Original Release: Merit, 1993-1998, Arcade/Bartop
Merit followed on their “Pit Boss” bartop series from the ’80s with six “Megatouch” games in the ’90s, sporting a very similar style and selection of options
Megatouch (Merit, 1993-1998)
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
The “Megatouch” series was Merit’s 1990s follow-up to its 1980s “Pit Boss” series of bartop game collections … kind of a lazy one too, as it continues running on 80s-tier computer hardware and recycles a lot of the same games. This review covers the original Megatouch series, comprised of six games – seemingly one churned out every year from 1993 to 1998, though they’re all on the same hardware set and don’t have a whole lot of difference between them.
It’s a big collection of boring games, if you want the short version. I find these things a little bit fascinating, though, in that they had such sustained success in the bar niche (continuing into the 2000s with the next generation of Megatouch, which maybe we’ll get to someday) despite being such obvious crap. They kind of presaged the mobile phone games market two whole decades in advance, but were an obscure wisdom only available to the drunks.
Anyway, I’m not playing all six of these, thus condensing the 1990s series into one page. They have been emulate-able through MAME for some time, though, and I tackled the final entry in this particular run (1998’s Megatouch 6) to see what the best and final evolution of the form had to offer. It’s not much. A big collection of mostly casino-oriented games, but often it’s more like the “off-Strip casino” from Vegas Vacation. They’re all over the place with some surprises though, there’s even a little clone of Arkanoid buried in there that’s probably the most technically advanced thing on the whole cabinet. But many of the games have apparently been with the cabinets since the old Pit Boss titles of the 80s and are the same old thing.
I do kind of understand how these maintained a bar presence for so long, along with Midway’s Touchmaster series, though; you’re sitting at a bar, you either don’t want to socialize or nobody wants to socialize with you, you drop in a quarter to be in your own little world and look like you’re occupied. Same way people play on their phones in public these days. Maybe they scratch the itch for a gambling addict when they can’t get to a real casino. That makes more sense than finding these games genuinely fun, which is difficult because they’re short and predatory at best even when the clunky Apple II-era design isn’t getting in the way.
But as to going back and playing them now, like throwing them on a phone or tablet to have a big portable games collection on hand? No, I just can’t see anybody wanting to do that. You’d have to get touchscreen emulation hooked up to make it even playable, which I don’t know if is possible or worth the effort. Otherwise you need a mouse, which means you’re on a computer, which means you have many better options for these same game types.
Megatouch survives from here to become Megatouch XL in the Bush years though, with improved hardware to boot, so maybe we’ll get to inspecting those at some point.
Links
- MAME has supported emulation of these for a long time but it can be iffy in newer versions. For more recent versions make sure you have the microtouch.zip BIOS file. Very old versions (from like 0.2 and before) don’t require the BIOS and may actually work better. Also be sure to change the control type to mouse in the settings, with a gamepad or arrows the cursor will skip around too much for many of the games to be playable.
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