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I picked up this game from it's original owner. Actually, to be more accurate, I picked it up from the guy who programmed the game for Atari, Rusty Dawe. This is the original Cloak & Dagger, serial #1, the very same game that was used in the filming of the movie by the same name.

Rusty was kind enough to autograph the control panel for me. He also told me a little history behind the game. It started out called Agent X but soon after focus testing began, a deal was struck to tie it in with a new movie coming out called, you guessed it, Cloak & Dagger. 20 of these dedicated cabinets were made and six of them had Agent X marquees on them. All the PCBs were changed to Cloak & Dagger before the game even went out on field test, so no PCBs survived with an Agent X title screen, although many of them have the name Agent X etched in copper. The six with Agent X marquees were changed into Cloak & Dagger and the marquees were given/traded away by Rusty. (At least the keychain it came with still says Agent X. (-: ) When it came time for mass production, Atari decided to make it a kit-only game, that was designed to convert Williams cabinets like Defender or Joust, but with mono sound. Only the 20 original cabinets had stereo sound.

The game is in near perfect condition, as you can see from the pictures. But it did have a rough ride in shipping. When it arrived, the neck board was knocked off the monitor, the PCB interconnect board at the rear of the main PCB was knocked off and the shadow mask on the inside face of the picture tube came off on the left side. The shippers must have dropped it on it's back. The cabinet itself was not damaged and the game still works, but the monitor needs to be replaced because of the shadow mask.

The high scores on the game are the scores Rusty put on it when he first brought it home from Atari. Needless to say, they are huge. I dumped the contents of the NVRAM chip from the game to disk to preserve the scores for posterity.That old RAM can't have many moons left in it. Download here. It'll work in MAME if you copy/paste the data into MAME's NVRAM file for C&D.

This is the second dedicated Cloak & Dagger I've owned. You can still see my page for the first one I owned here. Rusty gave me a little more info about that game that I never knew when I owned it. He told me "So, you got the machine with the Key Club mod, eh? <grin>. That was an experiment to see if we could make it work, though we never had plans to make Cloak & Dagger one of the games that would use it.... The Key Club was something an arcade owner could sell its patrons. It allowed games to remember who played them, including the ability to do games that took more than one session to play (ie. You could start up again on your last level instead of having to work your way back up from the beginning). It is actually used now (the same technology, that is) in many Casinos in Vegas & other spots for "players clubs", etc. They remember how much you've bet, etc. and let you get cheap "stuff"... Anyway, it was a fun little test, the technology worked, but marketing axe'd it after pushing us to try it. Typical <grin>."

Of the original 20 cabinets, besides the Key Club version that I sold to Pete Ashedown, I only know of one other that has survived. It's owned by Brian Wiklem, who also has three of the six Agent X marquees. He's also the one who found the Key Club version in the first place and sold it to me when he got his new one.