There are no serial numbers on the cabinet. The marquee and cpo say “Invisible Monsters” with Bally midway copyright underneath dated 1980. It appears to be a never before seen Mini Cabaret Cabinet. Back in the early days of arcade gaming, no one really thought about these games being valuable down the road, especially for a game that would end up being improved and mass-produced.Īs for the game itself: “The play of the game is basic and there is no speech. It seems plausible that this person who traded arcades for dental work is one of the game’s creators, or just someone who worked at Bally/Midway who ended up with the game. That’s how it came to be in the sellers family.” One day, this guy came in for dental work and couldn’t pay the normal way…but he had some arcades to trade. The buyer who managed to grab it, Troy F., sent us these pictures and also stated what history he was able to find out about it: “The seller’s father was a dentist in Chicago. Not long ago, a Craigslist ad for a strange arcade title called Invisible Monsters popped up on Craigslist in the Chicago area. It also was a part of Midway’s games that pioneered the use of digital speech synthesis. There are numerous maze patterns and while you are supposed to work together, this game had friendly fire so you had to be careful about where you shot. If you aren’t familiar with WoW, it is an over-head maze shooter where 1-2 players work to clear out the maze of different creatures, eventually facing the Wizard of Wor. It was designed by Tom McHugh and Dave Nutting. Wizard of Wor by Bally/Midway is well-known in classic gamer circles, having been released to arcades in 1981 and enjoying some console ports not long after that. The Discovery Of Invisible MonstersĮvery game is a “prototype” until it is released but it is rare that anyone comes across a pre-production version of a game that is fully playable. That story is the discovery of a prototype to Midway’s Wizard of Wor. Thanks to posting about that, another story came up that I didn’t really get into on the site due to other circumstances that has slowed the number of posts we see lately. I’ve always found prototypes and unreleased titles to be interesting and in the arcade business there is a lot of ground to cover with such titles.

If you follow the site on social media then last week you should have heard about our new page dedicated to tracking unreleased arcade games.

Wizard of wor play