Gypsy Juggler

The Game: One or more players take turns controlling the gypsy juggler, who is trying to keep his eggs in the air. Pressing the button releases another egg into the game, which the juggler much managed to keep in the air along with the previous eggs. If even a single egg splatters on the ground, a chick hatches and walks away disapprovingly, leaving the player with one less turn; the game ends when the player is out of turns. (Meadows Games, 1978)

Memories: After the success of Atari‘s Pong, other companies sprung up to copy that game and get a cut of the nascent coin-op video game market. In fact, many companies that would later become major players with original games got their start copying Pong, and earning the ire of Atari’s Nolan Bushnell, who referred to them as “the jackals” – presumably nipping at Atari’s heels and costing his company profits by selling their own knock-offs.

Meadows Games, founded by Meadows Manufacturing owner Harry Kurek, was one of the more successful “jackals”, as their QuadraPong knockoff Flim Flam, released mere months after Atari’s game in 1974, was a successful test case for getting into the arcade game business, having sold somewhere in the vicinity of 12,000 units. A follow-up to Flim Flam also proved successful, and then Meadows moved on to copying other games as well (i.e. Bigfoot Bonkers copying Barricade).

Gypsy Juggler is one of Meadows’ more innovative entries; there seems to be some clear inspiration from the likes of Exidy‘s Circus here (from the previous year), and maybe a hint of Avalanche, but Gypsy Juggler also hints at things yet to come, such as the keep-the-balloons-in-the-air game mechanic of Kick (1981). As happened with some of the other “jackals”, the realization must have set in that staying afloat would require some innovation. It would appear that at some point, Taito either licensed Gypsy Juggler…or copied it for itself, though with a very colorful improvement on the cabinet art (seen at right). (That’s the problem with the aforementioned undisciplined wild dogs, they tend to fight among themselves for a limited number of scraps.)

Despite cute touches such as the chick hatching from a dropped egg, there’s just really not enough of a “game” here. Gypsy Juggler is either too easy, or the player overestimates how much they can handle and it’s suddenly too hard to “survive”. And there’s not really a middle ground. And this may be what differentiated Meadows from some of the “jackals” who became more successful and innovative – a sense for what makes a game fun and not… well… a pile of dropped eggs, for lack of a better way to put it.