Counterfeiting a Classic: Recreating the Williams Defender Prototype

Trickman Terry · 01-12-2008, 02:28 AM

Counterfeiting a Classic:
Recreating the Williams Defender Prototype
by Michael Ford
Reprinted with permission from GameRoom Magazine, January 2008.
Article Copyright © 2008 GameRoom Magazine. All rights reserved.

Who has not dreamed about having a game so rare that no one has even heard of it? Well, maybe no one but me, but you will want one too after reading this.

My adventure began when I saw an eBay auction for a Prototype Defender Cabinet. This is the original cabinet built to test the Defender game. It was an internal experiment to see how the graphics would work, what gameplay was like, and how much it would cost to produce. There were only a handful of these made. Some went to gaming shows and after that many were actually sold to arcades.

After some research, I found andys-arcade.net, which had more information on this prototype. The production version of Defender had stencil painted sideart which is much less expensive to produce. The prototype had vinyl silk screened artwork that is eerily similar to that Star Wars movie that was so popular at the time. The prototype bezel also did not have the blue nebulae clouds. There were some other minor differences but the artwork stood out and that is what I liked the most.

Early Defender literature shows these prototypes and not the production version. At the time the literature was printed, the company was still developing the game and the prototypes were all they had to promote, so that is what they put on the flyers and magazine ads. They later changed the sideart before going into production and made some other minor changes.
I tucked those photos away in my ‘ideas’ folder, where they sat for several months. The original cabinets were very rare plus I did not really want an original. Too much money and it would only play one game. One game per machine may have been acceptable in the 80’s, but not today. It was not worth it to me. But, I realized that I could use a Multi-board to play several games, and suddenly the project seemed more interesting.

The photos on eBay were clear enough so I had an Adobe Illustrator artist re-draw the sideart. I printed the sideart, kickpanel, and a bezel I made by modifying the original Defender bezel, then hid them in a dark corner; awaiting the day when they could see light again. About a year later, I finally decided it was time to tackle this project. I began looking for a cabinet, which turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected.

What I did not do!
Before I continue I want to be clear that I did not buy a good game and chop it up. You should never chop a good classic cabinet for a project like this, or for any project. Restore it or let someone else have it who will restore it. I turned down several cabinets because they were in too-good condition. I refused to paint over good original Defender graphics to make this cabinet. I waited until I found an original Defender cabinet that was suited to this project.

I talked to VintageArcade.net and they had a water-damaged, converted Defender cabinet. It had a monitor, power supply, and transformer in it. Someone had converted it to a Double Dragon so it already had a JAMMA harness installed and all of the buttons and joysticks I needed. The cabinet had serious water damage and they were not interested in fixing it up. This was the perfect cabinet for me. It was already converted and in bad shape but not so bad that it was unusable.

Many dealers trash good cabinets just because they are not worth the time to fix. It is possible to fix these water damaged cabinets. I only needed to re-glue the edge of this one after filling the gaps with wood glue. More severe damage may require cutting out the damaged piece and replacing it. Then fill in the gaps with wood putty or car body filler. You can save damaged wood by using a special resin that is made to penetrate water damaged wood and hold it together. It is like the resin used to seal bar tops but specially formulated to penetrate rotten wood. This resin is available at systemthree.com

First Assembly
When I assembled everything, I found that my monitor was hard to see and very dark (bad CRT). I was surprised that it was so bad. I would have expected it to have been taken out of service long before it became that bad. It may have become worse sitting in a hot warehouse for years. I ordered the Generic Happ Controls monitor. It came with a nice plastic bag for the kids to play with, a remote mount adjustment board to set brightness, etc. The electrical connection had a standard 3 prong plug instead of the two pin molex-type connector on the old unit, so I had to rewire it to use my existing power connector. This inexpensive monitor looks fine, but the horizontal adjustments force some of the screen image off the sides no matter how you adjust it. That was the cost of saving money on the monitor. It fit right in place with no problems.

The MultiBoard
I always liked Stargate and Defender and wanted one of those games, but could not justify the space for it. I also did not want a “MAME’d” box because

I wanted it to feel original; a real arcade game anyone could play without going through a Windows menu or me explaining how to press the Coin button. Basically I wanted the feel of an original game, but the flexibility to play several games. The perfect solution was the MultiWilliams board from Arcade Shop. This board was recommended to me by a local dealer because it is very accurate and the controls are responsive. Some Multi-boards out there do not respond correctly or do not play like the original games. The Arcade Shop board gave me 10 horizontal games instead of just one. The first board I received was bad. It would only show one game and I could not change to another so I had to return it. Apparently they re-flashed it with something new, because when they returned the board it was working.

Installation was quite easy. My cabinet had already been converted to JAMMA so I plugged in the card and, by shorting each button while Defender was running, I figured out which button was which. There was a button test feature in the card setup but nowhere did it say what button was for what function. It only called them button1, button2, etc. It still only took a few minutes to figure out what each button was and stick it in place. I was quite happy that I had a JAMMA conversion because it made installation a snap.

The Control Panel
I rebuilt the control panel using a new con*trol panel overlay I created. The new CPO has extra buttons for the Multi-board and button labels so I know which button goes to which game. I took the original Defender control panel artwork (the real original, not the redrawn version commonly available) then changed the labels and added a button and joystick. I printed this out and laminated it. My original panel was warped from water damage so I cut a new one. The Defender control panel was very easy to make out of a single piece of wood. I used the artwork as a template to mark hole locations, drilled, and applied the overlay.

The Bezel
I took the artwork from an original Defender bezel and modified it to look like the prototype which is the same except it had none of the blue nebulae clouds. The instruction sticker was also shorter. I do not know what the original looked like so I squished the production Defender card down to fit.

Controls
I used leaf-type buttons, because those were the type originally used with this game. I also matched the colors to the prototype photos. I had to use a 4/8 way joystick to play Robotron, Joust and other games on the board. The 4-way feels a little odd with Defender plus my Reverse button is farther out than it would be with a 2-way joystick so I have to reach for it more than with the original game.

Final Cabinet
My only real expense in this project was the Multi-board and new monitor. Everything else came from my parts bin or was given to me. This is not an exact copy of the prototype—that was never my intention. My back-door is not hinged, there are no headphone jacks, the front coin door was silver, mine is black, mine plays Multi-board. But none of this matters. I wanted a fun game to play that just looked like an unusual original. I now have an interesting story to tell everyone when they say “Ahh, Defender, I remember that!” I will be much happier with this than I would have been with a real prototype.
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