Placing unsuspecting gamers right in the heart of a terrifying storm, Atari’s Tempest put a whole new perspective on video games. With dazzling QuadraScan™ colour…
Browsing: Arcade games
With its dogfighting space battles, lightsaber duels and narrow escapes, George Lucas’ 1977 film Star Wars seemed like a natural for the video arcades. It…
The original first-person driving arcade game took players on an endless race to nowhere in 1976. Speed was the only object of Night Driver from…
In his first two video game appearances, Mario had to play second banana to two starring gorillas, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. The moustachioed…
Released in the whitewater wake of Steven Spielberg’s terrifying 1975 blockbuster film Jaws, Atari’s Shark JAWS tried to recreate the deep sea horror on a…
Atari had its finger directly on the pulse of pop culture in the mid-1970s. In 1975, the pioneering video game company released Shark JAWS, obviously…
Released in 1976, Outlaw wasn’t the first arcade game to explore the Old West tradition of the shootout (Midway/Taito’s Gun Fight had done the same…
The video game Donkey Kong was created by Shigeru Miyamoto and is owned by Nintendo. It follows the adventures of the eponymous gorilla and a…
This maze arcade game was developed by Namco in 1981 and released in 1982, licensed and distributed by Atari. The player controlled Dig Dug to…
Atari had experimented with head-on racing games back in 1976 with Night Driver, but it took a licensed game from Namco (designers of Pac-Man and…
Atari’s first racer, the little-known 1974 game Gran Track 10, wasn’t the hit that everyone had hoped it would be. But rather than abandoning the…
One of the frustrations of pinball has always been how difficult it is to earn the extra balls necessary to prolong a game. No matter…
The quest for realism in driving games got a boost in Sega’s 1981 simulator, Turbo. Shifting the action into a new perspective, Turbo put players…
Back in 1978, arcade games had one undisputed king. Its name was Space Invaders, and at the time, it seemed like it would own the…
Developed in 1970 by Bob’s Space Racers, the anger-abating coin-operated game Whac-a-Mole did exactly what it said on the tin! There were five holes out of…
“Fight me! I am the Wizard of Wor!” Part Pac-Man, part Alien, part Dungeons and Dragons, Bally Midway’s Wizard of Wor took gamers down into…
In the years after Star Wars (1977), anything involving outer space, zippy interstellar craft and dangerous battles was golden. Into this arena of sci-fi fantasy came…
1982 gamers had never seen anything like Sega/Gremlin’s Zaxxon. Players had flown spaceships into strafing raids and interstellar dogfights before, but Zaxxon did it in…
A classic vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up Namco arcade game (distributed by Atari), Xevious sent your ‘Solvalou’ craft into solo battle against the invading Xevious armies. Unfortunately, the…
Backed by a thudding bass beat, dozens of invaders from another world descended on our planet in 1978. Within months, Space Invaders was one of…