Black Widow | 1982 | Arcade Experience | Cabinet Simulation
1This is my attempt to recreate the experience of playing the game Black Widow the way it was released, in an arcade cabinet with very beautiful art and the game being displayed on a vector monitor.
ABOUT THIS GAME
Black Widow is a multidirectional shooter developed by Atari, Inc. and released in arcades in 1982. The game uses color vector graphics. The player controls a black widow spider via two joysticks, one to move and one to fire, defending the web from insects. Black Widow was offered as a conversion kit for Gravitar (1982), a game which was not commercially successful. The kit uses the original Gravitar PCB with a few modifications and a new set of ROM chips. Many factory-built Black Widow machines were produced using unsold Gravitar cabinets with Black Widow side-art applied over the Gravitar sideart.
ABOUT VECTOR MONITORS
In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics. For this reason it is impossible to accurately present what a monitor of this type is like in real life, so my attempt was to simulate a recording of this type of monitor, where trails of bright lights remain on the screen for a while before disappearing, and glows are presented where there is a large concentration of light.
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