Best 80s Arcade Video Game

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.

I wasn't wrong about the crude graphics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MwVWsHBm5g

Voted Defender b/c it was insanely hard (what, five or six different buttons plus the joystick?) and b/c it felt like a quantum leap from the likes of Space Invaders. "A bleak, abstract, haunted landscape" puts it very well.

just realised this enormous omission

http://gamesdbase.com/Media/SYSTEM/Arcade/Snap/big/Scramble_-_1981_-_Konami.jpg

I vaguely remember that one. What was it called?

Scramble, was seriously obsessed with it for a while there

I was amazed by Battlezone as a kid. The green vector graphics, twin lever controls and periscope thing seemed quite rad when I was a kid. I can't even remember if I ever played it but for some reason it sticks in the memory.

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!"