unMAMEd Bally-Midway/Sente Games

For a more complete listing of games check out System 16.


Guided Missile (Midway, 77)
In MAME under the name Missile X/Guided Missile.


Top Gun (Midway [8080 B/W], 78)
Appears to be a mechanical shoot-out game. One target is a hologram, but there are probably no ROMs to this machine.


Catch 40 (Midway [prototype], 78)
Info from Arcade History:
The game [Kick / Kick Man] was actually first developed back in 1978 as a black and white game entitled 'Catch 40'. Midway never actually got around to releasing 'Catch 40', so they reworked it in color and released it as 'Kick'. Then they turned around a few months later and and re-released the game as 'Kick Man'.


Space Invaders Deluxe (cocktail) (Midway [8080 B/W])


Ms. Gorf (Midway [prototype])

Pictures thanks to Brian D!

Pictures from YouTube video.

Picture taken from Gamedev's pictures of 2001 Classic Gaming Expo.
Info from ranger_lennier:
Posted on 08/15/05
Jamie Fenton, the programmer of Gorf and Ms., gave me the lowdown on its whereabouts: "It's sitting in this box, on 8-inch floppies, just waiting for me to get it onto some sort of modern development system... development had to be halted due to the videogame crash."
Posted on 10/11/05
Taking some suggestions here, I contacted the Software Preservation Society. While they didn't have the equipment to read 8" disks, one of the members got in touch with ---, who runs a business specializing in data conversion and was willing to convert Jamie Fenton's arcade sources pro bono. And we got in touch with Jamie, who confirmed that she still wants to release them: "Next time I get down to the storage locker, I will retrieve all the old Bally floppy disks and we can proceed from there. I would love to put all of the sources I have on a CD-R and make it available to everyone. Some of it is in very obscure formats, such as FORTH and early Intel development systems."


Ant Raid (Midway (Game Refuge) [prototype], 81)

Marquee taken from Arcade Heroes article.
Info from Game Refuge:
Hardware designer Atish Ghosh came up with the concept of two ant hills fighting over limited amounts of food in 1981, but it never got off the ground until animator Brian Colin adapted the ants into cartoon warriors who walked on two legs. A trackball moved a cursor around the City Dump and players sent worker ants, soldier ant and super soldiers out to retrieve spoiled foodstuffs for their queen.


Mothership (Midway [prototype], 81/2)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
This was the prototype name for the eventually released Kozmik Kruiser. There was another prototype name of Kapt. Krooz’r for this one of Mothership. Brian described some of the deleted content, including a level called the Bizarn Ocean, which involved divers dropping pearls that would go into a bathysphere.


Critical Mass (Midway [prototype], 82)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
Brian [Colin] describes this as a game with a nuke in the center of the screen that players tried to defuse it before it went off. It was programmed by Al Rosetta. The first assumption from that description was that it was possibly a Midway response to Gottlieb’s Reactor.


Beezer (Midway/Tong, 83)
The Midway licensed version of Tong's Beezer is not dumped.


Ten Pin Deluxe (Midway, 83)


Earth Friend (Midway [prototype], 83)
A prototype color vector game designed at DNA, rework of B&W vector project called "Astro Friend". Also known as "Earth, Friend, Mission" According to Rotheblog, it was a rework of a prototype version of Tron.


Firefly (Midway [ever finished/released?], 83?)


Spitfire (Midway [prototype], 83?)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
On this page, Earl Vickers commented on November 5, 2020:
I programmed Spitfire at Midway in the early 80’s. It was a 2-player game; the computer could be one of the players. The players’ characters navigate up and down the left and right sides of the screen. In the center area (playing field), eyeballs floated and rotated around, occasionally bouncing off the top or bottom of the field or each other.
The players could press the Spit button to horizontally spit a wad at the eyeballs or the other player’s character. You got points for spitting on the other character or for pushing eyeballs off the other side of the field. Hitting the other character also disabled it for a couple seconds.
So it’s kind of like an old mechanical football game where you used these blowers to blow air at ping pong balls and push them past the goal line.
It took a mix of offensive and defensive tactics: spitting on the other character, estimating the angles with which balls would bounce off each other (as in pool), spitting furiously to keep an eyeball from going over your side, etc
One fun feature was that energy, contrary to physics, was gained during collisions between eyeballs. So if you could line things up where spitting at an eyeball causes one or more collisions, eyes could go zooming past the goal line before your opponent can react.
The guys in the lab seemed to like it, but for some reason it did poorly on test. Also it grossed out the execs. I should’ve offered to make it something other than spitting, but I was young and stupid. Anyway, I’d love to play it again, but it’s probably in a landfill somewhere.


Clone (Midway [MCR hardware, prototype])
Barzoids (Midway [MCR hardware, prototype])
Info from Chris at Turbo Sub:
These games were completed, but ended up in the “closet” at Midway. “CLONE” used the MCR hardware, and had a BW camera that captured pictures of players to use in the games. In test locations several players took pictures of various body parts instead, so R&D decided to shelf the project. The BW Camera was again later to capture the images for Journey. Another title was a game called “BARZOIDS” but not much is known, other than they completed it.


Destruction Derby (Midway [MCR hardware, prototype])
Confirmed to be a different game from "Demolition Derby".
Masters of the Universe (Midway [MCR hardware, prototype])
Star Trek (Midway [MCR hardware, prototype])
Info from Chris at Turbo Sub:
Four titles were completed at Sega and delivered to Midway. The first game was “TURBO TAG” (this rom image has surfaced with a Simon and Schuster copyright), the second game was “DESTRUCTION DERBY” (never released), the third game was “MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE” (based off the animated series, never released), and finally “STAR TREK” (Apparently they followed up the vector version with a raster version of the game). These games were also based on the MCR hardware (not sure if it was MCRIII or MCR 68K). Sounds like Midway may have not wanted to pay the licensing fees for Masters and Star Trek, or it was just bad timing in the industry.


Stomp It (Midway [prototype], 83/4)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
This was a Dudley Do-Right themed game where the player went around and smacked black bombs with a bat. Kind of a virtual Whac-A-Mole game in that sense. Not much else available on this one as the code and art have been lost.


Willie Lump Lump (Midway [prototype])
Info from Arcade Heroes:
According to the user astrp3 on this page: “I’ve seen a marquee for this one and someone at Midway confirmed its existence.”


Tank Maze (Midway [prototype], 84?)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
According to the user astrp3 on this page: “a game similar to the tank wave in Tron.”


Aerocross (Midway [prototype], ~84)

Pictures of 2011 Craigslist auction taken from Arcade Museum.
Info from Arcade Heroes:
Described by this page's user astrp3 as “fly a ship along a 3D racetrack floating in space”. Arcade prototypes asked Brian Colin about it and he knew a few things about the game. It first was a project where art was being handled by Bob Dimmerman who worked on Discs of Tron. He had been working on a 1st person roller coaster idea for a long time and that was turning into Aerocross. They were trying to get it working on a new and expensive 3D hardware system that had been created by John Perser but those expenses would prove to be too much for the project. At some point it was given to BC who tried to rework it for use on the cheap hardware that Zwackery ran on. It was limited to a few frames of animation at that point and ended up getting axed.


Euro Stocker (Bally/Sente [SAC-I hardware], 84)
Trick Shot (Bally/Sente [SAC-I hardware], 84)
The SAC-I games should be easy to add to MAME as soon as ROMs can be found and dumped.


P'tooie Louie (Midway (Game Refuge) [prototype], ~86)

Marquee taken from Arcade Heroes article.
Info from Game Refuge:
The player is a fur-bikini-clad boomerang-throwing cavewoman riding atop a giant red watermelon-seed-spitting pterodactyl who would periodically launch into the air to do battle with oversized, often invisible (!) killer bees! 'Nuff said?


Midway's Pro Tour (Midway (Game Refuge) [prototype], ~86-88)
Info from Game Refuge:
This was a highly addictive, single-screen golf game that featured over a dozen adaptations of some of the world's best-known courses. This is one of those games that got hours and hours of fiercely competitive play here in the office, albeit, unfortunately, not out on the street. More info from Arcade Heroes:
Tom Dedamenico was the programmer. It was described as “a highly addictive, single-screen golf game that featured over a dozen adaptations of some of the world’s best-known courses.” It did use a trackball and was so good that it was the #1 game at the Midway offices for a long time. It did not reproduce the same effect on test however and was shelved.


Moonquake (Sente, 87)

Pictures taken from CA Extreme.

Picture taken from Arcade Flyer Archive
This prototype has shown up at CA Extreme a few times.


JetPack (Midway [prototype], 87)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
Brian [Colin] describes this game as “Pac-Man meets Zaxxon”, where the player controlled a cartoony mascot kind of character on an isometric plane. Was a “cute game” but never got more than 1/2 way done. Judging by the timing, it was about this time that Namco released Pac-Mania, which was an isometric Pac-Man game so perhaps that is what shut down Midway’s effort here (who no longer had the Pac-Man license to use like they had just a few years prior).


The Ugly Stick (Bally-Midway (Game Refuge) [prototype], ~91)
Info from Game Refuge:
This weird, cartoony, multiplayer game was sorta like Tag with a Two-By-Four played by a handful of annoying little Monsters.


RC˛ (Electronic Arts (Game Refuge) [prototype], ~95)

Images taken from Arcade Heroes article.

Images captured from YouTube video from Galloping Ghost.
Info from Game Refuge:
A wacky, cartoon-intensive four-player Radio Controlled Vehicle racing game in which Players raced up to four players race around dozens of single-screen environments, disrupting objects and characters.


Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet (Midway)
A special version of the game that allowed network play over a broadband line specially installed at the arcade. There were also a few minor differences such as playable Noob Saibot. It never made it past playtesting in Chicago.


Joust 3D (Midway (Play Mechanix) [prototype], late 90s)

Pictures from YouTube Video.
Unseen64 article and media describes this as an Xbox/Playstation 2 game, however considering the companies involved (Midway Games West and Play Mechanix) are known for arcade titles, it may have been aiming to be an arcade game. Anyone know?
Info from Arcade Heroes:
It would have gone in a slightly different direction thanks to other mounts the player could ride (expanding well beyond Joust 2) and the freedom the 3D perspectives could provide. The code for this still is in the possession of George Petro at PM.


NBA Showtime / NFL Blitz 2000 (Midway, 99)
Cart Fury (Midway, 2000)


Game Magic (Bally Gaming Co, 99)
99 Bottles of Beer (Bally Gaming Co, 99)


Hydro Thunder (Midway Games, 99)
Offroad Thunder (Midway Games, 2000)


Cruisin' Exotica (Midway [Zeus HW], 99)
The Grid (Midway [Zeus HW], 2001)


Stock Carnage (Midway [prototype], 99)

Images from Arade Heroes.
Info from Arcade Heroes:
After the success of Hydro Thunder, the team responsible for that which included Steve Ranck and Brian Silva grew to tackle two projects – a sequel to Hydro Thunder and another racing game called Stock Carnage. Steve describes it as “a stock car racing game with over the top action and carnage”.


Skins Game (Midway, 2000)


Hydro Thunder 2 (Midway [prototype], ~2000)

Image from Arade Heroes.
Info from Arcade Heroes:
A few more details about this project via Steve Ranck through AH. A graphic (above) showing some of the intended boat models, and some of the track ideas for HT2:


RIP Squad (Midway [prototype], 2001)
Info from Arcade Heroes:
The "last" arcade game being made by Midway before they stopped development of arcade games altogether, a WWII themed mounted gun game. More information and videos are on the above page, with videos available in different YouTube links:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.


Wild Pitch (Game Refuge [prototype], ~2004)
Info from Game Refuge:
An "Arch Rivals" approach to Baseball with a fun and original gameplay mechanic.


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