![]() All these years later, I can still do a spot-on imitation of the synthesized voice declaring "Eye amm Gorff." Needless to say, I often find myself sitting alone in the corner at parties.įrom the look of this list, Namco was on a roll in the early 1980s. The arcade cabinet featured a Votrax speech synthesis chip. Your ship was free to roam anywhere in the bottom third of the screen and your quark laser blasts could be canceled by simply firing a new shot. This kick-ass multi-level Midway shooter ripped off the game play of Galaxian and Space Invaders, yet proved surprisingly entertaining. Of course, there is always the possibility that you'll accidentally shoot your own ship or lose track and let the enemy capture your last ship. With a bit of careful shooting, you can reclaim it and use two ships simultaneously. Under the right circumstances, a boss bug can capture your starfighter. Your starfighter can move left and right along the bottom of the screen, battling endless waves of rather unfriendly space bugs. What's with the hoards of evil space flies, anyway? Galaga was the sequel to Namco's massively successful 1979 Galaxian. It has been cloned endlessly over the years, but the original is still my favorite. It doesn't sound like the plot of a successful video game, but Sega/Gremlin's quest to save frogs from almost certain death proved tremendously popular in arcades and countless home computer ports. The title has earned almost mythical status in the three decades since its release, spawning a stream of progressively more impressive sequels.Ī frog, a freeway and a treacherous river. However, the North American office eventually dubbed him Mario, after Mario Segale, their landlord. Initially, the hero was known simply as Jumpman. Miyamoto eventually cooked up a story involving a deranged gorilla, a heroic carpenter and a damsel in distress. To save the day, they called upon neophyte game designer Shigeru Miyamoto to design a new game for the unsold hardware. It flopped, leaving the company in a precarious financial situation with a warehouse full of unsold units. In 1980, Nintendo tried to enter the North American market with Radar Scope - a Galaxian-style fixed shooter. Your job is simply to cause as much mayhem and destruction as possible before succumbing to the inevitable.Īpart from the frenetic gameplay, it was also the first game to feature a continue screen that allowed you to pick things up without having to start from the beginning.ĭonkey Kong was a title born out of desperation. ![]() Namco's brilliant multi-directional shooter places your tiny spacecraft in space, surrounded by an endless collection of enemy space stations, enemy fighter formations, space mines, asteroids and spy ships. Here are my 8 favorite arcade video game titles from '81, in alphabetical order. ![]() The result was an onslaught of brilliantly coded and innovative games. Games like Defender and Pac Man arrived in arcades late the previous fall, and the gold rush was on to develop the next smash hit title. ![]() Video arcades flourished in the early 1980s for one simple reason - arcade consoles offered stunning gameplay unmatched by the rudimentary home consoles of the day.Įven relatively straightforward arcade titles like Namco's Galaga incorporated three Z80 microprocessors, a dedicated sound chip and a high resolution (for the time) color display - a potent combination unmatched by the blocky graphics and bleeps of Intellivision and Atari 2600 consoles.ġ981 was a landmark year. ![]()
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