
It took place in a weird fantasy world but with masterful character sprites and animations.Īs I later learned, it was the first game for Capcom’s new CPS-3 arcade hardware, which allowed for a level of detail unmatched by other 2D games at the time. It had a versus mode but only four playable characters. It was a fighting game but with a sophisticated story mode built around boss fights. I stumbled upon it on one of those visits Red earth, a new game from Capcom that looked unlike anything I’d seen before. Which maybe was more of a liability issue, but it always made me feel like I was looking at something top secret.

I was trying to take photos for the amateur fanzine or website I was working on and the staff were yelling at me to stop. And I often saw games that hadn’t been officially revealed yet. I lived a few hundred miles away but always made it a point to stop there when in the area. It wasn’t uncommon to walk in and see games that were not only unreleased but hadn’t been announced yet.įor a kid obsessed with video game news, this meant everything. And when these companies needed to test their games, they often brought them to Golfland while they were still in development.


It was located in Sunnyvale, California and surrounded by many companies operating the US arcade video game business. On the surface it looked like any other miniature golf course with a small arcade and ticket booth, but it had one thing most didn’t have: proximity. In the 90’s, Golfland USA was a magical place.
