The Rare, Dedicated Midway LAZARIAN Arcade Game You Have Never Seen! - Remastered

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Joe's Classic Video Games back with another really cool arcade game for you this evening. This is a fairly rare one. This is Bally Midway's 1981 Lazarian. You never see this thing. This is the upright version, which you see even less, but they're out there. I mean, it's not one of the most valuable games ever or anything, but you just don't see them. This game, mainly, I think the reason is it just wasn't all that popular, but I like it. It's a cool game and the art is awesome on it, I think, but like I said, this is the upright. The cabinet's very similar to a Journey cabinet. Journey is another really cool game that Bally did in the early 80s based on the band, of course, and it's also really similar to the Bump and Jump cabinet. Bump and Jump, another cool game. I think it came out in 1982, but this is Lazarian. This came out around the time they were doing like Omega Race and Ms. Pac-Man and Gorf, so it's one of the early kind of more simplistic games, but what a cool cabinet with artwork everywhere. Look how they put art on the back behind the bezel. That's really cool. We bought this a while back at an auction, like a livestock auction that my brother was at. This guy came up and said, hey, I've got an old arcade game and don't you buy those? And so, yeah, we buy them. So, we went and looked and it was a Lazarian. What in the world? So, it's in pretty good shape. We fixed it up a little bit. Check out this artwork. Oh, check that out. Whenever they slip screened it, the part number's backwards on it because it's just a mirror image of the other side, but look at that unibrow. That's rough, folks. And you got a little fighter jet over here doing its thing and these little jets down here. Lazarian. The copyright on the art says 1982, so if it came out in 82, it would have been... Let's see what the screen says. It says 81 on the screen. It also says Zachariah on it, so I guess they probably did the software. This is this side. Of course, just a mirror of the other side. The art on this side is much better than the other side. You can see a little... Whenever you see this kind of black stuff on the artwork, it's because somebody spray painted it at some point. They probably painted this to touch it up and it bled over a little bit on it. It's the same thing as the other side. Cool art. So, down at the front, there's a similar picture, but it's a different drawing. The little ship is actually hitting him. Very neat. It's got the classic Valley Midway coin door on it. Looks nice. Control panel has nice wraparound artwork all the way on it. The little fighter jets. Start game, one player or two player. Those are the little buttons that are on some of the cocktail games like Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man. Then you have four fire buttons because you could shoot in any direction by the four main directions. It has those neat little diamond-shaped buttons. Then you can move in four directions with a four-way joystick, just like Ms. Pac-Man and such. Then the bezel is glass. Check out how they did it. The backdrop there behind the bezel continues down onto the bezel. You got the creature there, the alien whatever, and his tentacles go down onto the bezel. This one reaches all the way here towards you. Then you got the ships there. Then you got your ship right there shooting at him. You can even see the little guy inside of it piloting it. That's really cool. They did a good job on all that. Here's the marquee. The marquee on these is always flaking away. Basically, everywhere you're seeing little white things is because we painted the back of it to save it. Basically, before that, it was clear. All of that had flaked off and you could see through it and see the bulb behind it. We painted the back white, which lets it still light up, but makes it where you're not just staring at the bulb. That would have originally been orange. There's your fighter ship again. There's the Lozarian. All right, so let's read the instructions, shall we, of this long-lost classic. I think the only system it was ever released on was the Commodore 64, I believe, which was a long time ago. Instructions. Insert coin. Start game. Press one or two player button. So far, this game is a lot like other games I've played. To move ship, move control stick. That's also similar to other games I've played. Fire buttons control the laser direction. Phase one. This game was interesting because it had different little boards that you go through. Phase one is what he's on right now. You're the ship flying around and you're trying to shoot the yellow eye or the yellow little blob thing and avoid the ones that are cruising around looking for you. That one just killed him. Phase one. Shoot out the yellow areas to free meteors. Move into the red center zone and destroy the meteors. Avoid missiles and collisions. So, you shoot those little yellow things that it was showing. Once you shoot all of them, they all come to the outside. Then you go into the middle of the circle and shoot at them from the inside. Then you go into phase two. Move ship through corridors, avoiding obstacles and attacks to dock with the sister ship. It'll probably do phase one again and then I'll show you that. That's phase one. You shoot the yellow things. See the little red one on the outside? That's what they do after you shoot them. Then once you get all of them out, you go into the center and then shoot at them. So, this is phase two. You go through this tunnel and try not to hit anything and you can only shoot in certain directions. Once you get to each level, they attack you differently. Just weird, weird game. Phase three. Cut away the monster with the upper laser to release the eye. Drop back and to the side to avoid missile attacks. Four hits are required to destroy the free eye of the Lizarion. So, we'll show it again. So, basically this is the attract mode. So, you shoot the yellow things and then as you do, they come out at you like that. He's pretty good this time. This is just again the attract mode. And then once they all get out, you go into the middle. He blew up. So, then you move on to stage two, which is this one where you try to make it up to the top to dock with that sister ship, they call it, in each area. And then this is the Lizarion here on stage three. And you have to shoot through the body up there above them and then the eye comes out and then you shoot the eye. And then once you do that, it starts back over at the first level and gets harder. So, just a weird game. It's kind of like Gorf. Gorf was like that. It had four or five different types of little mini games in it that you had to play for each level. And then the first game that was kind of like that was Donkey Kong. If you think about Donkey Kong, on the first level you go up the rivets, I mean the girders to the top. And then once you get to the damsel, the second level is, it's all different and you have to climb up the ladders and knock out the rivets to knock them down. And then there's the spring level. So, it's kind of like three different games. Well, this is like that too. It's kind of like three different games. Check him out. Oh, he got him quick that time. But, it's just a weird little game. So, I don't think it really did all that great. So, you'd never see this. I don't know if they didn't sell very many or what the whole story was. But, we were happy to find it and get working again. It's got cool music in it. We'll play it a little bit here in a minute so you can hear it. It's got like, it plays like Beethoven and stuff and the William Tell Overture and things like that while you're playing it. It's just little simple versions of it, but it's kind of cool. So, I'll get the tripod and set it up and we'll play through this long lost, long forgotten classic. Be back in a minute. Alright folks, we are here in our arcade. That noise you're hearing in the background is the Ikari Warriors game. It's just behind this one. So, that's not the music for this one. This one, they attract sound. Actually, it didn't even have a track sound. So, that's not the music for this game. But, we'll let it run through the attract here for a second just so you can see what's going on. It says, move control lever left or right to select letters. Press fire button to insert blah, blah, blah. Score table, that's what you get for each part. 1981, Bally Midway Manufacturing Company. All rights reserved. It also said Zacharia. Maybe that's Zacharia. I don't know. I'm sure there are experts out there that would know. This is just a strange game. I mean, it's just weird. It never caught one. It's kind of fun though. I mean, if GORF is fun, this is fun. GORF had an edge up on it though because it had the speech chip. The reason I'm mentioning GORF is because it's another game that had multiple screens that were completely different from each other. We'll play through it a little bit. I'm not all that great at it, but we'll see what we can do. Let me try to add some credits without knocking over the tripod. One thing about it, it's got nice sound. The sound is nice on it. Very unforgiving though. If you get hit one time, you're dead. And you can't shoot the red things yet. Come on, sucker. The good thing is they just kind of orbit, so you can get out of their way pretty good. Famous last words. You also have a fuel meter at the top if you look close. Try to just do it as quick as possible, so they have less chance to screw me up. Hmm. All right, now you go in the middle and you dock with your sister ship, and now you have to shoot all of them. So, you can't leave this red circle. Okay, that's that. All right, so this is level three. Navigate the Tunnel of Fear. So basically, you can't shoot up. You can shoot behind you. All right, now these guys, you kind of have to just watch out. Man, so tough. Look how they treat it though. They let you continue from that same spot. They treat it like I just beat one level by beating the bottom. Can continue by inserting coin within 10 seconds. Let's do it. Let's do it. I'm getting very invested in this. You sucker. Come on, you sucker. Hmm. I killed them, so that should mean I beat that. I was robbed. It's tough, folks. The struggle is real. Man, when they've got two going like that, it's hard to get by it. Yeah, now what? It's a William Tell Overture, by the way. Reserve low. Oh, okay. We should be good now. Navigated the Tunnel of Doom. This is kind of cool. I kind of like this. All right, folks, there you go. That's how it goes. Now, guess what you do now. It's harder, and you just do it again. Oh, my little bullets are shorter. See how it only got a little bit? They're killing me here. They're killing me. All right, so I got the high score. Look, I beat everybody else that had zero. I mean, that's talent, folks. All right, there we go. So, that is Lazarian. I hit the button and turned the camera off. You'd think, after over 100 videos on YouTube, that I would know how to operate the freaking camera, but you'd be wrong. You'd be wrong about that. So, there you go. This is Lazarian. Very kind of strange game. You don't see it too often, but cool. I like it. I give it the stamp of approval. Very tough, though. Pretty challenging. I barely made it through the first mission, and I would imagine, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there's probably dozens of missions. So, by the time you see this video, we may not have this beautiful Lazarian anymore. We may have already sold it, and it zapped its way over to somebody else's house, but you can see all of the games that we do have for sale right now. That's what we do. We fix them up and sell them. On our website, go to lionsarcade.com, and you can check out all of the games that we've got in right now, or if you're local, you can come by and see us. We're in downtown Rock Hill, South Carolina, which is about 15 minutes south of Charlotte, North Carolina, and we've got a building here, a showroom with dozens of games in it at all times. We get a couple pinball machines in usually each month, and mainly the older pinball machines, though, usually the older games like this, too. But if you're not looking to buy a game, and you're not local, so you're not going to come by because you live in France, that's fine. Subscribe to us here on YouTube, and every time we get in a cool game like this, we will shoot a little video of it and upload the video here for all of our YouTube friends. So, have a good evening. We will see you next time.