This is one of the earliest arcade games released and it was based on a beautifully simple but extremely addictive idea. Some of the best arcade games were incredibly straightforward and Barricade has popped up again and again over the years with various alterations but the same gameplay. If you’ve ever played Snake on your Nokia mobile phone then you know what Barricade is all about.

You have a screen with two ever growing lines of blocks. You can change the direction of your blocks but if you run out of space then you have lost. While the new mobile phone versions are designed for a single player the original arcade game was a multiplayer affair. Either two or four players would face off and one would emerge the winner as the others got themselves blocked in and knocked out.

The game is actually much more fun as a multiplayer experience. The fact you can sneakily try to cut across your opponent and reduce their potential space to grow into makes it a real battle. With four players this is chaotic stuff and the competitive angle gets people engaged. If you manage to cut off a competitor and box them into a corner it is hugely satisfying and there is nothing they can do as the space fills and they inevitably crash. You just have to be careful not to crash yourself when you get distracted by gloating.

This was first released way back in 1976 by a company called RamTek. The stand alone arcade cabinets had four sets of basic controls. Each had four buttons, one for up, one for down, one for left and one for right. There is no denying that this game looks seriously dated. It is amazing to think how basic the first arcade games were and how far they have come.

Barricade was released in an ugly wood effect cabinet with a yellow surround to the horribly bevelled screen. The action itself was in black and white and it featured very basic mono sound. The graphics could not have been simpler with rows of blocks appearing as arrows to show the direction, a border for the level and some simple text introduction along with a winning announcement.

Barricade was forced to change its name after Gremlin sued. They released a game called Blockade the same year. It was exactly the same game but limited to two players and released in a more attractive cabinet with green graphics onscreen showing a line with an arrow at the end. Barricade became Brickyard which was actually pretty weird because Blockade looked more like brick walls.

Gremlin followed it up quickly with Comotion which was a four player version and it came out as a cocktail cabinet too. I’ve only ever played Barricade but by all accounts it is a straight rip off. The following year Gremlin released Hustle which added targets to pick up on each level, some of them mystery targets which only revealed a point bonus when you ate them. Hustle was pretty close to Snake and it offered a single player mode as well.