ZZ-Top Legs Video

An 80's rock video might seem to be an unusual topic for this blog, but there is a videogame related mystery in it. I was a huge music video and MTV fan back in the early 1980's and I distinctly remember the 1984 video for the song Legs by rock back ZZ-Top. Part of the video takes place in a small restaurant and I do remember there being arcade games in it, but there is a detail I missed until recently, I was probably focused on things in the video!

The first game we see in the video is a classic Taito Space Invaders cabinet released in 1978. 

In another shot we see a Stern Berzerk machine which was released in 1980. You can also see the Space Invaders machine is next to it. 

The mystery comes up later in the video when you see this shot. The Berzerk machine is gone and something else is in it's place. There are no clear shots of it the video so it was a little hard to make out what game it is. The bezel on the front of the machine is pretty unique, and I remember that Atari did a couple games with this bezel design. 

I eventually figured out that it is an Atari Destroyer from 1977 a pretty rare game. 

So why were there two different games in the video? An article Santa Clarita magazine provides a likely answer. Kymberly Herrin, one of the elminator girls, says this in the article:

“We were paid really well. We all got over $2,000 for the shoot, which is so much for a video dancer.” She said the shoot “went fine” but something went wrong at the film lab. “I heard the film came out black. We had to reshoot a major portion of the video.”

So clearly one game was used during the original shoot and the other during the reshoot.

The choice of games is interesting. Both Space Invaders and Destroyer were quite outdated by the time the video was filmed and even Berzerk had been out for a few years. If this was an actual resturant it's possible that they were getting whatever the local operator had on hand instead of the latest and greatest games. It's unlikley that you would replace Berzerk with Destroryer, so even though Berzek was more prominent it is likely that it was the game during the shoot.

I think a more likely explenation is that this isn't a real resturant but instead something created for the video. The real tipoff for me in the grill area which just doesn't look realistic and way to clean.

If this was created for the video then the switch of games makes much more sense. The games aren't important to the story of the video so they probably didn't care what the game were so took whatever they could get cheaply, thus explaining the out of date games. When they did the reshoot the Space Invaders was still avaialble, but the other game probably wasn't so it got switched out.