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Aracade Classics - an introduction to retro gaming - Part Two

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In part one of this continuing series, we took a brief look at some of the ways you can get access to retro games without having a museum of old arcade machines filling up your garage. In this next part, you'll get an idea of the kind of things that will be covered in future articles and the basic position that this series takes with regard to what's good and what's not.

There are hundreds of old arcade titles and life is short

The emphasis of this series is always going to be on the arcade titles that 'did the business'. Sure, there are many obscure titles that I could wax lyrical about, but chances are most people would not enjoy them. That doesn't mean I won't discuss some of the less popular titles, but they are going to get less space, and they are going to have to wait their turn.

In determining what to cover first I've decided to take as my guide the 'crowd' factor: if a machine could gather a crowd, it's worth a look. If it spent it's entire life being ignored, then I'm ignoring it too - for now.

So what's in and what's not?

Below is the list of titles, in order, that I'm going to cover in forthcoming chapters. If you never read these articles again, if you find something in this list that you haven't played and then give it a try, then at least you know there was once a time when people loved that game - that once upon a time they were as excited by it, or more so, than people are about the latest Xbox 360 release, or stuff that isn't out yet on Playstation 3.

On the other hand, there are some games that did draw a crowd I'm going to say less about, either because they've been hyped to death in the past, or because I hate them. I'll let you know when this happens so you can go off, try that game and remind yourself that Lupine was wrong again, or something.

  • Space Invaders
  • Cosmic Gorilla
  • Scramble
  • Galaxians
  • Asteroids
  • Battlezone
  • Pac Man
  • Defender
  • Dig Dug
  • Pole Position
  • Missile Command
  • Kung Fu Master
  • Star Wars
  • Tempest
  • Karate Champ
  • R-Type
  • Mr. Do
  • Double Dragon
  • Super Sprint
  • Gauntlet
  • Tron
  • Dragon's Lair

You will notice there are no sequels, no mk II versions, no derivatives and no deluxes on my initial list of 'really important games'. For this reason Galaga is out and Galaxians is in. Galaga cheats too much anyway.

It's pretty much a design feature that every sequel game was tuned to improve its cash making capability. This usually means that they are much harder to play for any length of time. Put another way, they cheat. Aracade owners were never happy when you could play all day for one credit and they wanted machines that quickly became absolutely unbeatable. While this was usually the design goal of all arcade machines, the early greats all had in common a shocking failure to achieve that goal - and were much more fun because of it.

The possibility that you could learn to 'clock' a machine: that you could develop the skill to genuinely and complete beat the game and play until the owner pulled the plug - that was a powerful incentive to learn to play those early machines. The people who had mastered game-play earned a certain degree of respect in the arcade. Being the envy of your peers always matters, especially to young kids and teenagers like the ones that filled arcades back then before they were turned into over 18 only gambling dens.

Each one of the games in the list will receive their own part in this series. However, before I get started on them I'll be devoting a section to some of the really early arcade games, and looking briefly at the history and evolution that led to the establishment of the classic arcade genres. OK, I admit I lied about not covering obscure games that nobody cares about.