Some Arcade history from Budapest:
There was an Amusement park in the middle of the city(still exists) and the only Arcade in Hungary was there.There were huge rows in front of each games, sometimes we had to wait more than an hour to play.1 credit was 5 forints, which is 2 eur cents now.
The most popular was the 2 Zaccaria games, Phoenix and Scramble.
The dedicated cabinets that I remember:Asteroids, Berzerk, Gyruss, Tron, Tutankham, Piranha, Star wars, Vanguard, Hyper Olympics, Space Invaders and a lot of electro mechanical pinballs.I've heard the rumour that all the cabinets was a part of a bartel business between Italy and the hungarian government.A few years later there were more and more pubs and little arcades whre we can play the games like Kangaroo, Zaxxon, Amidar, Roc'n rope, Dig Dug. Moon cresta etc..
I've heard also (the biggest shame in the history of Hungary), that when these machines from the amusement park's arcade sterted to break down and there were no experts to fix them, they smashed all the arcade cabinets and the pinballs, and threw them to dump.
I played a lot in that times with videogames, I had an Atari 2600, commodore 64(still have).
Than the arcade fever started to end in the 90's, everybody played with consoles at home like Nintendo and Playstation.
I missed these games very much, but didn't do anything to get them in the past 20 years.
Than last summer I accidentaly saw a Phoenix for sale in a hungarian auction site and all those beatiful years were came back to me.
I bought that one from a little village near Budapest, it became my first own dedicated cabinet.
To be continued........
Please somebody explain me, how to upload pics here
