On this day in 1985, the original Gauntlet hit arcades. It may not have been the first co-op game, but it was one of the earliest co-op dungeon crawlers.
Readers of a certain age will remember “Asteroids” – the wildly popular arcade game that made its debut in 1979 and again in 1981 with the release of the Atari 2600 home video game console.
In 1988, HAL Laboratory released three NES games, ports of the arcade games Defender II, Millipede, and Joust. One doesn’t associate HAL Laboratory with arca...
The spaceship and the floating asteroids are all simple forms of a few white lines set on a background of black, but the thrilling gameplay was enough to get players to spend quarter after quarter in 1981 alone, Americans put 20 billion quarters through arcade games, playing 75,000 man-hours on them.Two aspects of Asteroids its wraparound screen and the way asteroids are destroyed helped make the game a stunning success.
It’s there right in front of you every time you use GPS navigation: a triangle-shaped cursor representing your location on a GPS display, moving where you move. But did you know the cursor originates from Atari’s 1979 Asteroids arcade game? Here’s how it came to be.
Last modified on Thu 27 May 2021 05.31 EDT
15. Maniac Mansion (1987,
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The 1980s were crammed with wonderful adventure games â The Hobbit, Kingâs Quest, Leather Goddesses of Phobos â but the first point-and-click title to be designed by comic genius Ron Gilbert using the SCUMM scripting language is the classic that busted out of the genre ghetto. Filled with great jokes and B-movie cliches, the game made brilliant use of its accessible and intuitive interface, as well as seamlessly integrating cutscenes and non-sequential puzzles. The start of a weird and special era.
Maniac Mansion. Photograph: Lucasfilm Games
14. Jet Set Willy (1984, Software Projects)
Among the formative home computer platformers of the 80s â the likes of Lode Runner, Chuckie Egg and Pitfall â Jet Set Willy stands out for its surreal sense of humour and genuinely disturbing atmosphere. Like that other 8-bit pioneer Jeff Minter, Matthew Smith created his own idiosyncratic dream worlds with distinct rules and twisted logic, and as you battled through the bizarre house with its haunted wine cellars, priest holes and watchtowers, you had to contend with truly monstrous visions, from spinning razor blades to giant demon heads. Smith only made a handful of games, but with Jet Set Willy, he combined Monty Python and Hammer House of Horror to unforgettable effect.