If you’re like me and couldn’t balance on a skateboard if your feet were glued to it and it was the size of a small Japanese car, then you might have given up all hope of making it at the X-Games. You then might have gone to your local arcade and tried Top Skater. Because just like playing Dance Dance Revolution isn’t really dancing and playing Guitar Hero isn’t really playing the guitar, Top Skater isn’t really like riding a skateboard, but you can pretend that it is.
The machine is just a giant platform with a skateboard bolted to it. A skateboard that you can move left and right or tilt forward or back. Your guy moves along the screen all on his own, and you get to steer with your horribly uneducated feet. Your goal is to go up ramps and do tricks to gain speed. You do tricks by waggling the board around while your character’s in midair. It doesn’t really matter what you do, your guy will just keep doing tricks as you wiggle the board around a bit. The only thing to be wary of is that you need to make sure your angle of entry is perpendicular to the ramp when you land. Otherwise you’re going to be eating the ramp, and losing speed.
The game was ridiculously hard to control, and sticking the landings was nigh impossible. On top of all of that, the game was eight tokens to play (roughly the equivalent of $2). And when you’re first starting out, that’s a pretty big investment for about 5 minutes’ play time. Eventually, since nobody was really playing it, the cost went down to a reasonable level, but it was still not the best investment in the room. Partially because of the extremely fat people, the kind that make dimples in the sidewalk as the waddle past, would try their hand at the game. They’d barely fit between the retaining bars, and the machine would groan in agony as they tried (and failed) to make any significant progress.
Shortly after it broke, it went away forever.