Tag: 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...

When their KISS pinball machine hit big in the summer of 1979, the folks at Bally saw they had something good going with celebrity-themed...

Through tight corridors, against numerous foes, with only a four-way blaster for defence, a solo fighter took on the challenge of Vanguard, a pioneering...

It came as no surprise that Tron hit the arcades at the same time as its 1982 film counterpart. This was the first fusion...

Years before Extreme Sports hit the mainstream, there was Atari’s Toobin’, one of the oddest and most dangerous sports to hit the video arcade. The...

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...

Released in 1975, Gun Fight was the first arcade game to incorporate a microprocessor, and the expanded processing capabilities allowed for graphics and gameplay...

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,...

Into a world of Pong clones rolled a pair of tanks, firing artillery shells that rocked the arcade game world. Atari’s Tank - produced...

Flippers have been an important part of pinball games since they were introduced in 1947 with Humpty Dumpty. Just the same, modern pinball players...

One of the most famous faces of the golden age of arcade games was also one of the most bizarre. A furry orange orb...

By the early 1980’s, thanks to hits like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, video arcade games were starting to take on a playful, cartoon-like appearance....

Despite some industry fears, video didn’t kill the pinball star. Flipper-fuelled action had been an arcade mainstay since long before the days of Pong,...

It wasn’t like pinball machines hadn’t been sexy before - many a lad had pumped his pocket money into Slick Chick just to spend more time with...

The history of coin-operated video arcade games began not with a whimper, but with several explosive bangs, rendered in simple black-and-white graphics by a...

Inspired by the Alien films and countless other sci-fi suspense flicks, this game sent a group of unlucky scientists and soldiers into a series...

The star of 1982’s Time Pilot was a time-hopping military jet. Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, who would go on to create Gyruss, Final Fight...

Part of the beauty of early arcade games was the preponderance of "truth in advertising". What you read was what you got. So when...

One of the most frustrating things about almost every pinball game is the gap between the two flippers. No matter how good players are,...

This early Atari title wasn’t exactly the black-and-white equivalent of a Swiss Alps nightmare, but it was the closest a video game could come...