The words "Game Over" were written, quite carefully, using permanent marker on top of the dust-covered cardboard box, which was supposed to be holding receipts. Nobody is sure why the inventory team at Panic Warehouse 4 in San Gabriel, CA stopped to check this box out in particular. Maybe it looked a little cleaner, and it certainly was a whole lot lighter, but we like to think it was something a little more otherworldly that cast a certain glow on that 1 of 1000, sparked someone's curiosity, and brought it out into the daylight.
Tucked inside this corrugated crypt was a most wonderful surprise: a dusty set of EEPROMS, hand-wired, worn, looking frail and almost helpless, with a adhesive-disintegrating sticker marked "B360 - Rev 2 - '83". Considered destroyed with the great videogame crash of the 80's along with all of Panic's other arcade assets, including the never-released arcade games "Steer Go Round", "Rocktor", and much sought after "Vice Grip", B360 was the pet project of one of Panic's co-founders, Steven Frank.
After a lengthy career in aerospace during the 70's working on a embedded systems projects for the NASA JPL research laboratory, in 1981 Steven Frank turned his electrical and computer engineering skills towards the booming videogame industry. Along with Cabel Sasser, an unlikely contributor in the form of a college dropout "radical" who hated "The Man" as well as "Ralph Macchio", they began to build innovative, ground-breaking, and economical videogame arcade games, and were poised to light the videogame world ablaze.
Unfortunately, the videogame world got there first, the industry took a tumble, Panic declared bankruptcy, and B360 was locked, sealed, and never seen again.
Until now.
Thanks to the magic of emulation technology, which physically runs the B360 game ROMS on the simulated hardware of the original arcade machine, you can play B360 again ╤ something once thought impossible.
Videogames have changed a lot since 1983, but we like to think that the core gameplay of B360 remains as fresh and addictive as the day it was coded ╤ almost as if the game had been sealed in a quality, Tupperwear container, rather than a dirty, disgusting cardboard box we wanted to throw out.
INSTRUCTIONS
Use the mouse, move the paddle, destroy the bricks, send us your high scores.
REQUIREMENTS
B360 requires GameSprockets.
Please note: the game might not run well on older Macintoshes. This is due to the processor stress of emulation technology, and certainly not due to the fact that the game isn't an emulator at all, but rather just a fun quick project.
