Best 80s Arcade Video Game

NARC>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Contra

as far as politically suspect propaganda masquerading as a video game goes

too hard. the game I played the most was punch-out, but joust is so creative and amazing...i'm a huge fan of arkanoid, but best? idk too hard

arkanoid is awesome - basic puzzles + great design aesthetic is always a winning combination

I was always partial to Elevator Action myself

Ms Pac Man may be the perfect game

galaga galaga galaga

oh shit Marble Madness

Elevator Action was great, but best on the NES.

Moon Patrol underrated. Sometime around Y2K, I got a copy on one of those discs with 100 games on it sold at Circuit City. For some reason, it had MIDIs of Ace of Base songs played over it. I must've spent a solid month playing it every night with the boop-boop-boops of All That She Wants echoing in my empty apartment.

Voted for Galaga.

http://i.imgur.com/5l4QzNK.jpg?1

But I wish they didn't sell these as "abduction skirts".

between ms pac man, qbert, and robotron for me, tho list obv stuffed with classix including many i haven't played. ms pac man definitely the sentimental favorite for boring reasons involving my dad and a bar but now i maybe admire robotron's relentless onslaught more, or qbert's fake 3d and the way it gradually taught you to navigate the cramped, dangerous world this dude(?) lives in. maybe i'll vote for gauntlet.

Disclaimer: I've basically not played an arcade game since about 1983. But I remember Defender, Zaxxon, and Tempest as being fun and kind of hard. Among the others I enjoyed enough to tackle frequently, I pretty much mastered Centipede, Joust, and - my only favorite not on the list - Phoenix.

Shit, either Star Wars or Tempest for me. Portland has a barcade downtown where you can still play all of these.

Elevator Action and Joust.

Gyruss slightly nudges out Galaga for me. The latter has far more iconic sprite designs and brighter primary colors, but the former plays better and has better music.

I grew to enjoy the colors & designs of Bubble Bobble in the last 5 years, and the batshit insane choices of Japanese food items used as specials.

Dragons Lair is a neat idea but absolute dogshit to play. It's scummier than Candy Crush in terms of difficult design just to get you to cough up quarters.

Tron is always a favorite but the difficult curve spikes once you hit the third go round, and I could never proceed past that.

The one thing that keeps Ms Pac Man from being a perfect game for me is the inability to earn another 1-up past the first one.

It didn't help that Dragon's Lair was built around a consumer-grade laserdisc player that was never designed for skipping to a new scene every few seconds for 18 hours a day. You always knew you were about to die when the screen briefly went blank as it skipped to the death scene - and this gap became increasingly longer and the segment it managed to play shorter as the laserdisc players wore out, which they usually did within the first year. Still was great to watch someone else play for the awesome animation (courtesy of Don Bluth) even if they cheaply reused some scenes twice, sometimes in mirror image.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6em4GRiRY0

Two '80s arcade faves of mine aren't here: Carnival and Food Fight

Didn't visit arcades very often but when I did I'd head straight for the star wars cabinet every time.

after bh died, i decided to treat me and the boys.

this now takes pride of place in the old dining room (now the 'games' room)

http://www.findarcademachines.com/gamecab-retro-games-upright-arcade-machine-subwoofer-p-1201.html

dont have the new sub-woofer version, but the rest is the same.

for me the best was the unlisted phoenix.

Roadblasters should be on here

i, robot

this is probably my favorite 80s cabinet to play, haven't seen one in years. also very fond of Aero Fighters, Xevious, Golden Axe, and the greatest "why not, a quiz/board game" concept of all time, Quiz & Dragons

No Polybius no credibility.

this was another of my fave 80s arcade games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Off_Road

so much so that i'm not sure if i've ever played a racing game i liked as much (ok, there is one...)

gonna throw a vote to galaxian for its sound effects which are instantly recognizable the moment you enter a video arcade. in my mind all arcades sound like this game.

other favs to play are tempest, centipede, and robotron.

oh, and missile command.

When the game was originally designed, the six cities were meant to represent six cities in California: Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego.[2]

While programming Missile Command, the programmer, Dave Theurer, suffered from nightmares of these cities being destroyed by a nuclear blast.[3][4]

I liked Berzerk better than Robotron. Robotron more exciting, Berzerk just terrifying

My favourite here, Bubble Bobble, I think of as more of a home computer game than arcade game, so I picked Paperboy, because the bicycle controller is BOSS and the home ports were all LAME.

But also missing: Out Run, Splatterhouse, Ghouls n Ghosts, Bad Dudes and Shinobi. SHINOBI!

Galaga pretty easily. The space shooters seem to be the most replayable of these.

Paperboy is also a favorite of mine. I love the mismatch between the premise and the gameplay.

Oh, and Rolling Thunder.

(not so fun to play if you haven't mastered it, unfortunately)

I remember this materialising in the arcade at the run-down holiday camp we used to stay at for a week every summer. It looked amazing. I fed some coins into it. I moved the stick. It seemed to correspond not one iota with what was happening onscreen. My game was over. I never played it again.

Voted Gauntlet. Too much co-op fun.

Galaga 4ever

yeah Gauntlet was the first game where it really required people to work together (as opposed to against each other), which was cool

xp

the kids of my parents' wealthy friends owned Mousetrap in 1985 and I marveled at the graphics, especially when it looked as if the mouse was farting on the cats.

Berzerk was insane. After a while your guy couldn't run faster than Evil Otto.

what bothered me most about the gameplay in Dragon's Lair was how you couldn't just master it by timing your responses to the flashing signals, because some of those signals were fake/false and would lead to your dying anyway. So it wasn't just a matter of getting your responses timed right, you had to remember which signals were wrong. That just seemed like a cruel, quarter-eating bit of design.

xp

that being said I think Space Ace is an improvement and superior in every way. The action gets broken up by bits of story, giving the player a brief respite, the narrative makes more sense, there's several different "paths" to beating the game, less repetition, etc. Plus it's genuinely funnier imo.

i had to go with joust, great memories. that is all.

Two other favorites: Mr. Do! (an improvement on Dig Dug) and Bump 'n' Jump.

Galaga

Dragons Lair, God...that's an anomaly. The graphics were so amazing for the time so it got tons of attention but the game was designed to eat money. My stupidest friend was really good at it but I think he got that way by robbing his mother's purse.

Think my favourite was the intense slaughterfest that was Robotron but everyone in this thread more or less OTM about the others. Tons of fun here.

Galaga is really awesome. it feels light years ahead of Space Invaders, which is more of a cover shooter. it was fun collecting extra ships too. enemy AI was really neat -- you had waves of enemies doing these patterns across the starfield. Ms. Pac-Man came out the same year and had just 4 enemies onscreen at a time. this had hordes. really impressive and ahead of its time.

still, i think the more story-based Ms. Pac-Man is the better game. Galaga enemies are great but the level design is still somewhat random, sort of iherited from Space Invaders, where you carve out a path through the enemies. Ms. Pac-Man had environmentally-aware AI which was a big step up imo. as a result the play feels more intellectual and therefore immersive, depending on if are currently being pursued/distance from power pellets/locations of other ghosts/whether entrances & exits from your position are blocked. Galaga is more a constant barrage of missiles and ships - which are basically missiles, they function the same way.

for home ports I had an Atari 7800 so the port of Galaga was way better than any of the atari Pac-Mans. except the multi-screen Pac-Man Jr., that was actually pretty fun...

there'll be a ballot poll eventually, no? this is tough because we're dealing with such a broad span of time - the ones right around 1980 are still very close to the elemental, tripped-out mindfuck world of something like Asteroids, where playing it really does feel like stepping into this other, weirder, neurological world, now with even more tripped-out color and sound in an essentially bleak, abstract, haunted landscape: Tempest, Robotron, Defender, Missile Command, Centipede. these are the best experiences here IMO, and it's hard not to vote for one of those, even if the slightly more down-to-earth games with great control and satisfying action (Ms. Pac-man, Galaga) are more likely to have me sinking quarter after quarter to unwind.

but already with Frogger and Donkey Kong, you start to move to things that more resemble human reality - more colors, recognizable protagonists, big sprites, music. by Pole Position we're clearly in the real world and I think something of the "jack into the mainframe on a journey at lightspeed" quality is lost. the mid-80s games like Gauntlet, Paperboy, and Punch-Out inherit this with rapidly improving graphics; some are very fun but surely none is actually better than Missile Command. Lode Runner is unusual here in being a port of a home-computer game. don't think i've ever seen one IRL. a very fun game but not really all that "arcadey" especially in its great innovation (the level construction set). once you get to Street Fighter we're effectively in the 90s; the first one was a footnote nobody played.

then of course there's lots of dross that i would never have spared a quarter for in my life but which is kinda interesting to check out when you see it in a retro arcade today. in general though i think the inherited canon is pretty much accurate with these games - there really aren't any overlooked gems, most games were kinda crap.

anyway, since Asteroids isn't really an option I think I have to go for Missile Command, which conveys an unbelievable apocalyptic bleakness with every play. it's so fucking mean and ugly, this world - dead silent except for the sounds of death - and there is absolutely no ending besides global nuclear annihilation. you really only stave off the inevitable: that's the fucking game. and when it comes the machine itself seems to have been irradiated by those grim sounds and the scraggly bass notes. reagan's america.

great description! Remember the keypad that came with the joystick?

I remember so many of these just by the game controls. Zaxxon had the half gun thing. Gorf had a big joystick. Robotron was two joysticks, like Crazy Climber.

Still weird for me to see things like Punchout on here. That is so much an NES game to me that I'd be less surprised to see an Angry Birds arcade console now than a Punchout.

tempted by Bubble Bobble, Double Dragon, Gauntlet, and Dig Dug but i only really played those a lot at home. it's gotta be Ms. Pac-Man (shout out to Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and Arkanoid though).

spent more time playing marble madness than any of these, but on NES. never tried the arcade trackball and can't really imagine it given the precision required.

for actual cabinet play, i've probably dumped the most quarters into galaga, with honorable mention for the sit down BURGER TIME table in my orthodontist's office. i wanted it to be my actual kitchen table.

dr c makes a great aesthetic case for missile command. i also love the tension that derives from the small moment between the launch of a missile and its detonation, as you, the commander, wait to see if it made contact.

i think i mostly played Asteroids on my friend's Texas Instruments calculator in study hall though.

DrC bringin the science as usual. Agree about Missile Command = Reagan's America, both bright and nihilistic.

If it isn't clear from the games referenced here:

this other, weirder, neurological world, now with even more tripped-out color and sound in an essentially bleak, abstract, haunted landscape: Tempest, Robotron, Defender, Missile Command, Centipede

a lot of that has to do with the colored-lines-on-black-background aesthetic. It's so unnatural, unlike any human experience of the natural world, it has the ability to put you into this deep "I am somewhere else, interacting with something strange and terrible and archetypal" mindset

Lode Runner is unusual here in being a port of a home-computer game. don't think i've ever seen one IRL. a very fun game but not really all that "arcadey" especially in its great innovation (the level construction set).

also otm I love this game but *never* saw it in the arcade. the ability to make your own levels and play with these really simple building blocks was brilliant.

I played Moon Patrol last year at a local "beercade" and was amazed, decades later, that I remembered exactly where the craters and double-craters would appear.

this other, weirder, neurological world, now with even more tripped-out color and sound in an essentially bleak, abstract, haunted landscape: Tempest, Robotron, Defender, Missile Command, Centipede

a lot of that has to do with the colored-lines-on-black-background aesthetic. It's so unnatural, unlike any human experience of the natural world, it has the ability to put you into this deep "I am somewhere else, interacting with something strange and terrible and archetypal" mindset

― Οὖτις, Thursday, January 7, 2016 3:23 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes yes this 1000x yes. it tapped into late 70s space/sci fi craze too. the cathode ray tubes glowing in the dark. computer magic.

still remember as a new student in 87 or 88 going into the main arcade in Hull with a friend and enough 10p pieces to finish Golden Axe and spending the afternoon playing thru the whole thing

3. Rick prides himself on communication, accessibility, current technology and integrity. He is also an inventor; best known for creating a world renown video game Dragon's Lair (TM)

http://www.julianappletree.com/about.html

the best bit about time traveler is that it's not in any sense a hologram, it's just pepper's ghost ..

i remember it being in the tiny arcade at the caravan park i went to with my parents every year, a place which in most respects had nothing about it to differentiate it from the 50s, except, i guess, a member of staff paid to waddle around in the obese bird costume representing the establishment's mascot, 'Sid The Seagull.' -- anyway in such a place it seemed new and exciting, a welcome intrusion of the New, though i certainly forgot about it immediately when we left. i mean, in those circumstances even the x-men brawler seemed a vital and modern presence.

omg that hologram game. forgot all about that. yeah, same experience - everybody gathered around, wanting to play it, but quickly discovering it sucked and was expensive. IIRC when you died the cowboy guy would turn to you and proclaim aloud "Always remember, partner - winners don't use druuugs!"

HOLY FUCK THAT HOLOGRAM GAME WAS REAL? I was sure it was a dream i had when i was young, i must have only ever seen it once and i truly thought i engineered the memory.

this is a really weird feeling

it's real, and it's spectacular......ly lame

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9958AbBMG9w

Footage from the 1991 introduction of Time Traveler by Sega, including comments from then-Sega coin-op president Tom Petit and showing the game installed in one of its test locations.

love the dragon's lair animation, gameplay is total trash of course but it's the sound that sticks in my mind as being especially abysmal.
my best memories there are of the saturday morning cartoon... pure scooby rehash but they would do little choose-your-own-adventure breaks at the lead in to the commercial of the "does dirk take the top path or the bottom path?" See 10.53 here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyCxKBinLI

Stargate! (Defender's souped-up offspring)

Fuck fuck where is wizard of Wor

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Don't know most of these games but voted Altered Beast. "Wise from your gwave!"

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

btw I will most likely be playing all of these games at http://www.caextreme.org/ this year and if you live in CA you should too

kinda surprised at star wars placing that high - rest seems totally legit to me tho.

yeah that game is nothing special imo, basically just an update of Battlezone

it's also pretty much the only one to get more than token votes that has not had a substantial "afterlife" as a classic game - - - not generally featured in retro game packages for later systems, not a mainstay of bars and barcades in the contemporary era, not much discussed in feature lists and documentaries to my knowledge. so i'm kind of assuming the voters are mostly people who played it when it was new, and star wars was the center of the universe; i can imagine that playing that game at that time would have been a kind of awesome, memorable experience that would shape voting in some way.

Star Wars and Tempest remind me of each other, just because of the vectors.

Tempest is definitely better than Star Wars, but I sure did play a lot of Star Wars as a kid

R2, I'VE BEEN HIT!

I liked the ROTJ game

btw I will most likely be playing all of these games at http://www.caextreme.org/ this year and if you live in CA you should too

I already went to http://www.arcadeexpo.com down here in SoCal a couple weekends ago.

I liked the ROTJ game

I was strangely adept at ROTJ despite being a complete failure at diagonal motion games like Zaxxon. Voted Tempest of course but Gravitar should have at least been on the list.

Kind of surprised Donkey Kong didn't get even one vote. It was second only to Pac Man in popularity for a year or two.

I always wanted to like Donkey Kong but I was always terrible at it

1 for pacman, damn y'all are revisionists

who doubts that ms pac-man is the authoritative pac-man?

Very true

adore the ms pac-man cutscenes.

yeah that game is nothing special imo, basically just an update of Battlezone

if replacing slow tanks on a featureless flat plane with SPACE and TIE FIGHTERS and FIREBALLS and THE DEATH STAR and a BLISTERINGLY FAST TRENCH RUN is just an update then sure, it's just an update.

Battlezone's plan was not flat or featureless but whatever

plane