h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

To continue this articles' history, I believe the following games deserve honourable mentions.

Space Invaders - ZAP! POW! duck-behind-that-barrier, the less there are the faster they fly and more they spit...

Pacman - Probably the most revolutionary of the new order of computer games, this epic gripped the world in a feverant craze. See cartoon spinoff's and the -totally- different Ms Pacman.

Defender - Did ANYONE have enough hands to play that game? People having competitions to play for 12 hours, that sort of thing.

MoonPatrol - The surface of the moon isn't smooth and there's always a rolling rock or annoying git in a spaceship trying to pummel you.

Rally-X - Apart from having the most catchy music a computer game has ever had, a really neat game of pick up the flag and smoke up those nasty blue cars.

Dragons Lair - Could ANYONE have played this game with their nose only? So there wasn't much joystick action, but a great spectator game. Don Bluth uses cartoons for the first time.

Gauntlet - First real catchy game with 4 person capability and co-operative teamwork. Famous phrases that shall live forever, "The elf shot the food" and "The warrior... is about... to die..."

StreetFighter II - Another phenomonal craze that had youths lining up behind the solitary machine till there were lines of 10 in the arcade. Each character has strenghts and weaknesses that seem to have been duplicated in beat-em-ups ever since.

There you have it, the Arcade Hall of Fame.

*Spock turns to the camera, lifts one eyebrow and says "FASINATING"

Ah but surely you have missed out a couple in your list.
Asteroids. Turn, thrust, shoot, get blown up because you've just rolled from the top of the screen to the bottom and hit something.
Missile Command. All I can say is where have all the trackballs gone...

Phil

And how could I have forgotton Ghosts 'n Goblins. Mister Demon lost a lot of Zombies that day. Serves him right for taking the Princess I suppose. No wonder our hero looked so put out.

More complicated than Defender was the sequel, Stargate. If I remember correctly there were actually more buttons on the console for that. I remember that when I first tried it I was just overwhelmed. Consequently, I said to hell with that and played another game of Pac-Man.

Another classic game that I recall was Berzerk, which was a fine game where you had to go through mazes killing robots with a laser while trying to avoid a bouncing smiley-face named Evil Otto.

Berzerk also had the advantage of sampled speech for the first time (as far as I know) in an arcade game. One of the samples found a place in the 80's Techno music classic Stakker's 'Humanoid' ..."Intruder Alert..."

Other classics:-

Scramble - starship flies thru cavern avoiding ceiling and floor obstacles.

Donkey Kong - first big platform arcade game ;featuring King Kong hurling barrels at you as you try to climb ladders.

Galaxians - like Space Invaders but the aliens could split off from the pack and go gunning for you. Insanely addictive, especially in the BBC Micro's "Arcadians" conversion.

Pole Position - The first reasonable arcade Grand Prix driving game.

Afterburner - extremely fast '3D'-ish fighter game with VideoDisc ( I think?!?) enhanced backgrounds.

You are forgetting Spy Hunter. A fast car, a cool boat (if you could get it in time), cool baddies, and killer upgrades. I still pump out any number of quarters whenever I can find this game.

I don't know about Asteroids but If you have the latest version of Netscape and Shockwave
There's a version of Missile Command you can get from the Shockwave homepage. It looks
quite authentic, Plays really well with a mouse.

What about Tempest - the last of those great line art games!

All the others were great too...esp. Spy Hunter with the "Peter Gunn Theme" as background music!

There was an old IBM game I think, called Swashbuckler. One of the first side scrolling fighting games. I played it when I was in Jr. High if I remember correctly. It was at about the same time as Karateka.

Battlezone: one of the first games to use the perspective of one's field of vision.
Cool game play for such simple looking outline style graphics.

Nostalga freaks may care to try and track down a 1993 MicroSoft release of Arcade classics. Asteroid, Missle Command, battle zone, centipede and tempest. All original Atari code ie EXACTLY like the originals.

I have recently found my disk (remember those small 3 1/2 inch things we used before CDs) as well as buying the totally revamped BattleZone and the latest C&C and in all honesty I am playing the retro games more than the new ones........it must be an age thing.

CH

You might want to see my comments on the other strand, but basically I agree battleZone (mk1) was the first true game in my book, the fore runner of Doom et al and I stillplay it to this very day.

Robotron: 1st of many Williams classics to use two joystick format: one for moving and the other for killing. . .er I mean shooting.
Also it upped the ante for high speed of play and number of moving objects on screen.

But for sheer game play, how about the old Atari 2600 classic Battle. The one with the tanks and planes.

do you know of an arcade anywhere that has these classics? When did they all become fighting games? My dream would be to have an arcade of classics as well as rooms full of Ataris, Intellivisions, Colecovisions, as well as Apple II+, Commodore 64, and Amiga classics.

I'd have to add Pengo, Pooyan and Qix to the previous suggestions. The great thing about these three - apart from the fact that they are still really playable (it's rare for a week to pass without me firing up at least one of these on MAME on my PC (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator for the uninitiated - and if you are, but love classic arcade games then get hold of a copy) - is that they are all amazingly bizarre. I'm getting really sick of the modern strive for realism in games. Give me a pig in a basket shooting arrows at wolves flying on balloons any day (Pooyan)

Realism schmealism.

For those of you lusting after old home computer games, there are 100s of web pages out there with emulators and the old games, I spent many happy minutes playing old BBC games, and have a friend who is now hooked once more on C64 games, my Amiga still occasionally comes out.

All of which leads to interesting questions, have modern game writers sacrifice game play for fancy graphics/sound etc. The all time classic Elite went across ever format, lasted many years, two revials but was at the end of the game very basic in appereance (against todays standards - then it was amazing) and yet I still compare all space shoot them ups against it and so far nothings come close.

Oh well back to the original Atari Missle Command for me for a while, or until I run out of scotch and have to get up.

CH

Chuckie egg!

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A classic game if ever there was one...

I have to agree with you over Elite... mostly. Hardwar has a fairly similar kind of appeal... and some of the recent releases in the computer game world have been nothing short of amazing, Starseige Tribes for example.

I had an Amstrad 464... pretty similar to a C64, except for some reason very few peopl ever admit to owning them...

When it comes to emulators, I have Amstrad, Sega MS & MD, and Nintendo emulators... great fun. But you do need a fast PC.

I think that for the last five to eight years, game programers have indeed sacrificed game play for eye candy and sound. But the last two years have shown a revival in game depth. Years ago I played an adventure game based in the dungeons of a castle, you fought monsters you gained experiance you were rewarded with equipment and gold. You think you know which game I am talking about? It was called "Castle of the Winds" and was perhaps the best shareware game I ever played. Then two years ago Blizzard put out "Diablo" which has become my favorite game. Castle, was a turned based, no graphics game. But I played it for two whole years. I still have it on an old hard drive and I install it every once in a while. I hope the level of gaming goes up in the future, but untill then we will hae to keep on downloading all of those emulators. I also miss my C64.