Through the years almost every classic gamer finds a particular game designer whose games they find universally enjoyable whether they realize it or not.   A few years into collecting I realized that many of my favorite games were really written by two designers (well 3).  Tim Skelly (Warrior, Star Castle, Reactor) and the team of Owen Rubin and Mark Czerny (Major Havoc and Marble Madness).  That short list of designers comprise 50% of my all time favorite games.  Through the course of collecting without even realizing that Tim Skelly wrote them, I managed to collect Warrior, Star Castle, Reactor, Starhawk and Rip Off.  I also did an extremely extensive restoration of a very very rare Sundance cabinet, a very little known Skelly creation.  Through the course of time, I happened across Tom Mclintock’s ionpool.net website that outlined many of the unreleased games from Gottlieb/Mylstar at the time.  The list looked interesting so I went about finding the roms to try games like Insector, Wiz Warz, Video Vince and Argus in MAME.   One game stood out for me as being a whole lot of fun and I couldn’t believe it was never released.  That game was Screw Loose and this post is the story of how I put together the only working upright machine known today.

First, I tried the game in mame.  It was then that I found out it plays very similarly to Robotron.  Two joysticks, one for motion one for aim and fire.  There is an additional ’supercharge’ type button on the panel to speed your character Robop up.  Essentially, the goal of the game is to shoot all of the items around you ranging from Records to Bees while gathering prizes like hamburgers and atoms while not getting touched.  If you get touched one of your 3 hands will fly off and you have to retrieve it.  Seems simple huh?  The game itself is very colorful with a cool song that plays.

So, now I decided I really wanted to find a way to build one of these machines.  There is literally nothing known about this game at this point.   Out of pure luck a prototype Screw Loose board shows up on ebay that eventually winds up in another collector’s hands.  That collector then used the original board to apply the same modifications found to a working Q*Bert board I had.  This gave me a working Screw Loose main board identical in every way to a factory original one.  Next, because I had found out from Tom McLintock’s site that Screw Loose used the ‘Bonecutter’ type sound board found in Mylstar’s Mach 3 lasergame I located one of those and populated it with the Screw Loose sound roms found in mame.   Now for the first time I had a complete boardset.  Only catch was, no wiring schematics!  What was joystick up?  What are the sound wire connections?  No Qbert style game ever used that sound board!  What happened  next was literally hours and hours of testing, retesting and hoping until I finally got everything in the right places and had built a working harness.

Now at long last I had it all, or so I thought.  After firing everything up I realized there was no sound amplification.  This was usually done on the power board of Gottlieb games of the time and I had no way of knowing what power board was going to work, so, I improvised a bit.  The amplifier is now a standard issue amp board from a Mr. Do.  This allows me to use a PC switching power supply to run both the main pcb’s and the amplifier.  Once that amp was in place I had beautiful loud sound!

Now, I finally had all the inner workings.  I purchased a brand new Happ Vision Pro monitor and that made me ready on the technical side.  Now, had to work on the cosmetic side.   But, what does the game look like? what is the color scheme? what is the real control scheme?  Enter Tim Skelly.   I contacted Tim out of the clear blue asking a bunch of dumb questions about his game and I was really surprised when not only did he reply, he answered all the questions and was happy to do it!  Tim turned out to be a very nice person and shared a load of information with me and offered his advice on what the color schemes were and what his art intent was.  This was what I used as a starting board to put this game together.  Mind you, i’m no artist so I did my best to design something that fit based on what Tim shared.

It was from the above drawing that I drew most of the inspiration.  I vectorized these elements that are used in the theme of this website that was designed by Jeff Rothe of the Rotheblog.   It came out in email that the cabinet was supposed to be Q*bert style and the sides were white.  So, I set out to clone a brand new Qbert cabinet from MDF.  It is an identical copy to the original cabinet.

Now it was off to the final stretch.  I had to create a control panel and make artistic decisions.. UGH.  I started off with an old converted Qbert control panel, patched the joystick hole and drilled two new  holes for what would be the dual joystick layout required by Screw Loose.

Now here’s something a touch new, I have recently begun redesigning the artwork package, I started with the control panel overlay.

This new CPO design is brighter and more ‘gottliebish’ in my opinion. I will eventually make a replacement lower overlay to match, just  haven’t gotten there yet.   In this photo though, you can see the choice of colorful joysticks to match and the button layout.  From what Tim Skelly tells me, there were several iterations of controls for the game including buttons on the top of the sticks and a spinner/joystick combination.  The rom version I have does not have spinner ability, so I’m constantly on the lookout for a new rom revision.

I’ve also updated the Marquee..  Again a touch more in line with the game.  Now, all the components are in place and a long awaited picture can be taken..  From MAME to dedicated cabinet, we have our first photo of Screw Loose running on actual hardware in an actual cabinet:

Later on, Tim let me know of a VHS tape that he made while developing the game back in the 80’s.  This was really awesome news, because contained on the tape was the only known evidence of a revision of the game that contained Robop’s dog Fletcher!  The difference was, Fletcher was a dog that Robop could call upon to retrieve his hands lost during the game.  As long as Robop had a Bone, he could call Fletcher.  In the known roms I have, Fletcher is gone and a ’supercharge’ button gives Robop temporary speed.  This is one thing that Tim really seemed to remember but was not in any of the roms known to date.  A bit later that year a DVD of that very tape arrived in the mail, and thanks to that dvd I was able to grab a snippet of video containing Fletcher for the very first time.

Later, I filmed a short game of myself playing.

That’s the story of the building of Screw Loose.  It took a couple years time and lots of help from many friends in the collecting hobby, but it’s real now.  I’ve played many a game and should probably apply for an uncontested world record with Twin Galaxies on the game :)   I’ll end this story with one more scan of some hand drawn Tim Skelly art, without whom this game could never have had the fantastic history lesson that drove it’s completion.   Thank you Tim!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Screw Loose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.