> http://www.retroaccion.org/preservacion-de-maquina-arcade-last-km-de-zeus-software-gaelco
Here's a quick and dirty TL;DR version for y'all.
Asociacion RetroAccion has finally dumped and preserved the Spanish arcade machine called Last KM. It's a biking game programmed by Zeus Software in 1995 for Gaelco. The programmer for the game, Ricardo Puerto, donated the board to them so it could be dumped.
The game was fully functional and mounted on a Gaelco board, but it's not the final version of the game, and it uses sound effects from other Gaelco games of the time (World Rally Championship and an unlicensed MOD version of Giorgio Moroder's "Chase" from Midnight Express. The game originally had two static bicycle controllers, and the game was on display at the 11th Edition of Retromañia in Spain, without the controllers.
According to Julen Zaballa, Last KM was developed in the span of a month, at the same time as another Gaelco game, Biomechanical Toy (also developed by Zeus Software.) Luis Jonama, one of Galeco's founders, contacted Zeus and asked the team (Ricardo Puerto and Raul Lopez) to develop a game that used one monitor and two static bikes to play.
To create Last KM, Zeus Software reused all the software tools they created for Biomechanical Toy. The graphic artists had a tougher job, they converted all the photos of Donata San-Sebastian (the location in the game) that Raul Lopez shot for himself.
Last KM runs on the same kind of Gaelco board that Biomechanical Toy was on, but with less memory, because Ricardo Puerto added additional cabling and a "very delicate" (this might also mean fragile) communication protocol to connect to the bikes.
After it was finished, Ricardo Puerto went to Barcelona and took it to an arcade located at Las Ramblas de Barcelona, possibly in New Park. Unfortunately, Last KM was never released as an arcade game, instead it was only available at gyms, forgotten by gamers... until today.
That'll be $20. :P
Edit: Forgot to mention, I didn't translate all the text about the team that dumped it because it's basically a press release saying that they got the game and it has been preserved and blah blah blah. I was more concerned about the game's origins. My apologies. It's 10 AM and I just woke up.
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