Best 80s Arcade Video Game

I loved a lot of these. Galaga, Galaxian, Tron, Centipede, Gyruss.

I may well be alone in voting Gorf, just for the mocking voice. TOO BAD, SPACE CADET

Woulda voted for Bump 'n Jump. Or Heavy Barrel. Or Arch Rivals. Or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Hmm, maybe I shoulda done a real nomination poll. Too many to consider to narrow down to 50.

maybe "golden age" would have been easier than "80s"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_video_games#List_of_popular_arcade_games

Wasn't Dragon's Lair 50 cents, when every other game was 25? I remember being super excited to play it, but feeling cheated that 1) it cost twice as much as other games, and 2) the hyped graphics were just animated shorts. I mean, that's cool and all, but it's not like the player controlled the animations.

Really liked Dig Dug, Burger Time, and Tempest. Zaxxon was ok, but kind of one-note, and Pac-Man was endlessly frustrating. I remember Tron being the first game I was decent at (and the music was super earwormy).

I read about Dragon's Lair first in some Electronic Games magazine, and totally thought that you would be able to control the cartoon movements. Finally saw one at a pizza place, saw the 50¢ price tag, and after playing it, realized it was just an arcade version of Press Your Luck.

Now that was disappointment.

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.

yeah this is a game whose stature I minimize because I played so much of it - it was one of the most reliable there-it-is-at-the-pizza-joint, there-it-is-at-the-7-11 games. Ubiquitous. but the action felt, to me, considerably more sophisticated and interesting than Space Invaders, which is pretty clearly its father - down come the invaders, shoot 'em before they get you. but the changing-color screen, those duotone (tritone?) mushrooms, and the sounds, and the metric of the poisoned mushrooms...this was a super-engaging game.

I think it's almost pointless to poll something like this generation of games because when one of them succeeded in establishing a unique identity, part of the appeal was that it didn't really compare. You can't really compare Galaga to Joust, you can't really compare Centipede to Tempest. Really profound wave of creativity going on with these games, it seems to me.

I'm always interested by the generation of games that came after the rise of the 8-bit Nintendo - I feel like Smash TV was one of them, Xenophobe another - stuff that wasn't doing nearly the business in the fading arcades but which could be a great deal of fun, and stuff that was really good at making you spend a whole five bucks just to get ahead i.e. stuff that took the lesson from the home console "give them accomplishments to look forward to."

also it's odd how Street Fighter inspires so little discussion here - it does feel to me like a different era than most of these, but it was huge - prior to Mortal Kombat, it was the game to play on college campuses and in arcades - just massive.

That was Street Fighter II, is the thing... and that came out in '91 so for myself I've basically bracketed it out as not really what this thread is concerned with.

But yeah, I have to agree totally about the quarter-eaters of the turn-of-the-90s, especially what is probably the most important genre to emerge from the late 80s, the side-scrolling beat-em-up (particularly after Double Dragon, '87, and Golden Axe, '89) In hindsight these seem like the most direct heir to what gaming has more or less become in 2015: there's not really challenge and there's only a modicum of skill that will really keep you from eventually dying... but if you keep playing it (and feeding it quarters) you'll see more stuff, and reach the end. And: you play it collaboratively, so every 9-year-old has an incentive to stay in, feel like part of a group. They were also profoundly attuned to other kinds of junk entertainment of the era, especially martial arts movies...

man I used to feed Golden Axe a whole lunch hour's worth of quarters at a liquor store in Norwalk. but next to that machine at the same store was f'in' Badlands, which had my other favorite keep-you-going lure -- leveling up your character/vehicle. missiles, shields...fuck yes, Badlands, the coin-op I'd buy and put in the basement if a good condition one turned up on the local Craigslist

It's cool reading this thread from the perspective of someone born in the 80s. Makes me feel less weird for having numerous "thoughts" and "feelings" about Street Fighter 2.

Born '81 here, so my attachment to the games from right around or before the time I was born is tremendously inflected by Atari or C64 versions ... but these things hung around, cabinets being the kind of thing a non-arcade business would invest in and not look at updating regularly. So for example I distinctly remember playing Q*Bert at the roller rink during either a birthday party or day-camp-field-trip situation around, let's say 88 or 89. Tempest I knew from the '93 Windows Arcade package, Galaga we had on NES. Asteroids we had on Atari but I'm sure I spent more time with the C64 port of clone Omega Race. My mother used to wax on nostalgically about her Space Invaders days, but I knew Demon Attack (C64 cartridge version) much better...and so on. So I didn't play some of the very best ones on an actual cabinet until well into adulthood!

Badlands (1989) is new to me also; watching footage now. That's cool! Surprising amount of leveling-up type stuff for a coin-op. Reminds me overwhelmingly of the later Rock n Roll Racing, a SNES fave.

yeah you get an opportunity to level up after each race you win, and in the initial rounds of that, it gets easier to win, because you buy missiles with which to take out the leader. then the speed ramps up and you need shield, which only does you so much good if you keep hitting things, which you do. tremendous game!

i apologize for voting 'galaxian' when i meant galaga

should have voted arkanoid anyway

Funny how games like Galaga and Asteroids live on to be polled in the 21st Century while Dragon's Lair gets mixed reviews.

AND THEN there was this fucking thing:

http://i.imgur.com/okzJOqn.jpg

which was about as stupid as you probably think it was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbl_23GwjJ8

oh man i remember that. there was a MASSIVE crowd in front of the arcade. i pushed to the front. it looked bad!

basically dragons lair with shitty holograms

It was like that game on one side and Teenage Mutant Ninja Simpsons on the other. By that point, I was all you know, maybe I'm ready for girls now.

Votes TEMPEST a hundred million times.

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.