Best 80s Arcade Video Game

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.

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/this_is_spinal_tap_coco.jpg

quite exciting this computer magic.

Altered Beast stands out most on that list as the thing closest to video games in the 90s.

https://media.giphy.com/media/qDfj08zIpZ3JC/giphy.gif

it was really impressive to an 8-year-old-me, just how large and detailed the sprites had gotten

it's funny cuz I would think that was probably a technical choice rather than an aesthetic one - like the reason pong is not black lines on a white background is probably because it requires less energy + computing power, no?

xp

yeah it would be an insane proposition to program the negative space around pong.

i guess each paddle could be split into 4 white rectangles overlapped in such a way as to produce the black paddle. animating the cube in the middle flying around would greatly complicate things.

Until the early 80s the refresh rate of most computer displays wasn't sufficient to display black text on a paper white background.

might go with centipede. i have memories of finding that game kind of menacing but that's prob partly due to long-standing fear of centipedes in general.

Very hard to choose between gauntlet, rampage and mordy's write-in super offroad, which i spent waaaaaaaaaay too much time and money on

yeah colored lines on black is a big part of it. especially in the true vector games. playing those on a real cabinet for the first time was a revelation - the black is SO black and the white is just brilliantly, glowingly bright. no wonder people were hypnotized - it must have been like the effect early cinema had on audiences.

knew i'd gone on about missile command recently, here's my last rant (from Best Home Video Game Poll 1.0 Nomination Thread: 1970 to 1980 ), even using some of the same exact constructions. i'm a one-note, oops:

Missile Command is so amazing. It belongs much more with the other golden age, pre-crash cabinets that don't quite line up with the decades - especially Robotron and Tempest - for demonstrating just how radical and strange this new medium could be, how bizarre the freaked-out, searing day-glo universe trapped in the thickness of a TV screen's glass could actually be. The stuff at the bottom of the screen is generically figurative, but up above it's an aerial hellscape of diseased rainbows cycling rapidly through the course of the explosions, accompanied by fizzling static. It's so fucking bleak, this apocalypse: black background, defense guns, some vague outcroppings which could be earthly cities or lunar outposts - and the descent of glowing projectiles.

For all this abstraction, though, it's the first political video game, not merely in representing a real-world situation but in using the mechanics and emotional investment of the medium to make its point. If Space Invaders demonstrated the rising tension - rising, rising, rising oh no oh no oh NO DAMMIT NO! - that came from the inevitable forward march of attackers and ultimate, inescapable destruction of the user, Missile Command makes something of it: three years before WarGames and two years before Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, it invites players to a delightful game of Global Thermonuclear War and lets them discover through their own adrenaline and shell-shock that the only way to win is not to play. That the controls are fluid enough for it to actually be a compelling play experience is what makes it a classic game as opposed to a fascinating artifact or art piece, but it would be those other things even if it had been kind of a clunky mess that nobody played.

Galaga just towers over all these games, the gameplay is fluid and perfectly balanced, it's one of the few games that feels like a perfect fusion of programming and choreography

Personal fave 2-D grid-style game is easily Pengo, I've had that melody in my head my whole life. Popeye also super underrated and fun nonsense. Galaga 88 would be a good addition too, the music was amazing, the graphics were amazing, the capacity for inter-dimensional travel was terrific. Hang-On was not a great game but I loved the controller. Star Wars another favourite..

Just noticed Vanguard lingering misspelled at the end of the poll, and it prompted a long forgotten memory of being on a cross channel ferry with a single arcade game which I had never seen before. I was instantly addicted and spent the whole trip (or, more likely, as much time/money as I was allowed) playing it. Basically a horizontal shmup flying through caverns, very crude graphics, but every so often there was a small structure on the cavern floor you could fly through which made you INVINCIBLE and you could smash through the enemy waves with gay abandon. Cross channel trips don't take very long so I can't have played it that much - and I never saw it again.

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