Acrobat was an old arcade game released by Taito back in 1978. You have probably never seen an Acrobat
machine, but you may have played a very similar game on your old Atari 2600, which was called Circus
Atari.
In Acrobat you control a pair of clowns who jump up and down on a see-saw in an attempt to pop three rows of
colored balloons. You control the action with a spinner controller. Acrobat is essentially a
modified version of the game of Breakout, with some of the Pong elements removed from it. It is much harder than
Breakout though, as catching and aiming the jumping clowns can be quite difficult.
Acrobat came in an upright dedicated cabinet, and was also available in a cocktail configuration as well.
Acrobat machines had yellowish sides and fronts with highly detailed images of clowns and balloons. The front of
the machine was decorated with a large ornate monitor bezel that also doubled as a marquee (or nameplate),
this bezel showed several clowns in a Acrobat scene and had the game title in a yellow font. Upright machines were
labled "Acrobat TV", with the TV standing for "Taito Video", while cocktail versions were labeled "Acrobat TT",
with the "TT" standing for "Taito Table"
The control panel was featured detailed circus scenes, with the only controller being an analog spinner and
a start button. The whole machine was finished off in black t-molding with an orange stripe.
Everything Taito was making back then ran on Space Invaders hardware, as did this game. It is kind of
interesting that this minor game was so incredibly detailed compared to the utter simplicity of the Space Invaders
machines. Both machines were available the same time from the same company.
This is a fun title with a lot of replay value. It is however absolutely impossible to locate. Taito was
concentrating almost all their production on Space Invaders, and games that weren't Space Invaders (such as
Acrobat), tended to get hacked to play Space Invaders pretty quickly.