Back in the early eighties – video games were in their infancy. Sure you had your Atari’s, Coleco’s and Vectrex’s (only just!) but you also had the, frankly brilliant, genre of “Tabletop” games. These were self-contained, standalone, video game system, strongly reminiscent of actual arcade machines.
And I had two of them.
Grandstand’s “Astro Wars” (a clone/derivative of Midway/Namco’s Galaxians) and “Scramble” a conversion of the arcade game of the same name.
And you know what? I still have two of them!
Yes, despite Astro Wars coming out in ’81 and Scramble in ’82 both of these still actually work perfectly. Back in the 80′s things were obviously built to last – and last they have seeing as both of these machines are coming up to their 30th birthdays this year. In light of this, I thought a little celebratory blog post should go up in their honour.
More pics (and some videos!) of these units and other vintage video games (including Pocket Scramble and Mario’s Cement Factory LCD games) can be found on my flickr account here.
