Exterminator

This game is unlike any other game produced before or after. The aim is to clear the rooms of enemies ranging from frogs, spiders, roaches, moths and wasps to toy tanks and rats!

Elmininate pests by any means possible. Grab the flying beasts, pound your fist onto ground enemies or move to the side of the screen and use your 'laser' by rotating the joystick to aim left/right. When an enemy dies, the tiles on the floor move along one block coloured in. Below the floor tile 'columns' are room names. Once a floor tile column is completely filled in, you are moved on to that room. At the end of each house a bonus basement will sometimes be awarded where you must shoot a load of rats.

On the first level inside the kitchens of houses one and three, the freezer door swings open only once, releasing some floorbased enemies. If you get the hand in laser mode and shoot while the door is open, you will warp to the other house.

This was the first game to use digitized graphics for every element of the game. It was also the first and only videogame produced by Premier and the last to carry the Gottlieb badge. Production numbers are estimated at about 250 units worldwide. They were very unreliable in the field and not too popular with players. The dedicated game and its weird cabinet made it less appealing to operators since most other games that were being released during that time were conversion kits. It does remain one of the boldest moves in the industry to make such a machine at that time.

This video game was, perhaps, the last of the dedicated machines produced by PremierGottlieb. The extremely weird cabinet design contains full artwork from top to bottom. The game is shaped to look like a house, complete with a roof and chimney.

There appears to be two ROM sets for this game. The first which I call original follows the game playing methods described in the literature and the control panelcabinet instructions. The other set allows the player to fire the laser while in mid air, instead of moving to the edge of the screen. While this eliminates the need for rotary joysticks, it ruins the game play making it far too easy. Instead of having to pound the ground enemies, grab the flying enemies or swatting the wasp away, the player may use the laser on everything, thus making the game yet another bland shooter. I have only seen one or two machines play like this one still had the rotary sticks, but, obviously, these were not used the other had bog standard joysticks with fire buttons on top.

The game uses batterybacked RAM to save EMallEM 40 high scores, just like the old Williams games. The boardset is rather complicated, consiting of five boards in total, with many connectors between each board.