Arcade games without home ports

[lynchie137]

WWF Superstars and WWF Wrestlefest. Now granted, if these two games were ported to any of the home consoles that were going at the time, some major concessions would have to been made in order for them to be playable. But even so, they still would have been better than most of the WWF wrestling games that were available. And probably even better than some of the non WWF themed games as well. Both are pure classics, and I would LOVE to see the fine folks at Evercade release them on a wrestling themed compilation cart. Assuming they can get the rights to do so, that is...

Also, I wouldn't have minded seeing Mat Mania ported to a console like the NES or Sega Master System. Again, some concessions would have to been made. But seeing as how that's a much simpler game, I think that both consoles could come really close to making it as close to the arcade as possible.

[Atariboy]

Have you played either port of Sinistar or Atari Football? Sinistar is a great arcade experience; I think it’d be difficult to port Atari Football.

One more, does anyone know if I-Robot (created by Dave Theuer, creator of Tempest and Missile Command) was home ported? I gave the game a go last year at the classic arcade Pinball PA in Hopewell, PA, while I was visiting fam and friends. I-Robot was pretty hard to grasp, and the game’s backstory is pretty fascinating.

I've spent many hours playing Sinistar, ever since discovering it on Williams Arcades Greatest Hits for the Super Nintendo back in about 1995 or 1996. Every console collection that has featured it has done justice to it. Even Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits on the SNES/Genesis/PS1/Saturn is a good time, although you're limited to 8 way d-pad movement (The arcade game used a 49 direction stick).

As for Atari Football, it's emulated and I don't really know how well it plays. Given that it's a track-ball, the experience I'm sure is a compromised one on modern consoles just as something like Missile Command is. On Atari Vault on a PC, you could at use a USB track-ball (Or a mouse) for a more accurate experience thanks to supporting USB keyboard/mouse controls. But my attention was more focused on the other black & white arcade classics in the collection like Super Bug, Fire Truck, Destroyer, and so on. So I've barely played Atari Football, Atari Soccer, Atari Basketball, and Atari Baseball on there.

Atari's 'I, Robot' made its official home debut just last fall, in Atari 50 for the PC, VCS, Switch, PS4, PS5, XB1 and Series X/S systems. Always was passed over in earlier collections due to the complex and proprietary hardware it utilized (Commercial emulation developers usually like to focus on emulating hardware that brings to life a variety of games rather than one offs).

[AtariToday]

Cliffhanger laser disc arcade 1983: https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_deta ... me_id=7352. Bizarre Japanese laser disc game with 500 moves per screen.

Cliffhanger, believe it or not, is a laser disc game adaptation of the Lupin III movie Castle of Cagliostro, which I happen to be a fan of.

Whoa whoa whoa! How have I never heard of this game?!
I love the Castle of Cagliostro movie and have watched it about a dozen times or so (had never watched Lupin stuff prior strangely enough). I need to find an arcade that has a cabinet of this so I can play it.
Many thanks to Gleebergloben and Zack Burner for bringing this one up. This right here is one of many reasons I love reading the replies in this forum. You guys rock.

For games without a home port..We had a movie theater in town that had a Alien vs. Predator game by Capcom. It was a fun beat 'em up with two cool franchises (the movie AVP didn't come out for another 10 years or so). The SNES release from Activision was nothing like the arcade game. completely different except for the name

[Atariboy]

I personally don't count it as having seen a home release since it's a plug and play (and an expensive and huge one at that), but AvsP technically did get at least one home release on the Capcom Home Arcade.



Hopefully one day it gets a proper console and PC release. But in the meantime, it's coming to MiSTer and the Analogue Pocket soon.

[AtariToday]

I personally don't count it as having seen a home release since it's a plug and play (and an expensive and huge one at that), but AvsP technically did get at least one home release on the Capcom Home Arcade.

my goodness that is expensive and huge (looks like it is PAL format only too? weird..).

[lynchie137]

As I’m 102 years old more or less, I’m going old school. Not Mills Brothers old, but kinda old.

Arabian arcade 1983. https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_deta ... me_id=6899. I have very fond memories of this game, haven’t seen it in almost 40 years.

Bagman arcade 1982. https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_deta ... me_id=6995. The most insanely frustrating early 80’s arcade game, period. This game is so frustratingly hard as the 2 cops always seem to be right on top of you it’ll make you want to punch a house. But for some masochist reason I keep coming back for more.

Bubbles arcade 1982. https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_deta ... me_id=7226. Fun game though controls can get a bit ‘slippy’. There may be a port for this I don’t of it.

These 3 were never that big in the arcades, hence the lack of ports. But it would be cool to see what could be done with these games on home systems.

Speaking of obscure arcade games, here's another one that never received a home port. Which is a shame, as it's pretty good.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_deta ... me_id=7742

[matmico399]

Was the cocktail cabinet game Armor Attack ported to anything besides the Vectrex? I played the stew out of that game.

[djc]

For the purposes of this conversation, I don't really think compilations should count. While yes, a game being included in a modern compilation does let you play it at home, it is most certainly not a port. I can just as easily fire up MAME and play games that way also. Its not the same as a company taking the time to create a home conversion of a game.

On that note, Strata's NFL Hard Yardage would've been cool to see ported to a home console (probably a 32-bit system).

[DocHix]

Speaking of vector graphics, I don't think that even the Vectrex had a port of "Warrior" (Vectorbeam, 1979). I remember reading somewhere that this was the first ever one-on-one weapon based fighting game. It had a cool 3-D dungeon diorama over which the game screen was reflected (lit with black light to give it a spooky, dank look) and when a knight would fall into one of the "pits", he would spin into oblivion. I remember playing this in 1980 at an arcade on the UCLA campus...great game!

[Atariboy]

For the purposes of this conversation, I don't really think compilations should count. While yes, a game being included in a modern compilation does let you play it at home, it is most certainly not a port. I can just as easily fire up MAME and play games that way also. Its not the same as a company taking the time to create a home conversion of a game.

I personally don't see the significance in how the game has been coded. If it's officially available, it's officially available.

And some of these aren't even emulation, like the Williams Collection for Genesis and SNES (Not enough horsepower for emulation so these were true ports from the original source code).

I see value in differentiating if it's a modern release in a compilation decades after the game had originally went un-ported to contemporary home hardware, but I don't agree that for the purposes of a topic such as this that it shouldn't count.