Arcade game history
The timeline of classic retro video arcade games
Immerse yourself in retro heaven and take a journey through the History of arcade video games. Starting from the basic beyond belief computer space up to the multicoloured dazzling 3d games of today. Although this is not a complete list, it chronicles the biggest, most successful and most influential arcade releases in an arcade game timeline that will bring back many memories.
Computer Space although not the first, was was the first widely available video and arcade game. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney who later founded Atari. Computer space was the worlds first commercially sold coin operated video arcade game and was amazingly simplistic. it wasnt however a success. The gameplay was far too complicated. It was popular on college campuses, but not in the other bars and venues as it didnt have the easy to grasp gameplay needed for arcade machines to be successful. Nolan Bushnell recruited Alan Alcorn to create the sensation that was.
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Pong unlike Computer Space was very succesful and is widely recognised as the most important event in arcade game history spawning the video game industry that we now know. The game involves batting your ball using a vertical bar graphic as your bat and a dot as the ball to the computer or other player (player 2) until someone misses. The story goes that the first pong machine was placed in a local gas station. When Nolan returned the arcade machine was so full of money it wouldnt work any more!
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Released in 1974 by an Atari owned company Kee Games. Tank was the first video game which utilised those newfangled ROM chips to store graphic data. It consisted of guiding your tank through a maze attempting to shoot the other tank but the difference was the graphics stored on the rom chips were actually recognizable as tanks. It was however still on a monochrome screen. It spawned two sequels, tank II and tank III originally enough.
Yeehaa. Gunfight was released by Midway, another twoplayer game based on the popular Western movies. The first of many Japanese titles released in America. It was unusual in the way you needed two joysticks to control the cowboy, one controlled the guy and the second pointed his gun. Put your hands up sucker.
Night Driver released in 1976 was the first 3d racing game with a first person perspective. Previously all racing games had been seen as if looking from above such as the popular Atari game Sprint 2 also released in this year. The night theme of the game was chosen because the hardware couldnt cope with showing background scenery or images. Night driver started the 3d concept, then followed by overlaying sprites on the background. It then evolved into the true 3d which continues in driving games up to today.
Breakout the evolution of the pong game, involving a bat and ball knocking out the blocks in a wall was hugely successful and was designed by former Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. A total of 11,000 units were produced.
Heres where we get all misty eyed and weak legged..(Well i do anyways). The classic Space Invaders was the first mega blockbuster of a video arcade game and wasnt programmed by Atari! It was a groundbreaking game that No longer restriced arcade machines to dedicated arcades and bars, it brought arcade video games into the mainstream. Machines were placed in restaurants, corner stores, railway stations. It spawned hundreds of home versions and dedicated console and hand held versions.
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Football was the first true video sports game. Created by Dave Stubben. Its development began as a game called X's and O's designed in 1973. This project was put on ice for years until technology improved and Atari broke away from the limits of a single screen game display. Football introduced a scrolling screen, this allowed games to take place on playfields larger than the monitor screen in the arcade. Atari capitalised on their scrolling video game displays it was also the first arcade video game to feature the 'track ball' input device.
Asteroids was the Atari answer to Space Invaders. The game was designed by a guy called Ed Logg utilizing vector graphics later used to produce the home arcade video machine vectrex. This vector display was capable of moving objects very fast and smoothly across the screen, The graphics were also much smoother than the crude 'pixel graphics' elsewhere. Combined with great game play it became the biggest selling of game of its time.
Asteroids and Lunar Lander (Atari, 1980) were the predecessors Gravitar (Atari) and many modern rotating ship shoot em up games.
Battlezone was released in 1980 and featured a 3D interactive battlefield rather than just for effect. It featured an amazing 2 colors vector display. The USA Armed Forces were so impressed by Battlezone that they commissioned Atari to build a modified and upgraded version for use in army tank training.
The classic and awesome Defender arcade game was designed by Eugene Jarvis and besides pacman was the highest grossing arcade game of all time making over a billion dollars. Originally deemed too difficult to play to ever be a success it went on to become a deserved classic. It was the first video game to feature a sideways scrolling artificial world where game events could occur outside the screen view viewed by the player and amazed everyone with its superb fast moving graphics and color effects.
[Defender Information]
Another instant classic, PacMan was designed by Toru Iwatani and licensed from Namco. It was based on an ancient Japanese folk tale. The game consisted of controlling the pacman character which was moving inside a maze eating dots and to avoid the ghosts which chased and tried to kill pacman. The game was a huge hit all over the world. Also spawning many sequels, conversions, a cartoon and hit song.
Donkey Kong was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It used the same hardware as an older video game called 'Radarscope'. The idea of the game was to control a jumpman character which tried to rescue a girl from a giant ape. Later on the jumpman was named Mario, one of the most famous and succesful game characters invented.
Centipede was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. It was the first arcade game to be co-designed by a woman. Its colorful graphics and good game play made Centipede the first video game to be more popular with women than with men.
Tempest was designed by Dave Theurer. It was the first Atari game to utilize a multicolor vector display. It had beautiful 3D wireframe graphics and it became an instant hit.
Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.
Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.
Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.
Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.
Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.
Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.
In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.
I, Robot was the first game to feature 3-D polygon graphics. Only a thousand I, Robots were ever produced.
Xevious had scrolling terrain background with both ground and air targets. Xevious became the basis of new generation of scrolling shoot'em'up games.
Gauntlet was an absolute classic of a game designed by Ed Logg. It had good graphics and great game-play with up to 4 simultaneous players.
Space Harrier was a game that blew me away when i first saw it and had me spending many hours in the sit down version. The game had amazing fast scaling sprite based 3D graphics with stereo diginal sound. It marked the beginning of transformation of established genres toward three-dimensionality and more high-powered arcade hardware.
The game was designed by Sega's legendary game designer Yu Suzuki, who is also responsible for Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Hang-On and Shen-Mue.
Cinematronics Warrior was the first one-on-one fighting video game and Data East's Karate Champ (1984) had already introduced the "side view" perspective, the genre of fighting game practically didn't exist until Capcom released Street Fighter II. It had many truly different charachters to choose from and good game play. SFII started the new "golden age" of arcades. SFII was also converted to many home systems and the Super Nintendo version alone sold more than 15 million copies.
The success of SFII procudes many competitors e.g. the Mortal Kombat, Killing Instinct and Virtua Fighter series. SFII has numerous sequels and even a movie was made out of it. Fighting games started the new golden age of arcade games.
Virtua Racing started the new age of fast polygon racing games and high-powered multi-player simulators. Virtua Racing had good gameplay and force-feedback steering with the most realistic graphics up to its date.
Virtua Fighter brought fast 3D polygon graphics to fighting games and changed the fighting game industry. Nowadays practically all fighting games have 3D graphics.
Daytona was one of the first racing games to feature fast texture mapped and shaded 3D polygon graphics. Its great graphics, game-play and team-play option made it a huge hit.
