High scores were the big thing to have in 1982, as video arcade games took over as the leading use of pocket change across North America and the world.
One of those games was a space shooter called Vanguard, which found success for a time in 1981. While far from a household name today, the success of Vanguard was a huge help to SNK, which would gain fame later as a third-party publisher on the Nintendo Entertainment System and creators of the Neo-Geo System.
A teenager in Puerto Rico named Guillermo Vega Toro was among the early 80s gamers who enjoyed the game.
"The first Vanguard I played was on a convenience store (a "colmado" in Spanish) in my home town of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico," Vega Toro said. "Me and a cousin got hooked on it. I liked the music and the synthetized voice. We played the game over and over, getting better and better. When the game was replaced in the store, we would ride our BMXs to any other places that had it, sometimes all the way to a neighboring town. We were that hooked."
Vega Toro's love for Vanguard soon turned into high scores on the machine, as he began to rack up scores as high as 800,000 points. One day, he learned where that placed him among other fans of the machine.
"One day I went to the bookstore at the mall and found this magazine called Electronic Games Magazine," he recalled. "Like most teenagers at the time, I was really into arcade games, so I bought it immediately. When I read the scoreboard section I could not believe that the record for Vanguard was so low. I think it was something like in the 100,000s."
Vega Toro decided to submit a score of his own and asked his father to drop him off at the local mall to run up a new record score. When his father returned to pick him up later in the day, Vega Toro had racked up 2,238,220 points with two ships remaining, which he had to lose on purpose to end his game.
"When I scored my 2 million points I had to destroy my last two ships," he said. "If I could have kept playing, I think I could have scored 3 million."
Today, Vega Toro lives in Lewisville, TX and still owns the copy of Electronic Games Magazine that printed his score as well as photographs of the game screen with his accomplishment. On Saturday, December 10 he learned for the first time that a record of his 1982 score still exists online.
"I was pleasantly surprised to see that the score was kept in the Twin Galaxies database, and that it is still second after all these years," he said.
After decades away from the arcade game scene, Vega Toro has recently returned to playing the early arcade classics.
"I pretty much stopped playing arcade games since fighting games starting becoming the norm and the classic space shooters were replaced by the arcade operators. For some reason, fighting games did not appeal to me," Vega Toro said. "I recently got a 60-in-1 Multicade and I'm getting into some of the classic games that would eat my quarters, like Qix and Super Cobra. I find Qix very challenging and addictive. My best score so far is 116,000. Super Cobra is another game that I liked because it was more or less in the same vein as Vanguard. There was one bar in my home town that had a Super Cobra. I started to play it when it suddenly disappeared, so I never got past the 6000 mile mark. Now that I have the Multicade I have committed myself to reach the end."
While the game that brought him early 80s high score glory is not one of the many games within Vega Toro's home machine, he stated he feels he could return to form.
"It's been close to 30 years since I played my last Vanguard game," he said, "but I am sure that if I could find a machine, I could get in the groove again."
****
The author of this article can be found at PatrickScottPatterson.com and on Twitter @OriginalPSP. All quotes and content were obtained by the author, so please backlink and attribute use of materials within this article to this original source if using elsewhere.
Comments