Saving the Galaxian3 Theater

I was going to just post this in the Dragon's Lair Fan thread about the guy's home arcade, but this is just too much for one thread alone.

Years ago I took a trip to Niagara Falls with my folks for a weekend trip. When I was on the Canadian side I went to this place that was kind of like the Space Needle. On the top they had a mini arcade, with the WWF Royal Rumble and Guns n' Roses Pinball machines, and this monster, Galaxian3.

http://klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7889&letter=G

The game is pretty much a theater with two projectors playing two laser disk machines and it can fit six players at once. The game played a lot like Namco's Star Blade but on a grand scale.

I had to pay five bucks for a ticket so I could play it and by myself it wasn't that fun, but with five other people it's gotta be nuts.

Well I was on the Dragons Lair Fans page and the same guy who made the arcade in his garage, found the game, and now he's bringing it home.

http://www.dragonslairfans.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=231

Click there and let it load, it's not 56K friendly but damn it's awesome to see that their going to try to restore this back. I wish I could go over to there and play it again.

Absolutely Massive, restoring that beast would be quite the feat, replacement parts are prolly a bit difficult to get a hold of for a namco game made nigh 17 years ago.

Very Cool stuff.

That's pretty awesome. Many years ago I got the chance to play one of the Galaxian3 cabs at the Riviera in Las Vegas, they were charging $1 to play it. The next year, the price had been cut to 50 cents. It amused me that it had gotten to the point where this big expensive cabinet could be played for much less than the original price to play. Then the next time we went to Vegas the cab was gone.

It got me thinking about the few arcades that actually got the game in the first place - what do they do when they decide to get rid of it? There's no chance of selling it to another arcade. Do you just completely trash a big expensive cabinet?

It's cool to see their attempt to preserve the thing. Sure it's a shitty game, but it's the cabinet that makes it such a big deal.

YuckMud said:

Years ago I took a trip to Niagara Falls with my folks for a weekend trip. When I was on the Canadian side I went to this place that was kind of like the Space Needle. On the top they had a mini arcade, with the WWF Royal Rumble and Guns n' Roses Pinball machines, and this monster, Galaxian3.

Click to expand...

haha, I played the very same machine years ago when I was up at the falls with my family. I remember they had a 3d headset setup too, hooked up to a PC running some shooter (maybe duke nukem? I forget) which prety much sucked. They also had one of those sit in rides where you watched a screen and the thing bounced around. Not a bad place put that game was defently the best part, even though I didn't think it was anything too special. Concept seemed cool, but it played like crap. It was sometimes too difficult to tell what was going on I thought.

I hope Namco make this game in HD for x-box 360 or ps 3
also I have this for ps 1

Actually my brother, who owns a small arcade in Kamloops Canada, bought this monster for his place about 3 years ago. It is huge and took about 3 days to fully assemble and countless hours troubleshooting. There were tons of problems with the laserdisc players and even today I think it is still having issues. Replacement parts are very obscure to find but the laserdisc players (which are fairly unique) can be found on ebay relatively easily. I think he is charging 8 tokens or $2.00 per play per person. Here is a link to the game center:

http://www.thefunfactor.ca/attractions.htm