I'm going to need to get some quarters

September 25, 2023 10:07 AM

Top 10 Arcades Games Every Year From 1980-1989 (100 Games) [25m] offers without commentary a list of each of the 100 games, showing gameplay and those delicious sound effects. Right away I was struck by "oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that one!"
posted by hippybear (104 comments total)

I believe this is the yt video missing Ikari Warriors for 1986.

Having lived in an arcade ~1980 - 1991 (I clocked in 6000hrs as a game attendant 1986 - 1991 at my uni's student union) I Have more Opinions.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:17 AM on September 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Amazing how some of them have stood up as far as popular culture is concerned and some of them just went away. Moon Cresta? Never heard of it. Centipede, same year? Iconic. Bosconian? Never heard of it. Galaga, Frogger and Donkey Kong, same year? Legends.
posted by mhoye at 10:17 AM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

> Moon Cresta?

this was licensed by Gremlin as Stellar Ranger , and was at the 7/11 on the way to my junior high so it got about a million dollars worth of quarters from me (had I been buying AAPL instead of feeding them into the coin slot). I joke but the math almost checks out
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:20 AM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can still hear the sounds from Moon Cresta recorded in my brain in perfect fidelity.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:31 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I played a lot of Zaxxon and, later, Gyruss. Probably my favourites of the decade. Time Pilot, also. But in the latter half of the 80s I had an Atari 400 so put a lot less money in coin ops. Probably the last machine that really grabbed me visually was Assault because of its rotozoom chip, revolutionary at the time, but as a game it kind of sucked.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:36 AM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

yeah, by rights, Assault should have played as good as it looked. You can say that about most Namco games after Pacman, alas.

Time Pilot had that smooth player-as-the-hunter flow that Assault was missing in a bad way. I think Spy Hunter is my favorite game of the 1980s since I remember getting into the flow once and just wasting everything on the screen for like 3 minutes, such a hype with the Peter Gunn theme blaring behind my head.

(fun fact: I neglected seriously pursuing a job at the outfit that was going to become Blizzard to seek employment at Namco Japan, LOL/sigh)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:55 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

yeah but if you had seriously pursued a job at blizzard you might have ended up working at blizzard. bullet dodged.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:59 AM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

I can still remember the exact arcade (and the location within) for many of these games. Do I have to lookup my own phone number? - you bet!

h/t to Ground Kontrol and Quarterworld for keeping these games alive.
posted by azlondon at 11:03 AM on September 25, 2023

I've said before that if someone were to install a vintage-1983 Defender console anywhere near me, they would within a year have my life savings. In quarters, mind you.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:04 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

So many low-contrast platformers in the latter part of the decade. In some cases it's hard to make out your character from the background. They had more colors than contemporary consoles, but didn't make very good use of them.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:06 AM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh and I haven't looked at the list. As far as I am concerned the taxonomy is:

1. Defender
2. Honourable mentions to Asteroids, Space War
3. Everything else. If I woke up tomorrow in a world where Frogger or Donkey Kong had never existed, I would never notice.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:08 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I gotta say, that Ninja Turtles arcade game? That was a campaign. I must have been about 9 or 10, so this was a couple years after it came out. Prime "kid" age, you know? Me and some friends from recess put together a whole mission to beat that thing. Called it Operation Turtle Storm.

We scrounged quarters for weeks. Saved up like TWENTY DOLLARS between us (an eternity and a fortune to a kid) and came SO CLOSE, beating Krang at the cost of all our quarters, then out came Shredder. When it was getting clear the mission was lost, we were out of quarters and the last couple turtles were flagging, we ran to our parents to plead our case while the last of us prolonged the fight. "We're right there! We just barely beat Krang! The turtles are counting on us!" and it absolutely fell on deaf ears. Those games just devoured money at the end stages. How many more Very Important surprise bullshit secret bosses were gonna show up at $5 a pop? I get it now, at the time it was the height of callous indifference - my loving parents becoming the very face of a world unequipped to understand what i cared about. This was not first time I felt that feeling, nor would it be the last.

BUT THEN when hope was lost, the clerk at the greasy Oakland burger joint we'd chosen for our battlefield overheard this like, "What? You're about to BEAT SHREDDER???" He swiftly hopped the counter like Casey Jones himself, popped open the coin release and gave us like 30 free credits to seal the deal.

Really saved the day, that dude. I hope, wherever he is, he knows he's a hero.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:09 AM on September 25, 2023 [117 favorites]

There was a lot more innovation early in the decade, and by the late 80's, a few dominant genres had emerged and most games were just incremental improvements.

It's pretty amazing that I remember playing 50% of these, despite a being kid in the 80's and early 90's who only rarely found himself in an arcade with a budget of quarters.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:09 AM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I made it ten seconds in before having to run out to make sure Phoenix wasn't some version of Galaxian.
posted by mittens at 11:09 AM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

My junior year in High School, we'd go downtown for AP Physics lab (at the local University) on Fridays. Afterwards, a group of us would stop at an arcade and play a ton of Mario Brothers. We'd start out cooperatively, but eventually someone would make a mistake, and things would get personal.
They also had Star-Rider, a laserdisk racing game from Williams, which looked simply awesome. It was expensive to play, so MB got most of our quarters, but we'd play it simply to race through those incredible worlds.
(Also, I didn't see Elevator Action. I wasted a lot of quarters in that game, too.)
posted by Spike Glee at 11:09 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm struck by how good the sound design is on so many of these, given the limitations at the time. The Peter Gunn theme still runs in my head from my own Spy Hunter runs. Damn helicopter.
posted by SunSnork at 11:10 AM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

ROBOTRON 2084 TWO JOYSTICKS ONE FOR RUNNIN ONE FOR SHOOTIN AMIRITE?
posted by mcstayinskool at 11:14 AM on September 25, 2023 [21 favorites]

1. Defender
2. Honourable mentions to Asteroids, Space War
3. Everything else.

You forgot Tempest. I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to find a decent recreation of that particular weighted potentiometer. I even owned an original cabinet machine for a while (don't get me started -- CRTs are not made to display vector graphics). Nothing comes close.
posted by The Bellman at 11:17 AM on September 25, 2023 [14 favorites]

>Ninja Turtles arcade game

every kid within 15 miles of our arcade came in to play that. TMNT, along with the suspiciously-similar Simpson's 3P coop, was a game we had to empty every day instead of biweekly. (for some reason we were never big on getting multiple cabinets of the same game, until SF-II I guess)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:20 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

The sound processing in this video bugs me -- stereo phase cancellation or something, really annoying in headphones. These games didn't sound that lo-fi!

Also they got some captions wrong: Wizard of Wor (not "war"), Pleaides (not Pleaids), Sinistar (not Sinister).

This really takes me back, though. Out of the 100 I was familiar with 86 of them, and I'm being flooded with memories of plenty of others that didn't make their list.

My dad was a manager for a chain of arcades and I got to play stuff for free every Sunday morning as long as I helped with some of the pre-opening tasks. We also had epic (to me) New Years' Eve parties with family and friends, where (among all the other games) we'd usually have a continuous Gauntlet campaign going, swapping players in and out.
posted by Foosnark at 11:26 AM on September 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

very few arcade games of this period were of sufficient awesomeness for us college-kid attendants to keep the arcade open after the midnight closing for us to play the new game into the wee hours.

Gauntlet and Hard Drivin' were on that list.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:30 AM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

There's some wiggle room as to which game belongs to which year, perhaps. Like, KLOV has Tempest and Wizard of Wor as 1981 rather than 1980.

The early 80s are so drenched with classics that it's easy to fight over top-ten status. 1980 is missing Crazy Climber, Battlezone and Star Castle, for example, but it's hard to say what to drop out to make room for them.

81, Super Cobra AND Scramble? Lose the former, and then you have Astro Blaster, Mouse Trap, Omega Race, Qix, Strategy-X, Vanguard and Venture jousting with the aforementioned Tempest and WoW for position.

And so on.
posted by delfin at 11:30 AM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

jousting with the aforementioned Tempest and WoW for position.

Speaking of which, the lack of Joust on this list is a crime.
posted by Foosnark at 11:42 AM on September 25, 2023 [26 favorites]

Spy Hunter was amazing, and was definitely a flow game. One weird night in the mid 90's we played a single game for so long that it started glitching out; we drove our car into the boathouse and, instead of a boat emerging, the boathouse started moving forward over the water. No enemies, no steering, just a house gliding over a swamp. Then eventually the boathouse collided with the other boathouse at the end of the water stage, the car came back out, and it was back to oil slicking baddies. It's as if the game itself were asking, Why are you hunting spies? You could just be boating. Point taken, Spy Hunter.

It's nice that I have a story about Spy Hunter, because it's always fun to remember that they made video games other than Robotron: 2084. I'm not really sure why they bothered, though.
posted by phooky at 11:42 AM on September 25, 2023 [15 favorites]

Moon Cresta? Never heard of it.

Pepperidge Farm Platinum Games remembers
posted by May Kasahara at 11:45 AM on September 25, 2023

I was hoping to see Xevious, and I was disappointed. So then I went and watched it myself and I was again kind of disappointed. (I remember it being a lot cooler, but I guess that was by 1983 standards)
posted by aubilenon at 11:46 AM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

man, if only people could easily rotate their TVs 90°.

Now that the iPhone 15 has USB-C video out I'm kinda interested in developing a game that people can plug in Switch-like, but that only works vertically if they have a desktop monitor (that rotates), and not a TV per se.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:49 AM on September 25, 2023

I got a pocket full of quarters
And I’m headed to the arcade…

They made a whole album’s worth of these.
posted by Eikonaut at 11:59 AM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Eikonaut - I listened to that album enough to have had it memorized. Some days I wonder what my parents were thinking. Other days I'm just grateful for the gaps age provides to memory.
posted by meinvt at 12:02 PM on September 25, 2023

This is very timely, I just finished building my Picade this weekend!
posted by furtive at 12:04 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have the Pac Man Fever vinyl in my collection to this day. It's surprisingly good music if a bit cheesy.
posted by hippybear at 12:05 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.

A bunch of space invader clones and shitty driving games. Well I was born in 1984, so I grew up with Street Fighter II clones and Myst. Duke Nukem was a puzzle platformer. Doom was the future. The soundtrack to Rygar still haunts my afternoons. H.I.L.and at last: M

Do you really need me to unpack spispopd?
posted by es_de_bah at 12:09 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was hoping to see Xevious

Xevious was the first time I saw a vertical scrolling schooter where you could interact with the ground, and wasn't 90% over the sea, which seemed really cool at the time.
posted by furtive at 12:15 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

ROBOTRON 2084 TWO JOYSTICKS ONE FOR RUNNIN ONE FOR SHOOTIN AMIRITE?

Xybots. The joystick rotates left and right to turn left and right.
posted by mikelieman at 12:16 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

So many spelling errors. Sigh.

And was this based off Replay or Play Meter (trade magazine) charts?
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:23 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

ROBOTRON 2084 TWO JOYSTICKS ONE FOR RUNNIN ONE FOR SHOOTIN AMIRITE?

my neighborhood ice cream store has a new multigame cabinet and the joysticks are so fresh and tight and the operator has that gnarly williams low-fi sound turned all the way the fuck up. Robotron heaven.

stand by, last human family, help is on the way!

posted by Sauce Trough at 12:24 PM on September 25, 2023 [5 favorites]

Xybots. The joystick rotates left and right to turn left and right.

Ikari Warriors uses the same sort of control stick, to allow players to move and shoot in two different directions. Which made porting the games hard, as no contemporary console had such a controller. (Though there was one that did - the console that kicked off the second generation of video game consoles, the Fairchild Channel F.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:31 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

that gnarly williams low-fi sound

If you want a real rabbit hole regarding that classic Williams sound board (D-8224), this is for you.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:32 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Robotron is the only game from that period I can think of that I still enjoy playing as much, if not more, than I did in 1982.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:33 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Buried deep in the archives of Metafilter, difficult to find now because of a particular former user's decision to button and in the process wreck the site by demanding their posts be deleted (I do not forgive things like that easily) is a link to a Something Awful list of the "greatest" video game characters, which was entirely made-up. (Well, more made up than normal game characters, in that they were from fictional games.) The thread turned into a joyous session of everyone inventing fake memories of fake games. I kind of want to start something like that here, making up some fake games to reminisce about, but... nah.

It surprises me how strong the cultural memory is of the period of arcade gaming from 1978 to 1983. Six years, from Space Invaders (1978) to a bit after Q*bert (1982). Arcade gaming in the US would never again reach those heights, but it was far from the end. There were definitely big hits after that, Gauntlet, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, that are remembered fondly.

Now, arcade gaming in the US is in a sad state. There are only two big manufacturers in the US now, to my knowledge, Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix. Once in a while one of them makes an interesting game (there's a Space Invaders-themed light gun game, played with a big colored-LED display, that's pretty cool) but most of them are the same kinds of shooting or driving games that have been most of US video arcade gaming for a couple of decades now, or sometimes arcade ports of simple mobile games. Even pinball seems to be more active than arcade video gaming--in the United States, at least. If you go to Japan there seems to be more energy, but I don't know a whole lot about their current scene.
posted by JHarris at 12:37 PM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

There are only two big manufacturers in the US now, to my knowledge, Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix

Actually that's just one. Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix merged in 2006.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:43 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

My quarantine project was building my own arcade cabinet at home (Mrs. Pac-Man skin, of course), and now it looks like I've got an excellent list of new games I never tried to work my way through!
posted by Zargon X at 12:44 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

All my favourites are 80-81. Mostly because of the crazy physicality of them. Tempest - weighted, zero-friction central knob, Missile Command - big rubber trackball, Battlezone - periscope & subwoofer.
posted by brachiopod at 12:49 PM on September 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Man. So many of these I only played via sub-par NES ports with different names. When I have a garage or rec room it's going to have the sickest MAME cabinet with 4 joysticks and we're going to beat the ever loving shit out of those beat-em-ups (not to mention Metal Slug &c.) that robbed us of our allowances. REVENGE!!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:52 PM on September 25, 2023

All my favourites are 80-81. Mostly because of the crazy physicality of them.

There was a 70s football game with a trackball, where the players were just represented by Xs and Os. I don't recall the name, but it was hugely popular. At my dad's arcade, players wore away the panel around the trackball from playing it so much, and one guy managed to slice his hand open and bleed all over the thing and just kept playing like it was no big deal.

Marble Madness (1984) was my absolute favorite trackball game ever. Literally using a trackball to roll a marble, it just made so much sense. The game had awesome music too thanks to an Yamaha FM synthesis chip and a couple of brilliant composers (Brad Fuller and Hal Canon) -- I still love that soundtrack.

Major Havoc from 1983 had a "1-D trackball" thing -- predating scroll wheels on mice by many years.
posted by Foosnark at 1:04 PM on September 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

It's funny: while reading the discussion on Newton's law(s) the other day, I kept thinking, "Man, if students are having trouble understanding the whole rest/motion/force thing, just have them play Asteroids or Defender. That'll learn 'em real quick!"

I want an ambient track that's all 100 games from this video making their boops and beeps at the same time, taking me back to my youthful days of watching the chain smoking older kids (and the occasional adult) holding court while going through these games on just one quarter/token.

And as much as I love the high I get when I finally defeat a difficult boss in a SoulsBorne game (I'm looking at you in particular, Malenia and Fire Giant), that giddy feeling of walking out of a hot South Florida day into the cool and darkness of an arcade and finally having a good enough run to put my name on the high score list for the games featured in that clip was a feeling like nothing else in this world before or since.
posted by lord_wolf at 1:14 PM on September 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

Ninja Turtles arcade game

My school went to Sea World or some place like that for an end of year band trip, and they had that game in the arcade. Some friends and I beat the crap out of that game, and also for some reason had no money for lunch or dinner. I'm still pretty proud of that accomplishment: beat an arcade game at the arcade.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:27 PM on September 25, 2023

Defender, Tempest.
posted by whatevernot at 1:28 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The most exciting thing that happened to me was once, while my mom was shopping at the base exchange, I put a quarter into the Thunder Blade arcade game (with the moving helicopter seat) and somehow was invincible. I could never get through a full level normally, but I just kept playing through all the levels. It was ridiculously short (looking up just now it only had 4 levels) and I managed to play through the entirety of the game before she got back. I tried to tell her what happened, but the coolness was lost on her.
posted by msbrauer at 1:28 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The football game is Atari Football. There’s one at an arcade in Orlando.

There are so many aspects of the original arcade experience that are hard to replicate. Fresh CRTs, fresh joysticks, sound booming to 11, 80s hits on the jukebox, quarters lined up on the deck, new games advancing the state of the art.

BTW search archive.org for “arcade ambiance” for that cacophony track.
posted by credulous at 1:28 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Love all this, and taking the opportunity to drop a link to Joysticks (1983). I've heard it called "Porky's in an arcade" and yes, that's accurate and you can expect all the unfortunate 80's attitudes to women and race on display.

But someone forgot to tell anyone at Namco/Williams/Etc they were making this movie and it's packed with real games. The plot is stupid, but the performance of King Vidiot is memorable!
posted by keep_evolving at 1:33 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

This was wonderful, thanks. I was amazed, as I watched, how many secondary memories were triggered - the smells, tastes, and ambient noises of arcades and pizza joints. My rivalry with my older cousing who was so much better than I was at so many (until Joust, which I destroyed him at). Very fun.
posted by kokogiak at 1:36 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Midnight Madness (1980) too
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 1:38 PM on September 25, 2023

one guy managed to slice his hand open and bleed all over the thing and just kept playing like it was no big deal

I did the exact same thing with Atari Football's spiritual successor, Tecmo's quite-excellent Gridiron Fight. When cleaning the rollers or something I closed the panel but left the screws along the top (~6" above the trackball...) sticking up about 2/3", sufficient to rip a big gash out of my left palm in two places when I was "testing" the ball. The two scars are faintly visible 36 years later, maybe because I waited to hit the ER until my shift ended at midnight.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 1:45 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

Defender - 1 Coin - stopping it at 999,975 - remember you get 25 pts when you die :)
posted by burr1545 at 1:47 PM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

Trackballs? I was never a video game player but I remember a time, either late 70’s or early 80’s when a new trackball based game appeared. It had a fairly large trackball and a number of my coworkers kept injuring their hands and fingers when the action got exciting. Bandages across the department.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:56 PM on September 25, 2023

My personal favourite was Major Havoc. It wasnt very common, but there was one at my "local" (Space Port in Quaker Bridge Mall). I'm surprised Joust doesn't pop up anywhere. That seemed to be everywhere.
posted by conifer at 1:57 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

I recognize so many of these up until about 87-88, which is around when I started driving and smoking pot. There were quite a few I would've added: Track & Field and Hyper Sports, Battlezone (which might be late 70s), Zaxxon, Pengo. There were also a few that nearly brought tears of joy to my eyes at the long lost memories, like Kung Fu Master.

one guy managed to slice his hand open and bleed all over the thing

It me, except Golden Tee, and I proceeded to bleed on the waiter who brought me a beer.
posted by slogger at 2:09 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Looks like my arcade-hanging-out days ended in 1981, although I played a few of the later ones.
I did not play Defender often, but I was in awe of those who did well. I thought it was the hardest.
I mostly stuck to Galaxian. Much better than Galaga.
(Did I mention I was 29 in 1981? Probably didn't have the reflexes for Defender)
posted by MtDewd at 2:57 PM on September 25, 2023

Did I mention I was 29 in 1981? Probably didn't have the reflexes for Defender

You spent your entire twenties living in the Seventies?

You're lucky you can even type.
posted by hippybear at 3:06 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Seems like a fairly random list (no R-Type!) but it was nice to see some of these again. In particular Jail Break had stuck in my head for some reason but I couldn’t remember the name.
posted by tomcooke at 3:13 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

the games I treasure most from this period are the oddball games that didn't launch subgenres.

like Donkey Kong birthed platformers and Space Invaders birthed vertical shooters and Tailgunner and Battlezone* birthed the first-person POV and so on and so on -- but games like Qix were one-and-done; an intensely fun and challenging game that was kind of an artistic and commercial dead end.

* not 100% sure of this; Tailgunner was 1979, were there earlier first-person games?
posted by Sauce Trough at 3:25 PM on September 25, 2023

Where Polybius?
posted by Jacen at 3:30 PM on September 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have a strong love for Qix. It was unlike anything I've seen before or since. It was a battle game where there were zero humanoids on the screen and nobody shot at anyone. The enemy was a randomly fluttering burst of energy, and all you had to do was claim territory without it touching you while you did that.

I really sort of miss those early years of videogames where things were more abstract. Dig Dug and Burger Time both spring to mind. But at their core, they're still a humanoid going around killing walking creatures, even if they are rubber dinosaurs or fried eggs. I appreciate that surrealism. But I do truly love the abstraction of Qix and if there were a cabinet around near me anywhere I'd probably be putting coins into it.
posted by hippybear at 3:30 PM on September 25, 2023 [14 favorites]

I grew up in the far south west of England. There was a big local shop that was a pet shop, toy shop, greeting card and stationery shop. Probably other stuff too - tools? - it was 40 years ago, so that's fuzzy. They also had an arcade at the back of the shop - just a room with maybe 10 or 12 machines in it - a real mix of old and new. I remember them having a few pinball tables and some ancient mechanical slots. They added arcade machines in the 80s when those became available, about the time I move to secondary school. I'm sure of three of the games. One was Battlezone, with its intimidating interface (you literally had to press your face into the machine). They had Q*Bert, which nobody quite understood, as far as I could tell at the time. They also had one called Gorf, which was a sort of Space Invaders / Galaxian hybrid, unremarkable except that it trash-talked you using a voice chip while you played. It really seemed like this was the future. Knight Rider was on TV. They also had that '1942' top-down shooter as well, though maybe a bit later. Many places like that are still around in that part of the world - little warrens of shops leading one into the next, each just tacked on as and when there's a demand for it. I first played Pac Man in a big coastal hotel late one Burns Night when I tagged along with the local bagpipe band. Space Invaders lived at the town's swimming pool, and if you had a sick note for school swimming lessons (frequent ear infections for the win) you could spend the lesson up on the balcony where they'd installed a Space Invaders machine next to a talking Clix Drinks machine that also had a voice chip and requested that you enjoy the drink that it had just made by dumping coffee or soup powder and some hot water into a cup without any attempt to mix the two.
posted by pipeski at 3:51 PM on September 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Jesus, there should be warnings for nostalgia trips this strong. I still remember exactly which long-defunct arcades I played some of these games in, and in some cases which wall of the arcade the game was up against.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:12 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

They made a whole album’s worth of these.

The first cassette tape I ever bought, in a store, with my own money, was Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever". I was 15.

I mostly stuck to Galaxian. Much better than Galaga.

Those are fightin' words, for sure. If nothing else, the Galaga sound effects are WAY better than the cacophony that is Galaxian's sounds.

I wrote my first college term paper, fall of '84, on techniques for playing Time Pilot.
posted by hanov3r at 4:14 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Out of all the Galaga-likes, Phoenix was my favorite because I really liked G-Force.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:37 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can still smell mall arcades, decades after being in one. And I can still hear "warrior needs food badly"...at least that's what's lodged in my head.

My clearest arcade memory is playing pinball and having a girl hit on me...I was so clueless (this is not something that happened much in my life, certainly not at that point) that she finally asked "are you gay?" and my response was "I don't think so," which still has me involuntarily wince all these years later. I wasn't even that into pinball and am definitely straight.
posted by maxwelton at 4:45 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

It wasnt very common, but there was one at my "local" (Space Port in Quaker Bridge Mall)

Heh, conifer, we probably crossed paths there, too.
posted by mollweide at 5:11 PM on September 25, 2023

G Y R U S S.

So much money. SO MUCH. that and the star wars vector graphics one.
posted by hearthpig at 5:34 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

...but games like Qix were one-and-done; an intensely fun and challenging game that was kind of an artistic and commercial dead end.

Actually, Qix wasn't a dead end. It spawned Super Qix some years later, which was basically the original with graphic updates, and Volfied, a late-80s sequel with a sci-fi theme and powerups. There are Genesis and PC-Engine ports for the latter.

Kaneko stole one of Volfied's gimmicks (multiple enemies, with the "main" enemy determining which side of the line got filled in) and added two big ones in Gals Panic the following year:

1) A silhouette on the background that is the target to be uncovered, rather than the entire background. Collecting non-silhouette portions raised your energy level; collecting silhouette portions lowered it, and if it dropped below a certain level the target image would change from a comely young lady to a comical animal, which would not count to advance you to the next board.

2) Sex.

Yeah.

The young ladies had three images each to uncover, progressively less covered up but remaining within PG-range, and would make little gasps and moans and "Oh, God"s when certain sensitive areas were captured. If you finished all three boards for a girl, you received a brief digitized photo featuring frontal nudity. This meant that any time someone dropped a quarter in and the signature chirpy "GOOD LUCK!" was heard, boys would come running from all over the arcade.

The original arcade Gals Panic is actually a very fun game to play, if you can get past that. There is a Sega Saturn port that is more family-friendly, and it spawned a long series of sequels and knockoffs and cheap copies that were far more focused on the nudity than the gameplay.

But the fact remains that Qix was the direct ancestor of at LEAST a dozen games that an adventurous sort can play in MAME, which is more than a lot of other classic games can claim.
posted by delfin at 5:47 PM on September 25, 2023 [8 favorites]

The local arcade closed last year. It was mostly a victim of Covid, I think, at least partly, but also maybe the hassle of running a venue in a quiet tourist town.

There was a Moon Patrol machine on the ferry boat that I took to get to high-school, so I got good enough that I was able to make a single quarter last almost the entire ride, which was maybe 15 minutes. I played it at the local arcade in 2019 and discovered that the muscle memory doesn't really go away.
posted by surlyben at 6:06 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Qix was written by Randy Pfeiffer and his wife Sandy after Randy left Williams Electronics. He worked on those early lo-fi sounds that everyone remembers from Defende/Stargate/Robotron/Sinistar etc.

If those sounds are giving you the feels there are a ton of YouTube selections that play "arcade ambience" background sounds like this one. Some are better than others.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:14 PM on September 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

(tries to think how a Qix 3D would work)
posted by RobotHero at 6:45 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

> press Slow Draw

You activate Slow Draw mode.

> up

You begin tracing a path towards the top of the screen.

The Qix lurches towards you.

> left

You are close to the edge of the screen, and safety.

The Qix lunges towards you, and makes contact with your line!

(Your life counter just went down.)
posted by delfin at 6:54 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Aaaah... DragonCon most years has a selection of retro arcade games to play. They did again this year, with Galaga (but it didn't work), Space Invaders (didn't work at first but was fixed), Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids (it looked like an original, with brilliant shots, but when I looked closely the vector lines has tiny stairsteps, I don't know if that was an aspect of the hardware), Gauntlet, Dig Dug, Robotron, Sinistar, Joust, and a few later games like NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II. They were like old friends, even though, as a kid, I almost never got to play them.

I played a bit of them, but ended up spending most of my time on the Twilight Zone pinball machine in that area. Which turned out to be a good thing: I managed to reach Lost In The Zone, with spectators no less! 2nd place on the machine!
posted by JHarris at 6:57 PM on September 25, 2023

Cyberball 2072.
posted by garisimo at 7:00 PM on September 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

BTW, if you find current games are lacking the appeal of those classic arcade games, two relatively recent titles that seek to recreate it are Annalynn and Donut Dodo. And the later has been ported to the exA-Arcadia arcade platform, so it can be played as an arcade game too.
posted by JHarris at 7:03 PM on September 25, 2023

But in 3D rather than drawing a line do you need to draw a plane to divide a cube?
posted by RobotHero at 7:08 PM on September 25, 2023

I think the 3D version starts off with you drawing in the rectangle like in the 2D version, but at some point you get to click into 3D and then things shift and you can drag lines you've already made through into 3D shape, pulling the plane to claim 3D space, able to spin the total space around to drag from any side...

Or that's just one idea.
posted by hippybear at 7:15 PM on September 25, 2023

>Cyberball 2072

Such a solid game. John Salwitz had done Paperboy & 720 before that, and did that weird Tetris/cannon mash-up game (Rampart) after.

Got to meet briefly him and one his Atari coworkers at the T. Cyberball machine at the '89 AMOA show in 'Vegas, LOL. Was my life all downhill from then?? Maybe, maybe not!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:16 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

Salwitz did an awesome post-mortem on the development of Paperboy at the 2019 GDC.
posted by JoeZydeco at 7:18 PM on September 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's interesting which ones live on in vintage arcades. Everyone has Centipede, Donkey Kong, and that aneurism-inducer Robotron. Finding 720 or Tron is cause for celebration, and the vector-line Star Wars. Can't remember the last time I'ver seen Spy Hunter, Hang On, or POW Prisoners of War.
posted by gottabefunky at 7:22 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Who remembers "cheating" at Track & Field by using a pencil to hit the buttons really fast?
posted by gottabefunky at 7:24 PM on September 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Such a solid game. John Salwitz had done Paperboy & 720 before that, and did that weird Tetris/cannon mash-up game (Rampart) after.

Rampart might be my favorite arcade game of all. I had to bug the MAME people to fix a bug in the Rampart driver that caused the game to mess up and become unplayable on Board 5. Partly was because a driver writer didn't like Rampart, but mostly I think it was I'm one of the few people who can get to that level in Rampart. I had to record the bug happening, send it to them as an INP file, and then check after each of their changes to see if it worked. Eventually it did, and that's why you can now play Rampart to completion in current versions of MAME.
posted by JHarris at 7:57 PM on September 25, 2023 [18 favorites]

It’s not the something awful thread mentioned above, but you might come close with this 1979 games conference comedy sketch, from the very early days of comedy youtube
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:11 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm having a problem with the link. When I play the video, it doesn't show Altered Beast. Is it my config.sys?
posted by darksasami at 8:28 PM on September 25, 2023

I had forgotten how many games from those days involved dispatching enemies by crouching as low as possible and kicking them in the ankles.
posted by Nerd of the North at 9:58 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also.. While we are living in something of a resurgent era of variety in game design, what a delightful diversity of concepts there were for games in those early generations, before just a few genres (e.g. fight games, platformers, FPS) took over an overwhelming share of the market.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:01 PM on September 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

GORF. Dang I loved that one.
posted by Golem XIV at 10:18 PM on September 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

(My statement above sounds like carping about the MAME devs; it wasn't intended to be that way. The bug had persisted in the Rampart driver code for a shocking long time, something like a decade, because no one played Rampart in MAME. And they have thousands of drivers to look after. I'm happy that they were responsive enough to get it fixed, at last!)
posted by JHarris at 2:22 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Phoenix infected me with an 8-bit Beethoven earworm which never left.
posted by fairmettle at 2:36 AM on September 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

I thought I knew the history pretty well but roughly one title each year is completely new to me. Pliades? Dragon Buster? Cosmo Police Galivan? Forgotten Worlds? What? I suppose it's possible these machines simply never made their way to Europe.

And I swore I wasn't going to play 'complain about chart placings' but putting Space Harrier at #3 for 1985 is nothing less than a crime.

New Zealand Story, yeah.
posted by Hogshead at 3:28 AM on September 26, 2023

Defender - 1 Coin - stopping it at 999,975 - remember you get 25 pts when you die :)

Defender - 1 Coin - rack up a huge number of extra lives - jump into hyperspace - walk away from the machine - watch the other kids fight over who gets to take over the controls
posted by fuzz at 5:46 AM on September 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Defender is so quick to eliminate the extra lives of an unskilled player though. Defender is also one of those games, I seem to remember, with the common rollover extra life bug: when you approach the point where the score resets to zero, every scoring event until the next extra life level awards as if it had been reached, granting lots of free ships and smart bombs.

The reason this happens in so many games is, the next extra life award goal is often stored in memory as decimal digits of the same format as the score, for ease of comparison. When the score nears rollover, the extra life goal rolls over first, and for a while, every time it checks to see if current score > extra life goal, it turns out true. Like: 990,000 > 0 is true, 990,150 > 0 is true, 990,350 > 0 is true and so on.

But in fact these lives are just loaned to the player: every time the check is registered as true, the next extra life point is bumped up by the extra life award increase value. So it's actually: 990,000 > 0 is true, then, 990,150 > 10,000 is true, then 990,350 > 20,000 is true, and so on. When the player's score rolls over, it'll be as many extra life awards as the player received free lives until they start registering again.

Keep in mind, Defender awards 25 points for dying, so during this period, the player can't technically lose lives, as even dying is an event that awards an extra life. But if the player can cause the extra life award goal to roll over again before their score flips, it'll all cancel out, and they won't have to "pay back" the extra life loan. On default settings the player must earn 100 lives during this period, while keeping in mind earning more than 255 lives will flip the life count, stored in binary. Dying 100 times earns 2,500 points; doing that four times, assuming no other points are earned, will flip the extra life award goal four additional times, and let the player resume normal play afterward--assuming that I haven't neglected anything. I am a duffer at Defender, I can barely reach Wave 3.

Dragon Buster

This is a game I'm familiar with, and kind of like. It was only released in Japan, is why you've probably not heard of it.

Made by Namco, it's mostly a side-scroller fantasy sword fighter/platformer but with a map screen connecting the sublevels. It has weird controls; the player can double jump with the right timing, but it's tricky. Hero Clovis swings his sword by spinning it around in a weird way. Each sublevel is a maze-like area, divided into corridors, mineshafts (some with ropes that he can climb, and some without), and rooms containing minibosses. Each miniboss, when defeated, drops an item that can help Clovis--or hurt him, some of the potions are poison.

A lot of the minibosses are best tackled by jumping at them and doing a downthrust move, similar to Links from Zelda II, in mid-air to stab them good. At the end of every map there's a big dragon boss to pit your remaining health against. Finish four levels to rescue a princess; do this four times to clear all the levels, although I think the game may actually continue forever.

One regrettable element is, if you can find certain items in each four level sequence (a Crown and/or Scepter), you can cause the rescued princess to show up wearing either a bikini or a bunny girl outfit. These two items replace other items in your inventory, so the player has to make the game harder for themself to view this tiny video game cheesecake. Again, I've never done this myself, I'm going off of memories of FAQs.

A Famicom port of Dragon Buster, which has some minor rule changes (I don't think the bikini/bunnygirl thing happens in it) is included in Namco Archives Vol. 1, available for current console platforms even in Western territories.
posted by JHarris at 7:02 AM on September 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh man the nostalgia. Sinistar was and still is my favourite arcade game of all time. The crazy 49 way joystick, and that terrifying speech synthesis. That game haunts me to this day.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 8:23 AM on September 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I HUNGER
posted by exlotuseater at 8:36 AM on September 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

I had mad respect for anyone good at Defender, I never got very far. As an observer, it seemed like the trick was to get enough things happening onscreen that the processor was overwhelmed and the action slowed down so that it actually became easier to play. So if you were like, a Zen master, or a Jedi, and could remove yourself, your consciousness, from the noise and blinking lights, then you could beat it real good.

Asteroids was my drug tho, oh god, Asteroids... Pinball Pete's in E. Lansing had massive banks of Asteroids, always a machine available, always there, waiting for you...
posted by Bron at 8:46 AM on September 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Some of these games I haven’t thought about since the last time I saw “Game Over” on the screen.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:54 AM on September 26, 2023

Some important games are missing because they're in the wrong decade: Top 10 Arcade Games Of The 1970s

We should also save some room for Night Driver, the first first-person driving game, or first-person anything game for that matter.

Honorable mention for 1980 should go to Red Baron, which inspired Sid and Bill to create Microprose.
posted by credulous at 12:44 PM on September 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

one of my long time hot takes is that stargate was a much better game than defender. it had new and interesting enemies and new tools (the stargate and inviso) that really deepened the play experience. defender was complex, but stargate upped the ante and was way more entertaining, both to play and watch.

i also vividly remember the first time i ever played defender. there were all these slow enemies on the ground that were easy to shoot. "wait what? why has everything gone crazy? this game sucks."
posted by bruceo at 6:22 PM on September 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

I also prefer Stargate (renamed after the fact to Defender II) to Defender! I haven't gotten that far in Defender, but in Stargate I've been to the Firebomber Showdown (Wave 10). It might just be that Stargate gives you one more tool to work with Inviso, or that Stargate is more varied and so holds my interest longer, or that I warped part of the way, and the extra points from doing that also helps out. But whatever it is, I just see, to do better at Stargate.
posted by JHarris at 3:13 AM on September 27, 2023

JHarris: "Buried deep in the archives of Metafilter, difficult to find now because of a particular former user's decision to button and in the process wreck the site by demanding their posts be deleted (I do not forgive things like that easily) is a link to a Something Awful list of the "greatest" video game characters, which was entirely made-up. (Well, more made up than normal game characters, in that they were from fictional games.) The thread turned into a joyous session of everyone inventing fake memories of fake games. "

RSS search to the RSS-cue
posted by Rhaomi at 11:54 AM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]