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Posted: Feb 20th, 2007 at 11:57 am
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http://www.gamedaily.com/images/we-love-retro-games
The Greatest Retro Games of All Time
BurgerTime
G-mode, 1982
Food and video games go together like NASCAR and rednecks. So when Burgertime hit arcades in 1982, it's easy to see why arcade-dwellers fed this game rolls of quarters to help star Chef Peter Pepper construct giant hamburgers while avoiding the likes of Mr Hot Dog, Mr Pickle and Mr Egg -- food enemies that could be temporarily stunned by a dash from the Chef's pepper shaker.
Little-Known Fact: PizzaTime, a sequel to BurgerTime, fell victim to the Great Game Crash of 1983 and never released.
Ms. Pac Man
Namco, 1981
Long before the days of Lara Croft, our video game fantasies relied on Ms. Pac-Man. Aside from her pert bow and luscious red lips, this game plays almost exactly like Pac-Man, except that she gobble pellets faster than her male counterpart. Though history books consider Pac-Man the more successful of the two, we still thank the Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga combo cocktail tables for many late nights at the local watering hole.
Little-Known Fact: Ms. Pac-Man was originally conceived as a game called Crazy Otto, a bootlegged hack of Pac-Man. Play It.
Centipede
Atari, 1980
One of the first female-created arcade games makes the Greatest list for one simply for the hours we spent in the back of the local pizza parlor, spinning the trackball with our grease-and-sauce covered hands. Using the trackball, players must move a garden gnome around the screen and fire shots at a centipede rapidly weaving its way through a patch of mushrooms. Spiders, fleas and scorpions presented extra challenges for our pepperoni-fueled shooting sessions.
Little-Known Fact: In 1983, Milton Bradley released a board game based on Centipede. Play It.
Q Bert
Gottlieb, 1982
This bizarre orange furry critter with a long snout captured its fair share of our loose change back in the '80s. We mastered the art of directing the Q-man from the top of a pyramid of cubes to the bottom, changing colors of each of the cubes while avoiding "Coily" the purple snake, red balls, purple gremlins and sneaky green pineapples that'd revert cubes back to their original colors. If Q*bert didn't make history, it was still funny to see the @!#?@! thought bubble above his head.
Little-Known Fact: Q*bert starred in his own Saturday morning cartoon as a teenaged furball that wore an athletic letterman's jacket. Play It.
Tron
Bally Midway, 1982
Back when pellet-munching, asteroid-blasting games turned endlessly repetitive, a rogue computer program named Tron (looking suspiciously like Bruce "Babylon 5" Boxleitner) packed four distinct gameplay styles into one arcade cabinet. Everyone remembers the Light Cycle demolition derby, but the game also included a shooter level, a tank combat level and a Breakout-inspired level.
Little-Known Fact: Jeff "The Dude" Bridges plays the hapless programmer zapped into the movie's computer universe.
Pong
Atari, 1972
PONG's not the original Ping Pong video game (1958's Tennis for Two takes first honors), but it's undeniably the most famous. Like Asteroids, Pong's simplicity made it extremely accessible to people of all ages, and it has been credited for sparking the first video game boom.
Little-Known Fact: The first Pong arcade machine was tested in two small California bars. Within a day, the game drew so much attention that people lined up outside the bars, waiting for them to open so they could play. Play It.
Galaga
Namco, 1981
Thirty-some-odd years later, and video games still rely on this basic mission -- shoot aliens. Even though Space Invaders (1978) clearly paved the way for this game, we spent hours latched to Galaga, wrenching the joystick left and right to avoid enemy fire while perfecting our button-mashing technique to take out alien ships or to save captured vessels for double the firepower.
Little-Known Fact: Players could activate a bug in the original that halted all enemy firepower. Namco fixed the glitch in later versions of the game.
Zaxxon
Sega, 1982
Today's hyper-realistic flight simulators can't touch this airborne classic. This pseudo-3D game puts players in control of a space shuttle, which must destroy as many enemy targets as possible without running out of fuel (easily replenished by shooting fuel tanks) or getting blasted out of the isometric sky.
Little-Known Fact: Clones of the game were called Jackson and Zaksund.
Asteroids
Atari, 1979
Hop into the way back machine to 1979, the year of the Susan B. Anthony dollar, the nationwide energy crisis and a vector-graphics arcade game named Asteroids. Low-fi graphics and a simple premise -- shoot asteroids to bits and avoid getting blown up in the process -- delivered hours of mesmerizing entertainment.
Little-Known Fact: Going over the game's maximum score (99,000) flipped the score back to zero.
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Posted: Feb 20th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
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Gauntlet
Atari, 1985
Video game dungeon divers can thank the granddaddy of action RPGs -- Gauntlet -- for providing hours of slashing, hacking and flinging magic spells against ill-intentioned ghouls in hopes of collecting sweet loot. Next to the hours we spent playing this game with our pals (up to four players at once), we still hear the narrator's voice when it's time for lunch -- "Wizard needs food, badly!"
Little-Known Fact: Four Gauntlet books were slated for release several years ago, but were shelved after the series' publisher and licenser went out of business.
Pole Position
Namco, 1982
Long before Gran Tourismo or Project Gotham Racing turned TV screens into virtual windshields, pre-pubescent Gen-Xers pumped quarters into this (at the time) state-of-the-art racing simulator. If the muffled voice opening the game with a cry of "Prepare to qualify!" doesn't bring back warm Reagan-era memories, the trackside billboard ads for other classic games will.
Little-Known Fact: The Atari 2600 port of Pole Position was featured in the 1985 boy robot movie D.A.R.Y.L.
Dragons Lair
Cinematronics, 1983
The full-motion art created by former Disney animator Don (The Secret of NIMH) Bluth was a revelation for many gamers -- until they realized the game just played the same pre-made animation loops over and over again, depending on which way the joystick was pushed. In practice, this interactive cartoon proved nearly impossible to master without painful (and expensive) trial and error, leading to many a grisly death for Dirk the Daring.
Little-Known Fact: So amazingly popular that the laserdisc players inside the game cabinets often broke down from overuse.
Star Wars
Atari, 1983
Talk to anyone from 1983, it'd be hard to find anyone who didn't love this movie tie-in. The elaborate sit-down game put flyboys behind the throttle of Luke Skywalker's X-Wing, and required them to battle TIE Fighters and take out the Death Star, basically reenacting the final scene in the original Star Wars film. We can still hear Obi-Wan urging us to "Use the Force."
Little-Known Fact: Urban legend says shooting Darth Vader's ship 30 times during the first level will result in extra lives.
-- Libe Goad
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Posted: Feb 23rd, 2007 at 03:55 pm
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I love these articles; brings back memories of better days...
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Posted: Feb 24th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
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yeah... think Star Wars at the arcade was one of my favorites. I loved the movies and thought the game was so "life like" back then, lol.
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Posted: Mar 1st, 2007 at 03:17 pm
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Haha, life-like!! The graphics were VERY impressive at the time for sure.
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Posted: Nov 28th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
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Man I loved that game.
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The Greatest Retro Games of All Time: The Greatest Retro Games of All Time - (Read 361 Times)
