’s freaking annoying that the movie starts at 10:30 p.m. when it finally gets dark.
You can still occasionnally run into those mechanical games in Japan. The only time I tried one, I almost lost a finger though!
I love all those really old mechanical slot devices (non-electrical). The craftsmanship, gearing, and honesty of those old machines feels so much more real than all the pure digital stuff we have today.
My favourite game of this kind was something called Jongkyu machines.
They were various type, but in essence they were pachinko machines where your goal was to get the balls in the spots you chose to aim for at the bottom, as to recreate high scoring mahjong hands. It was like the proper real life Peggle!
Sadly they were all made illegal 10 years ago, and as usual when Japan decides to erase history, good luck findind even traces they existed.
Why would they make those illegal? Konami makes tons of money off digital gambling machines it seems a shame they’d do away with mechanical ones.
I have no idea…wait. Elevator control? Is that the sliding cage-type door folded up to the left?
I’d love to have one of those, not only to play, but as a work of mechanical art. It just looks awesome to me.
Same reason I’ve never sold my two 70’s era electro-mechanical pinball machines, even though they’re huge. Mechanical shit in general is just cool, and the artwork on them was always a big draw for me.
Nothing like that (gambling is supposed to be illegal already, laughs): it was a forceful way to retire all sort of hardware, based on “security concerns” around their electric supply, if I recall correctly.
The law was so stupid it was feared it would be applied to all consumer electronics, resulting in the illegality of about any eletrectric hardware manufactured, but it didn’t get to that in the end. Still, they claimed a whole part of their entertainment culture out, without much looking back.
Yep. The kind of control that they still have on the freight elevators in the Empire State Bldg. I loved running one of those.
Gambling is supposed to be illegal? I don’t understand as they have giant places filed with konami gambling machines, like the ones based on Metal Gear Solid. In fact Konami is basically quitting the gaming industry because they’re making so much off gambling.
Pachinko got a weird pass for many years. Technically you were shooting balls to try and collect more balls. Which were traded for prizes but not money (but a lot of the prizes were tokens you could exchange for money next door). For whatever reason, it wasn’t considered gambling.
I left the gaming (gambling) industry in 2015 but I believe legislation eventually passed in Japan to allow Casinos and those types of slots. While Konami made Pachinko machines for the Japanese market, their gambling industry growth was from mostly outside Japan IIRC.
As the Pachinko idiosyncrasy shows, you can’t directly bet and win money, with a few weird exceptions, like some sports betting, or more strangely most mahjong parlours (which are labelled ironically “free”, as in “free to lose all your money”) — I guess this is why both horse racing and mahjong have poor images, in Japan.
But anything goes as what you can get besides money as a prize, hence that weird chain bartering of tokens @nKoan described.
Also Konami has always been smart with strange venues even in Japan itself, as they are still around after having gone through multiple of the Japanese gaming crisis.
As far as I can tell, the law to authorize casinos hasn’t passed yet.
Looks like a law was passed but no property has been approved yet. Wouldn’t be surprised if there were some more legal hurdles too (at a local level).
When a real little kid we had a very old B&W tele with turn knobs on it to cycle through the channels. The last channel was the UHF band - you had to set that one manually. But TV had a loud chime based remote that with the right combo would cycle all the way from ch2 to UHF or back down again. It would spend one second per channel (I am sure it was mechanical in the TV). Even channels with no signal were displayed during the pass. So hours of entertainment as a young child cycling through all the channels at one second intervals, the majority of which was snow, as the dial magically turned.
Was also fun to use as a pretend Star Trek Phaser.
EDIT: I may be mistaken, it may have only had the function to change one channel at a time, but I think chime commands could be queued up, so frantic button pushing could get ahead of the physical action of channel changes.
Also we did have a few incidents where if the right plates/silverware clicked just right, it would get set off. Very entertaining.