R-Type [1987]

The first big question that, for me, looms over R-Type [1987] (and many arcade titles of its ilk) is a stupid, but fundamental one: why is there so much dang video game inside this video game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TyDnakXZE Dead Can Dance - Dawn Of The Iconoclasts [1987] R-Type is way longer than it seems to "need" …

OutRun [1986]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDFYjKqg8M0 Koto - Jabdah (Instrumental) [1986] {Down the 5-lane freeway cruises a salmon-pink Ferarri Testarossa Spider at a ludicrous speed. We follow close behind as it bobs and weaves through intermittent traffic and wide curves, squealing its tires for some reason every couple of seconds. In its left seat sits a Dude, and on the …

Tower Of Druaga [1984]

If Tower Of Druaga [1984] came out today, there is little doubt in my mind people would call it a Roguelite. By dint being a somewhat-clunky top-down dungeon crawler where to attack randomly-placed enemies you gotta walk right into them until they die, it feels a lot more Like Rogue [1981] than, say, Spelunky [2008], …

Dragon’s Lair [1983]

So flagrantly sexist in such a basic and obvious way that it frankly makes me feel like a bit of a simpleton to point it out. It's barely even an observation. Princess Daphne spends the whole game as the Platonic ideal of a damsel in distress, occasionally crying out "save me!" Where her predecessor Pauline …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

The screen is enclosed by rainbow flashing that snaps open and shut like a curtain between levels. There's one sound channel but it's overloaded with buzzing and bipping and screaming. There's dozens of robotic enemies closing in on you from all sides, and their colorshifting teletextural bullets travel faster the further they are away from …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

Text version, for legibility and slow connections.Music: Front 242 - U-Men (Instrumental) [1982]

Q*Bert [1982]

It's hard to tell what Q*Bert [1982] is. It's literally at a 45 degree angle to other games. It seems at first like it's going to be a puzzle game, but it never gets off the runway and introduces an actual puzzle. It forgoes even as much narrative contextualization as Pac-Man [1980]. Instead of words, …

Donkey Kong [1981]

(Content warning: Racism.) Donkey Kong [1981] is not only the start of a long-running genre-defining game franchise, but also the creation myth of an industry titan. It becomes overburdened with significance: I had to go and delete from Wikipedia the bizarre and preposterously incorrect claim that Donkey Kong was straight up the first video game …

Galaga [1981]

(Content warning: war.) The first thing that strikes me on booting up Galaga [1981] is that it is a beautiful game. Games I've written on up to this point have been eyesores. (They mostly make a virtue of it.) Even the prior entry in this franchise, Galaxian [1979], a visual tour-de-force, looks pretty drab, predominated …

Protected: Qix [1981]

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Berzerk [1980]

Not too close, not too close. I'm too big for where. Am I a knight? Right through the neck please. Hercules for a moment, then lament the blue brush. There's no room and there's no rooms. Gives green around the gills. KILL IT. The base place intruder. Regular 6-point figures trace the forever now and …

Pac-Man [1980]

Since Space Invaders [1978], the game in the arcade has become more clear: it's all about managing and producing tension. If Space Invaders was a jazzed-up marching band tune, Pac-Man is an Alfred Schnittke all-out orchestral assault. It could not be a starker contrast to the stately Lunar Lander [1979], in its loud poison-frog colors …

Lunar Lander [1979]

Lunar Lander [1979], at first blush, seems an incongruous fit for the arcade. It must be intentional as an attempted marketing strategy for floorspace in the ever-more competitive competitive arcade ecosystem. It's austere, maybe serious, adult, even intellectual. Slow, certainly. Methodical: Twitchy, nick-of-time reactions will get you nowhere here, you need to commit to medium-term …

Space Invaders [1978]

It's more about time than it is space, not that those can ever be fully disentangled. Space only finds actuality in relative positions, and you're not being challenged to judge the length of the gap between your cover shields or navigate a maze. If the titular were not engaged in constant horizontal motion, the game …

Death Race [1976]

(Content warning: Vehicular homicide.) Cliche when it comes to the game is to sensibly chuckle at the quaint moral outrage that made it infamous: all this over some crudely-drawn stick figures! This condescending ahistorical reaction doesn't just sell short humanity's ability to read abstraction and process media, and thus really the medium of video games …

Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we …