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…
Browsing: Arcade games
Patents for similar table games date back as early as the 1890s in Spain. However, the origins of Table Football (aka “Foosball”) date to 1921,…
Into a world of Pong clones rolled a pair of tanks, firing artillery shells that rocked the arcade game world. Atari’s Tank – produced under…
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…
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 and…
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…
It came as no surprise that Tron hit the arcades at the same time as its 1982 film counterpart. This was the first fusion of…
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…
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 shoot-em-up…
Venture (from Exidy) challenged a lone treasure hunter named Winky to explore a monster-filled dungeon armed only with a bow and arrow. Our hero was…
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, and…
Stuck in the mire of the 1984 video game market crash, Nintendo knew it needed a hook to draw gamers back into the arcades. Their…
Atari’s Warlords got Medieval on the old Breakout formula. Instead of chipping away at coloured walls for your own amusement, Warlords gave a more sinister…
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…
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 those…
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 of…
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…
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…