Starcade - a video game show in the 80's

The video games of the 80's seem for the most part, exceptionally dumb by today's standards. However, it is important to keep in mind that we had really nothing to compare them to so for us, the fact that you could control something on a screen with a joystick was just the most awesome thing.

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This game show came on in the afternoon times just after school. This caused some controversy in my own household because we only had one TV and my sister wanted to watch something else. Imagine not being able to youtube whatever, whenever.

The game worked by two contestants answering questions about video games in order to choose which game to compete on. They were then given up to 50 seconds to get as many point in that game as possible to add to their total.

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The second player would then get a chance to do the same thing although they would normally get like 10 fewer seconds to do so. Eventually a winner was chosen by their point total and they would get a chance to play a brand new game that the had never played before.

Their score would be compared to the average of 20 other people that had "tested" the game with the same time-period. If they beat this average they would win the top prize.

This top prize was normally their own arcade machine (which was just the dream of dreams for a kid in the 80's) a robot or a vacation to some exotic location (which I would assume was the least desirable prize for the contestants)

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Very few people actually won the top prize, but RB5X was one of the choices. An obvious R2-D2 lookalike retailed for around $3500 and is still manufactured today, you can get one for a mere $2000 now.

Arcades were a very big deal back in the early 80's and the ability to see some of these games before you arrived at the arcade was a very important 22 minutes for little me back then. This show surprisingly only lasted one season so maybe it didn't have as widespread appeal as I thought. I would love to go back in time and try to explain Twitch to the show's creators and just blow their minds.