...At the Hamburger Mary's at the corner of Folsom and 13th St in San Francisco. It's because the game was installed into their bar area and that's where I would be after work on Friday nights, sometimes Saturday nights too. I would order my drink and then I would retire into the cockpit and just play the game until I got sick of it for that night. Which was usually a couple of hours.
I couldn't believe how similar it was to watching the trench run in the movie, even though it was very simple computer animation. Getting into the trench was my favorite part of the game it was very difficult to get through it at that point. The wire frame graphics looked a lot like the graphics from the movie, and back in 1977, that was considered high end graphics. Little did we know that less than 10 years later we would get graphics cards with millions of colors. Heck nobody knew that we would get 4K video, which allows you to see every pimple on Mark Hamill's forehead in the original Star Wars movie.
What killed was that you got to sit in a cockpit and you had a pretty nifty flight controller.
Usually I got through about three drinks before I could no longer function.
I know they are making this game even today and that you can buy the cockpit, they do have versions of the game without the cockpit though. I needed that "steering wheel" in order to do it right.
The only other games that they had back then were astroids and I hated that. There was a game made by Exidy called "StarFire" which was pretty similar to this, but it didn't have a trench run but you did get to fly around and shoot down other enemy space ships, it also had a cockpit.
