Exclusives & Rarities

The Act: An Interactive Comedy was developed by the now defunct developer Cecropia who was based out of Massachusetts. They spent six years developing this game as an original game concept which in and of itself was a variation on the ideas put forth in classic arcade titles like Dragon's Lair. The Act gives you much more control over the main character than something like DL did however, as it makes use of a knob controller. By spinning the knob left or right it will change Edgar's actions, the further you go the more intense the action generally becomes. Some of the game involves trial and error to get everything right but the game also provides audio cues to let you know if you are doing something wrong.

In the game you take control of Edgar, a humble window washer who is working with his brother Wally at a hospital. While washing windows, he sees a nurse named Sylvia walk into a room and he has a little fantasy about meeting her in the setting of the classic movie Casablanca. This is where you first get to play.

There are several scenes you can play through: The Casablanca style meeting, getting the boss back into the window, acting as a doctor to sneak into the hospital, checking a lady's heart, getting Sylvia's attention, the Heimlich maneuver (probably the hardest scene in the game), racing through the hallways and the final Sylvia scene.

Overall the game tells a fun and interesting story, without the use of dialogue or a lot of text. Currently our game is equipped with a trackball instead of the knob as the knob device stopped functioning completely. If you come in an play, you can enjoy the game for only 2 tokens a play (50¢).

So what makes The Act rare? The fact that it is a prototype game that was never officially produced for wide distribution. Cecropia got to the point of location testing the game and they were looking into getting the game distributed, but for reasons that were never entirely clear, the game was canceled after testing. When the title was canceled, the company had produced 40 kits where the game could be put into any JAMMA cabinet and two location test cabinets which would have fit into what the final product would have looked like. Out of these 40 kits, only about 10 were sold publicly on eBay, the other 30 going to the members of Cecropia who worked on the game.

We were one of the few lucky ones to grab a kit when it showed up on eBay. We know of only one other arcade to have this, Arcade Odyseey in Miami. The game was once ported to iOS, however it was removed from iTunes after a time, keeping it extremely rare.