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…
Browsing: Arcade games
In the late 1970s, celebrities became a popular theme for pinball machines. In fact, everyone from Ted Nugent to Evel Knievel had a pinball machine…
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…
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…
It will come as no surprise that Pac-Man originated in Japan, where a Japanese computer firm called Namco Limited, modelled the game after a classic…
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…
The first successful computer game was a video version of ping-pong, whose “ball” was a blip that bounced back and forth on-screen between two paddles.…
By the early 1980s, thanks to hits like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, video arcade games were starting to take on a playful, cartoon-like appearance. Sensing…
One of the most famous faces of the golden age of arcade games was also one of the most bizarre. A furry orange orb with…
Namco’s Rally-X is often mistaken for a Pac-Man clone with elements of Defender, but it was actually released alongside these games in 1980 and -…
Sega/Gremlin’s Safari, released in 1977, took players on a big game hunt in the jungle, trying to bag the heads or hides of four different…
The hunt was on in 1976’s Sea Wolf, a submarine simulator with realistic sounds (explosions, sonar pings, buzzing motors and more) and a rotating periscope.…
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…
Sega’s Space Harrier (1985) presented a surreal, pseudo-3D universe filled with giant centipedes, poisonous mushrooms, and other fantastical creatures. As the Space Harrier, you had…
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…
Atari’s Indy 800 brought multi-player racing to the masses, but the company’s Sprint series took the genre to the next level, offering greater speed, multiple…
Star Castle – a 1980 classic from vector graphics pioneers Cinematronics – envisioned future castles as rotating rings of energy. Your mission was to pilot…
Although it had been off the air since 1969, Star Trek remained a big deal among fans of science-fiction television throughout the 1970’s. In fact,…
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…
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…