What's an electromechanical arcade game?  Well, they are the games that you'd find in an arcade before they were superceded by video games in the early 1980's.  Early pinball machines fall into this category too, but they are so well known that they have their own category.  EM games use relays and other discrete components to implement the game functions, rather than microprocessors as are used today.  Some later EM games had transistorized sound effects, but I still consider them EMs because the main game functions were electromechanical.  Some games also used 8-track tape players for background sounds and music.  See here for details about my 8-track Sound Project.

My interest lies primarily in the 60's and 70's games, but there are diggers, fortune tellers, horse racing games and others going back many decades before these.  I might add information about some of those some time in the future, but for now, you'd best look elsewhere.

These games came in many different forms.  There are gun games, driving, flying, torpedo shooting and many one-of-a-kind games.  With Dozer, you operate a miniature bulldozer and shovel as many "tons" as you can in the allotted time.  There's S.A.M.I. - a surface-to-air missile launcher, and Skee-Ball (along with other games of skill).  The games covered broad areas of interest from simulators, to head-to-head physical competition.  While some of them may seem antiquated or simplistic, they all deal with manipulating the physical world, unlike staring at the dots on the screen of a video game.  

I'm working on archiving the sounds from all of the games that used tape cartridges.  MP3 files for all of the sounds that I currently have will be available for downloading.  Click here or one of the buttons to the left for all the details.