[Ye Olde] MAME – A new upcoming column!

There was an age, long ago, when personal computers were luxury goods, when there were a bunch of consoles and when in the cities there were a lot of video arcades with tons of coin-op machines.

Then one day everything finished. Coin op-machines were considered out of fashion and everybody started to play at home with their PCs or consoles such as NES, Game Boy, Sega Saturn and lately PlayStation.

But there was also an age when all those people who lost hundreds of dollars, pounds or lire started to feel very nostalgic about that wonderful arcade era in the late Seventies and Eighties so they put their efforts working on an emulator to recreate the hardware of arcade games.

So in 1997, italian Nicola Salmoria released 0.1 version of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, universally known as MAME, which now features over 7000 games, most of which are 30+ years old.

A lot of MAME featured games are more than well-known even nowadays: games such as Ghost and Goblins or Metal Slug are milestones in the history of gaming. However there is a huge band of almost-forgotten games that re-gained popularity thanks to the emulator which avoided them a sad, sad ending.

For this reason I planned to start a new column with a new post every monday, dedicated to a MAME featured game, just a very quick review to remember all those good old games that amused us or, if not us, at least those older friends of us that we watched with our eyes wide open wearing out the coin-op joystick trying to beat somebody else’s high score…

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