I was a teenager when the video game arcades were big in the 80s. I rode my bike everywhere and arcades were all around me. I would go to a pizza shop, a hotel lobby, a department store or the mall and find them. It was fun to go to different places because they often had different machines. I got to play a lot of different games, so I'm breaking this blog up into three parts. This first one is the years 1978-1981.
I was in middle school for these years. At home I had an Atari 2600 and my friend next door had an Intellivision. You'd think that having home consoles would stop us kids from going to the arcades, but at the time, the arcades were king. These were the places that had the systems with the best graphics, the biggest sound and the most exciting gameplay. It was just a situation of the technology. Back then you could do much more with a board dedicated to one game than a home system designed to play many. That's not to say home consoles were bad, just different, and us kids always looked to the arcades to see what was coming next to console, albiet in reduced form. These were my favorites by year.
1978
This was ground zero for video game arcades' massive popularlity. The hit Space Invaders started it all. Almost every arcade I went to had one of these.
Look at that, not even a joystick on that cabinet! Ever wonder about that Bowie song from '72 "Moonage Daydream" (used recently in Guardians of the Galaxy film) and the line "I'm the space invader". I wonder if the devs at Taito heard that and named the game after it. Probably just a coincidence, but since I noticed it in the song, I always think of the arcade machine that came out six years later.
1979
This year was great for Galaxian and Asteroids, two big hits, but I always had fondest memories of Lunar Lander, the first vector graphics game.
Look at that throttle controller! Nothing else had that. Interesting that you could put more quarters in for more fuel to keep playing - kind of like continues. Definitely unique. I played this at my big mall arcade, but it wasn't as common as Asteroids or Galaxian elsewhere, so I played it less.
1980
This year saw a lot of big hits like Pac-Man, Missile Command, Battlezone and Rally-X, but I spent a lot of time with Berzerk, probably because it was one of the first games to use speech synthesis. Doing this back then was really expensive so very few games had it.
I can still hear the voices of the robots saying "Got the humanoid, got the intruder". That game kind of scared me. The walls of the maze were electrified and your character would sizzle and die if he touched them. Yikes!
1981
This was the year of Donkey Kong. Others were: Scramble, Tempest, Frogger and Defender. But my favorite was Galaga, the sequel to Galaxian. This was like the next evolution of Space Invaders. The enemies fly down at you in more complicated patterns and there are many different types of alien craft. Some try to capture your ship. If you let them, you can then recapture it and play with two ships at once with double the firepower. Genius! Also there were challenge levels where you just shoot at the swarming ships for bonus points. If that wasn't all, it was colorful. Blue, green, red and yellow ships make the screen a psychedelic trip.
These old cabinets did a good job of isolating you just enough so you felt you were immersed in the game and helped to block out as much stray light as possible to reduce glare. Look how simple the interface is on that one above: a joystick and a button. What more do you need? Right?
Part II to follow, 1982-1985.
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