Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

UA2: 1980s Arcade Games

Today's topic was requested by dwmalone, and my 10 minutes starts... now.

The 1980s was the heyday of the coin-operated arcade game. Sure, they'd started to emerge during the 1970s, but two bats and a square ball that went "boop" could only be taken so far. In the 1980s games became better and, well, more playable, to be honest, and ruthless competition between manufacturers led to the best 1980s arcade games being just about the most fun you can have by grasping a joystick and pushing all the right buttons, as it were.

The classic years were the early 1980s. Pac Man, which apparently wasn't actually inspired by a pizza with a slice taken out, was a social phenomenon despite having what today would be considered very simple gameplay - just up, down, left, right, eat the dots and avoid the ghosts. Other games such as Defender (shoot everything that moves, and don't let the unfortunate humanoids plummet to earth and splat or be converted into those annoying bleepy mutants) had their afficionados, while other connosieurs of the period will talk about the vector graphic classics such as Asteroids (shoot everything that moves, especially the fast-moving tiny UFO that went bweeweeweewee), Star Wars (shoot everything) and Tempest (uh... what was that about, anyway?) as being the foremost games of the period.

Pac Man, of course, went on to a long and illustrious career. Donkey Kong (which Wikipedia will tell you does not contain any actual donkeys) launched the career of a plumber named Mario. But other characters from 80s video games are not so famous today. What happened, for instance, to the little man from Berserk? Did Blue Wizard go any further in his career after Gauntlet, or does he still need food badly? I guess we'll never know. What actually happened to launch the war that Missile Command put you in charge of? History does not tell.

As the 80s wore on, video games started becoming a bit more like pinball, in that what people needed to get them playing were gimmicks. People were now used to zapping aliens, and what they wanted was... well, to zap more aliens, but higher-resolution aliens. They wanted the aliens to explode in stereo. This culminated in games like Space Harrier, a ride-on game which tipped up and down with stereo sound and all kinds of exciting things, not least a semi-comprehensible sampled voice that was maybe slightly more understandable than the famous BBC Micro speech box which sampled newsreader Kenneth Kendall.

So people zapped and blasted their way through the 80s. Billions of space invaders got zapped, untold gazillions of dots were, well, eaten by Pac-Man, Defender players generally failed to defend, but then towards the end of the decade came the first major threat to arcade games - home games consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. These let people play at home without the hassle of substandard ports to home computers or loading from tape. So the arcade game slowly started to die off, and the next big revolution was launched in gaming - home gaming and the console revolution went on to change the world.

Time up - 10 minutes precisely.

Posted by mpk at January 1, 2007 7:05 PM | TrackBack