Quest for Robotron Greatness

Well, I headed up to Funspot today with Matt Hamill from Night of the Show to play some Robotron and hopefully set a personal high score. Upon arriving, Matt and I warmed up with several head to head games of Pinbot Pinball. Though I usually do pretty well at this game, Matt pretty much spanked me for a best 3 of 5 set. So after my pinball defeat, I decided to head over to the Robotron game to give it a shot. I brought a video camera with me this time around so that I could record any high scores with the hope of sumbitting one to Twin Galaxies (www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx ) and getting my name on the list of top Robotron players. As you may have read in one of my previous blogs, the current world record for Robotron is a mind-boggling 348,691,680 set by Brian King in June of 1983. In fact the top 11 scores are all in excess of 50,000,000 and were set in the early 80's. So obviously, I have my work cut out for me in my quest for Robotron Greatness.

On my very first attempt, I set my personal high score at 536,125. Upon finishing this game, I headed out to find Matt, tell him the good news and grab some lunch. After lunch, I returned to see if I could improve on my initial attempt. I came close, but that first score stood for the day. Not bad for my first time recording myself playing Robotron. I am confident that, with a little more practice, I could exceed the 1,000,000 point mark. Getting to the 50,000,000 mark, well that might be another thing all together.

Currently, I have to either travel to Funspot to play or find a local collector who has a Robtron cab. So far, I have met two people in the Boston area that do in fact have the game in their personal collection, so I may another opportunity to play soon. I am also on the hunt for a Robotron cab of my own to buy, so if you see one on sale in your area, let me know. In the meantime, I will just have to settle for irregular trips to Laconia, NH and my favorite arcade cab at Funspot.

Here is the footage of my high score game. Notice the many silly errors that I make like running into corners or getting greedy trying to save one more human. Recording my game definitely showed me some areas where I can improve, so I am looking forward to the next time that I can play the game.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCqAYjOMsKU[/youtube]