Sinistar · Williams Electronics · 1982 · Williams Electronics (in-house)
A vast horned silver-and-red skull glaring off the side of the machine, and a cabinet that speaks: "BEWARE, I LIVE!" The first Williams game with digitised speech, and the first arcade game with stereo sound.
Sinistar was produced by Williams in 1982 (its on-screen copyright reads 1982, though it reached arcades in 1983) and shipped in two forms: a standard upright, and a cockpit-style cabinet that carried the first stereo sound ever fitted to an arcade game. The art on both is dominated by a single image — the Sinistar itself, an enormous face of red and silver plating, horned and skull-like, with an expression of active malevolence. It is one of the few pieces of cabinet art in which the illustration is not an idealised interpretation of the game's antagonist but a near-literal rendering of what is about to chase you across the screen. The cabinet's real weapon, though, is its voice. Sinistar was the first Williams game to use digitised speech, supplied by John Doremus, and the machine does not wait for you to insert a coin before using it. It taunts. "Beware, I live!" "Beware, coward!" "Run! Run! Run!" "I hunger!" "I am Sinistar!" These lines carry across a noisy arcade floor, which means the machine is advertising itself by threatening people who are playing something else — a piece of attract-mode design so aggressive that it has become the single thing most people remember about the game.
The most frightening attract mode in arcade history
Most arcade attract modes are advertisements: here is some gameplay, here is a high-score table, please insert a coin. Sinistar's is a threat, delivered in a voice, at volume, to a room full of people who did not ask for it. The design intent is unusually direct — the machine is trying to unnerve you into playing it, and the reason it works is that the thing doing the threatening is not a narrator or an announcer. It is the enemy, speaking in the first person, before you have paid.
The art and the audio are pulling in the same direction. Almost every other cabinet of the era used its side panels to depict a heroic protagonist, or a scene of action in which the player is winning. Sinistar's panels depict the monster, alone, filling the frame. There is no hero on this cabinet, which tells you everything about how the game expects the encounter to go.
The genius of Sinistar as a design is that the Sinistar is built in front of you. Enemy workers mine the asteroid field and haul pieces to a construction point, and the player can watch the thing being assembled, piece by piece, in real time, while trying to prevent it — and the game will taunt you as the construction proceeds. When it is complete, it comes alive, announces itself, and hunts.
That is a horror structure rather than an arcade one, and the cabinet is engineered to support it. The malevolent face on the side art is a promise about what is going to happen. The voice is the countdown. By the time the player hears "Beware, I live!" they have already spent two minutes watching it be born, which is why a game consisting of asteroids and a spaceship is remembered by a generation as genuinely frightening.