I played all those arcade games you mentioned back then except I don't remember Front Line as a kid (I did play it later on the collections). It's weird that I don't remember that one, though, because my arcades usualy had every other Taito game out there at the time.
My 1980s Gaming: 1982
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 On 09/14/2019 at 07:19 PM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
1982 was the heart of the golden age of video games, in my opinion. Flynn’s Arcade in the movie Tron, that came out this year, gives a good view of what an 80s arcade was like.
I was playing Dig Dug, Donkey Kong Jr, Front Line, Joust, Moon Patrol, Q*Bert, and Time Pilot. Front Line was my favorite. In it you played as a soldier on the ground in a vertically scrolling environment. I was very excited when it came to Colecovision.
At home on Atari I played Star Raiders, Barnstorming, Chopper Command and Pitfall. Star Raiders is the most memorable for me. I played it in the attic of my house where I had set up a photography darkroom. It was dusty and unfurnished, containing mostly stuff in storage, but I loved it. There was one window I could look out of as I tried to figure out how to hunt down all the aliens and defend my space stations. I replayed it recently on an Atari Flashback collection. I had to read the manual to figure it out again. Remember manuals? Sometimes back then you really needed them.
Back then there was this divide between the arcade games and home console games. The arecade machines were more powerful and gave you the best graphics and gameplay. The home consoles tried to port these games but usually with much reduced quality. The Colecovision was inteded to solve this and came out in '82. One of my friends in the neighborhood got it, so all us kids in the neighborhood would go over there to play. Colecovision did the best job with arcade ports. Games like Donkey Kong and Front Line stunned me with how close they were to the arcade.
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