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Dona Bailey

A Brief History of Women in Gaming: The 1980s

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It is awesome to see that The Strong (National Museum of Play) has a Women in Games Initiative and their International Center for the History of Electronic Games creating brilliant history exhibits, like A Brief History of Women in Gaming.

You can check out A Brief History of Women in Gaming: The 1980s on Google’s Arts and Culture forum, which showcases a plethora of amazing and talented women in the gaming industry, from the assembly line to the marketing department, this exhibit highlights how women have shaped the games industry through hard work, creative coding, artistic imagination, and business savvy. This exhibit tells this vital but underappreciated part of history!

source: Arts and Culture – Google

From Carol Shaw at Atari and then Activision, creating her best-selling game River Raid, Hope Neiman leading the Vectrex home game console manufacturer General Consumer Electronics’ marketing efforts in the early 1980s, to Gail Tilden creating and editing everyone’s seminal favourite magazine, Nintendo Power, this exhibit is brimming with amazing and talented women in gaming.

Check it out right now!

 

The RepliCade Mini Tempest Is In Da House!

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Being an early backer on a Kickstarter has its perks, you can usually pick up a product for an early bird price (way cheaper than its inevitable retail price) and you get to use / play it well before anyone else does. The only down side is the usual delivery time frame, so the wait can be agonising.

After waiting patiently, our Replicade Mini Tempest arcade machine has finally arrived! Joining its sibling, the Replicade Mini Centipede, these machines are a sight to behold! With great quality inside and out, it’s like someone got a shrinking gun and used it on the real arcade machines – they are that damn accurate! Don’t believe us, then check out the pics below. Oh yeah, the spinner, albeit on a smaller scale, feels almost how we remember playing Tempest over three decades ago!

 

 

 

Introducing the RepliCade Mini Centipede Arcade Machine

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When we backed New Wave Toys‘ RepliCade: Mini Centipede Arcade Machine Kickstarter, we only imagined how good it would be. Well, we have received our limited edition RepliCade Mini Centipede and let’s just say, we are totally blown away by it!

The level of detail, from the cabinet styling, artwork, light-up marquee, control panel overlay, old school P1 and P2 player select buttons to the fire button, coin slots and the beautiful trak-ball, New Wave Toys should be commended for a prefect recreation of Atari’s iconic Centipede arcade machine – it truly needs to be seen to be believed!

The Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin approves of the RepliCade Mini Centipede Arcade Machine

OK, we know what you are thinking, it looks great, but does it play well? In short, it plays perfectly, we cannot fault it one bit! The trak-ball feels oh so right (you can adjust its sensitivity) even though it looks small, it feels great under the index finger. The concave fire button also feels right, with no lag at all. The emulation used is as if it was yanked right off the Centipede arcade board, it plays unbelievably smooth. Just on this, New Wave Toys are using their proprietary RepliCade high-performance chipset for smooth, lag-free gameplay. It runs on a closed system that boots directly into ROM. By pressing the right coin slot, you have access to all the options that the original machine had in the arcades. Seriously, these guys have thought of everything!

The RepliCade Mini Centipede Arcade Machine comes highly recommended. The design and level of detail of this replica mini arcade machine is simply sublime. Dona Bailey and Ed Logg would be quite impressed with what New Wave Toys have achieved. We now look forward to their next creation in their RepliCade series, the Mini Tempest Arcade Machine!

PS: The Atari 25c insert coin keychain (bottom of this article) was available to Kickstarter backers only! The generic 25c insert coin keychain is available via Amazon!