Before video arcade games, there were electromechanical arcade games. Periscope was from Sega, released around 1965 in Japan and 1966 in the US. It was Sega’s first coin-op arcade game, and put Sega on the map. Wikipedia says:
Periscope popularized the quarter (US$0.25) cost per play of arcade games in the United States.
It looked like this, in play,
They made large, 3 player ones! An absolute unit of an arcade machine,
If you are ever in St.Louis Mo, check out the City Museum, they have a huge working arcade with mechanical video games.
I will add if you’re ever in San Francisco, California, Musee Mechanique also has tons of mechanical games.
Oh wow! That looks incredible.
Didn’t expect the thread would turn into a list of awesome places to visit if me & fam are ever in the area, but I’m here for it! That SF one is new to me so thanks for the rec.
I think there might be a similar place in … was it Portland, or Seattle? I’ll have to go dig for it.
Oh that’s really cool.
Schweeeet! This place? That looks kind of awesome without even counting the mechanical arcade games.
Yeah it’s a crazy artists fever dream. I haven’t been there in over 20 years, and it looks like it’s even more amazing than previous visits. They have tunnels everywhere so you can enter through the giant whale and go thru the giant tree to one of the other levels, you might come out the indoor skate park where kids are just sliding around in the bowls or you might come out in an old fire engine that leads to an airplane fuselage. And don’t forget the adult ball pit.
I’m super curious how this actually works. Does it move physical torpedo models under the wave surface?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0CoYCcw9dU
This shows it off.
Oh, wow that’s way more awesome than I thought it would be! Not a lot of playtime for a 1966 quarter though.
A little over $2.50 in 2026 dollars. I assume it’s because it was advanced for it’s time. I imagine people would pay similarly at modern VR arcades.
Wikipedia also says the machines cost arcades $1,295 then, equivalent to around $12,000 in 2025 dollars, which was around twice the price of most machines. So they’d need let’s say 5K plays to recoup the machine cost, assuming 100% profit. Of course they had costs too, rent, salaries, repairs, so in practice it would be a lot more than that. Multiple 10K’s maybe?
I wonder if it was considered a success. I think arcade machines were supposed to pay for themselves in less than two years.
I think it was. Wikipedia says,
Periscope became a surprise success for Sega. It performed well in larger locations such as malls and department stores, which normally did not host coin-operated arcade games
In March 1969, David Rosen said that Periscope “may well turn out to be the most profitable arcade game of the decade”. As a result of Periscope’s success, Sega created and exported between eight and ten games a year for the next two years
I only know what I skimmed on some vintage arcade sites, but I have the impression that this game is why Sega succeeded in the early days of the company. It was an expensive cabinet, but it was also advanced and attracted a lot of players.
Periscope swam so Sonic could run.
Yeah, impressive visuals for 1960s tech!
Neat!
Neato torpedo, even.
I was about to post a youtube link but Technotica beat me to it. Anyway, it had several fixed torpedo tracks with lights under the waves that would show the torpedo as it moved along. You’d have to time your shot on one of the tracks to hit a ship model in the distance. Which I guess is why the cabinet was so much deeper than most machines: it needed the depth for the torpedo track.
Meh. Spent 6 years grinding the 150 player version, didn’t even get on the leaderboard.
I remember playing some submarine sims, I think El Gato?, on my old Apple.
There’s a lot to recommend a good sub sim. It would probably be a fun thing to have on in the background since there´s a lot of waiting involved. I think the last time I played a sim I got frustrated because it didn’t have the tools for me to fully geek out and calculate trajectories by hand.
And there was VR sub sim, too, which let you bounce around the sub doing the different tasks.
It was just called “Gato”, no “El”. Named after the class of submarine it depicts.
tools for me to fully geek out and calculate trajectories by hand.
Oh! There was a 90s vintage PC sub sim that that had a mode where you could employ a remarkably good simulation of the WW-II era torpedo calculations, and mechanical firing computers they had back then. Good for geeking out.
But man, I forgot the name now! Was it Silent Hunter 2? That might be wrong! I’ll wrack my brain and if a memory jars loose, I’ll update here.
Sounds familiar.
The place to go is probably here: https://www.subsim.com/
Looks like there have been some developments.
I feel like they had something like this that was more portable but maybe its something totally different.
Probably thinking of Sea Wolf which came out much later
that name sounds familiar to. I think it might be that.
