
Retro gamers love spotting old consoles and computers every time they appear in TV shows and movies. You can’t have failed to notice that social media seems to be awash with posts every time a Commodore 64 or Vic 20 appears in one of the John Wick movies. But Mastertronic isn’t safe from this as I found out when watching some old episodes of the 1990’s series based on DC Comics The Flash starring John Wesley Shipp…
The episode in question, Ghost In The Machine, centres around a technology-obsessed super-villain from 1955 The Ghost (Anthony Starke). He manages to escape capture from his counterpart Nightshade by using a form of cryogenic freezing, hoping to awaken in 1999. Things backfire slightly and his freeze chamber revives him from his frozen slumber a few years early in 1990…
While adjusting to life 35 years in the future and wondering what possibilities lie ahead with the new technology at his disposal, The Ghost finds himself in an arcade. While initially disappointed at the fact that people were using this for entertainment he decided to try for himself.
Although he was even more disappointed to find out just how easy the game was and that he managed to beat the game’s high score in a matter of minutes on his first ever game…
Yes, Mastertronic’s first ever arcade game made it on TV! From the outside, the cabinet itself didn’t seem to be a generic arcade cabinet though, nor was it one of the standard Arcadia ones so what was really inside the arcade unit? One of the other machines seen in the clip gives it all away as right next to the Sidewinder machine you can see Shadow Of The Beast running on it!
So basically the production team opted to set up a couple of Amigas with monitors inside arcade housings. Obviously they were going to be cheaper than buying or hiring arcade machines for the show and more importantly, the Amiga’s video output was normally perfectly suited for TV use as it synchronised perfectly when being filmed unlike other systems at the time, hence the lack of flicker on TV!
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