Journey

The musicians have Sixteen-style black and white photograph faces connected to cartoon bodies.

The game opens with all members: Steve Perry, Neal Schon, Steve Smith, Jonathan Cain and Ross Valory jumping into their Journey "Scarab vehicle", which flies into the forehead of the big blue face wearing a space helmet. The player then gets to choose one of five planets to travel to. Each one features a game starring one of the Journey members in which he has to travel past obstacles to collect his musical instrument.

Once they collect their instruments, the board changes and the rock musician uses his instrument to shoot his way back to the Scarab vehicle.After the player has makes it past the first five planets, Journey performs in a live concert before a captive audience, while the player controls "Herbie" the roadie, who tries to keep crazy "groupoids" from attacking the famous rock combo.

There are five separate games -- one for each band member -- plus a bonus round game. Each game has two phases: Recovering the musical instrument, and returning to the Scarab vehicle.

The games are as follows:

1. Steve Perry: Steve starts at the top of the screen and must make his way through a maze of moving turnstiles to his microphone at the bottom of the screen. Once he has the microphone, he uses the fire button to shoot at rows of passing turnstiles similar to Galaga.
2. Neal Schon: Neal must navigate a cavern using his jet pack. Once he grabs his guitar, he must fly across the cave towards the exit while dodging rockets similar to Scramble.
3. Steve Smith: Steve must jump back and forth between drums, turning them from yellow to blue. He then climbs behind his drum set and shoots bullets at flying infinity symbols similar to Galaxian.
4. Jonathan Cain: Jonathan must make his way down conveyer belts, jumping piano keys by pushing the joystick up. Once he is behind his piano, he shoots at vertical rows of circular objects that converge from the edges of the screen inward. Each object must be shot twice before it is destroyed similar to Donkey Kong and Mega Mania.
5. Ross Valory: Ross jumps between elevators in an attempt to reach his bass at the top of the screen. Once he has reached there, he fires downward at cannons that are firing deadly LP albums.

Bonus Round Concert/Herbie Herbert: Herbie, Journey's tour manager, must block the doorways and prevent the fans from entering any of the three doors on stage. If a fan gets past Herbie, everyone rushes the stage and steals the instruments again. During this scene, the machine plays a cassette loop tape of "Separate Ways."

The game was designed by Marvin Glass Associates. It was the first arcade game that was created around a rock band the band members were big video game fans themselves during that era and the first to use digitized graphics black/white.

Most of the game's sounds and music is generated by two AY-3-8910 chips. During the bonus round, a cassette player inside the machine plays a loop tape of Separate Ways Worlds Apart. Electronic Journey songs include: Chain Reaction, Do not Stop Believin', Lights, Still They Ride, Stone In Love and Wheel In The Sky.

Originally, this game was not to have the band Journey in it. It would have a digital camera created by Ralph Baer, the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey home console systems that would take a picture of the player's face and put it on the character. After some people used unmentionable parts of their body as character heads during tests, this was dropped.

The front of the machine, including the marquee, monitor glass, and control panel overlay, look like the Journey "Frontiers" album the head of a blue space alien. The side art is the same.

Wiring harness is almost identical to TRON except for joystick/wheel. I believe all MCR boardsets have the exact same POWER, VIDEO, AUDIO, COINDOOR pinouts. This wiring type should be referred to as MCRII/III.