You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
The video game console wars of the early 80s were reminiscent of the video format wars a few years earlier, where VHS won the popularity contest hands-down, yet Betamax still boasted a better quality. In this arena, the Atari 2600 played the role of the VHS tape and underdog challenger was Mattel’s Intellivision, a fine little video game system that never quite captured the same spotlight, but will forever be remembered by many from that era as the superior system.
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If you only had the name to go by, one might assume that a video game called Joust would be a mere pitting of two knights, sitting proudly atop their respective trusty steeds, engaging in an effort to successfully skewer their opponent - a reasonable assumption, but one that completely undersells this quirky and enormously popular endeavor. No, Joust, released by Williams Electronics in 1982, offered a much more entertaining challenge, one that focused on a delightfully strange competitive arena.
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You would thing that after all these years, villains would finally realize that kidnapping the girl never leads to anything but a truckload of trouble. But luckily for gamers, these sinister scoundrels have proven to be slow-learners, and a seemingly endless supply of damsel in distress games has continuously dotted the arcade landscape. Borrowing on a premise from the Bruce Lee film, Game of Death, Kung Fu Master placed our hero in a multi-leveled palace, with each floor upping the adversarial ante.
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Would you like to play a game? Back in the 80s the Cold War was still a very real threat so naturally, the whole global thermonuclear annihilation thing made a fantastic subject for arcade games. Missile Command, released by Atari in 1980, took advantage of the U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. standoff to create a virtual world where missiles were indeed flying fast and furious and only you and your quarters could save the country.
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There once was a playing card company in Japan that decided to get their feet wet in the world of arcade games. One day, they introduced an addicting little video game about a plumber battling with an ape and within five years, the name Nintendo would become synonymous with home video game systems. Perhaps every family in America didn’t have a deck of Nintendo playing cards in their living room but millions would eventually have one of their Game Systems. And if you were a kid during this era, it was simply the only game to have. Let's take a look at the history of this iconic toy.
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For arcade aficionados in the 80s, eager to earn their commando credentials, Operation Wolf offered you the opportunity to put your shooting skills to the test, as you faced formidable enemies and protected the innocent in this action-packed adventure game.
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It’s a yellow circle with a wedge missing that goes around a maze eating dots and dodging ghosts. That, in a nutshell, is the most iconic, legendary video game ever to hit the arcade. Ask anyone with access to electricity to identify Pac-Man and they’ll get it right 99.999% of the time. Created by Toru Iwatani of Namco in 1980, the game had an inauspicious release in Japan but enjoyed a far better welcome in the United States (where it was distributed by Midway). Overtaking the popular Space Invader, Pac-Man became a staple of arcades across the country and spawned a veritable media empire that is still thriving today.
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Space hero, cowboy, mythic warrior...all pale in comparison to Paperboy, the arcade game that allowed the player to work his own virtual paper route. It's a game that might very well have been boring if it wasn't for the fact that the main character wielded newspapers like lethal weapons, just perfect for launching through a [...]
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Since the advent of arcade games, those that offered a chance at testing your racing skills have always remained a popular attraction. In the early days, the graphics left much to be desired, as you guided your dot through a track of dots without a fellow racer to be found. This all changed in 1983, with the introduction of Namco's Pole Position. Offering state-of-the-art graphics and realistic controls, the game offered a much more realistic racing experience - and aspiring drivers lined up in droves.
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A rocket ship on a course for danger and destruction, Scramble was an action game lover's dream come true. There were no princesses or hostages to rescue, no treasures to recover, no object other than the entire destruction of the "Scramble Defense Systems" and the base they protected. Let's look back at the memorable arcade game, released by Stern Electronics in 1981.
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