January 2009

In 1983 the home video game market was becoming saturated with low quality titles which would soon provoke a massive crash in the US industry. While this was going on the arcades were still doing big business and although they may have been reaching their peak the industry still looked healthy. 1983 was the year that Nintendo developed and published the first game in a series which was to revitalise the home console industry a few years later, Mario Bros.

 

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Tron was released back in 1982 and hailed as a stunning vision of the future which attracted gamers in their droves. It was an unusual release in the world of arcade games for a number of reasons but most obviously because it was the first movie and game tie-in. The movie was released by Walt Disney as a sci-fi epic which pioneered the use of computer graphics in film and it had been inspired by the growing popularity of video games in general. While the movie was only moderately successful and received very mixed reviews the arcade game was a smash hit.

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While there can be no doubt that arcade video games have declined in popularity over the years they are still big business in some parts of the world and developers are still working on releasing new titles. In video arcades are still extremely popular and several new games are released every year from big developers like Sega, Taito, Konami and Namco.

In Japan they hold several annual trade shows to highlight new titles. First up this year is the AOU Amusement Expo which will be held in Tokyo on the 20th and 21st of February. Then there’s the Amusement Machine Show which is put on by JAMMA (the Japanese Amusement Machine Manufacturers Association) and held in September. Both shows are primarily for the trade but they include days where they open to the public and large crowds flood in to try out the latest machines.

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Centipede was an odd game released into arcades by Atari in 1980. It was a colourful high speed shooter which challenged the player to destroy advancing centipedes as they snaked down the screen with additional challenges provided by various other creepy crawlies. Equally popular with men and women it proved to be fairly successful and spawned the usual array of home console versions, knock offs and sequels.

 

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Recently, I got a chance to enjoy a few of my favorite arcade games from my pre-teen years in the early 90's. While the retro cabs of the 70's and 80's get the lion's share of the gaming nostalgia around these parts, 1990-93 was a miniature Golden Age for the arcade.

The Merch Campaign Beat-Em-Up

Probably the most prevalent early 90's arcade genre is the Beat-Em-Up, a semi-3D side scroller in the tradition of Streets of Rage. By 1991 a tend in the genre set in and made some of the best, most-played games in the arcade. Superhero games were the standard here. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set the format back in 1989 with four-player cooperative combat featuring the cartoon's famous fighting reptiles. Captain America and the Avengers brought the first comic book tie-in, augmenting the genre with special projectile moves and flying shooter levels to break up the punch-and-kick stages. For many gamers, myself included,

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They don’t make them like this anymore. Defender came out in 1980 and was developed by Williams Electronics. It was widely expected to fail because the complex controls included a joystick for up and down and no fewer than five buttons! Certain vociferous industry execs predicted commercial failure but then they also predicted that Pac-Man would flop so they obviously had no idea what they were talking about.

 

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Galaxian was released in 1979 by Namco and built upon the success enjoyed by Space Invaders. The game represented a step forward in terms of color graphics and visual effects and it featured similar game-play to Space Invaders with a couple of simple additions.

 

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Shooter games were always popular in the arcades but one of the first I remember to feature an actual replica gun as the control method for the cabinet and a first-person perspective on the action was the classic Operation Wolf. Released by Taito in 1987 this was an immersive war experience as the player took on an enemy army single handed in true Rambo style and tried to save as many hostages as possible for bonus score.

 

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