BarricadeThis 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.

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When a game company decides to adapt a hit arcade game for a home console, is preservation really the point? A lot of big box games are ill-fitting for personal systems for one reason or another, so they never make it to the more lucrative world of console gaming. Others get a few minor (or major) tweaks to make them fit in the home market. For a long time this meant toning down the graphics, programming the D-pad to mimic the sluggishness of an arcade joystick and fiddling with the difficulty so it would encourage continued play from enjoyment and not so much from sheer challenge. Most arcade-to-console ports, especially in the heyday of arcade boxes, were low-rent versions of the real thing. The following are ports that actually managed to do it right.

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Tube-It screenshot from vgmuseum.comSome of the best arcade games ever created were simple puzzle games like Tube-It. The name may be unfortunate but it is at least fairly descriptive because the game was all about fitting tubes together. It was originally released by Taito in 1993 but they only brought it out in the arcades in Japan and it was called Cachat. It soon popped up on PCs across the world and made into lots of those classic arcade game collections. It is still an addictive wee title with a nice design.


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WWF Superstars screenshot from vgmuseum.comIn the late 1980’s the World Wrestling Federation was enjoying a golden age. Everyone was obsessed with muscle bound, spandex clad weirdos throwing each other round the ring. Wrestlemania started in 1985 and for the next few years the sport of wrestling would remain in the limelight with Hulk Hogan as the biggest star. In 1989 Technos Japan Corporation saw the potential for a videogame conversion of the license and so WWF Superstars hit the arcades.

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Chiller screenshotCould Chiller actually have been the most heinous violent video game of all time? Well the censors certainly thought so when it was released into arcades back in 1986 as a light gun game with a strong horror theme. It was banned in the UK for being gratuitously violent with no redeeming features. That’s probably a fair assessment to be honest.

The light gun was the height of cool in the arcade for a while and spawned a series of dumb “shoot everything on the screen” games. Chiller fits nicely into the category somewhere near the bottom. The basic idea was to shoot and maim as many of the onscreen vermin and human prisoners as possible within the time limit. This was the gaming equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel as all the targets were locked up in mild S&M gear in some kind of torture chamber. Stuck in vices and chains you were free to shoot their limbs off.

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RoboCop screenshot from vgmuseum.comRoboCop was a huge movie on release back in 1987. The unfortunate patrolman Alex Murphy was brutally gunned down by a gang of psychotic criminals. They filled him so full of lead that there wasn’t much left and his barely living remains were turned over to an evil corporation. Omni Consumer Products decided there was life in old Murphy yet and they pasted his remaining organs into a titanium skeleton, wiped his memory and sent him onto the streets to clean up the trash.

The arcade game was inevitable and sure enough it came along in 1988. Developed by Ocean Software and released by Data East this was a popular title in the arcades. It was a fairly typical side scrolling 2D beat ‘em up. You played as RoboCop and had to battle your way through the streets of Detroit wasting thugs, muggers and maniacs. Many of the enemies would take hostages and try to use them as human shields and the boss battles featured the inevitable showdown with the ED-209.

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Space shooters dominated the arcades after Space Invaders created thousands of addicts in 1978. The next few years saw a multitude of variations on the theme adding new mechanics and improving on the graphics and one such title released in 1980 was Phoenix. You piloted a spaceship and had to destroy alien birds that flew around the screen in formation. The big difference with Phoenix was the introduction of boss levels where you had to destroy an alien piloted mothership.

 

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Gauntlet was huge in the arcades. It was the original hack and slash RPG which drew on the fantasy worlds of tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons. Players had to fight their way through a series of dungeon chambers fighting off ghosts, demons, sorcerers and thieves not to mention death himself. The game was open ended so you could play as long as you liked and with up to four players teaming up to slaughter monsters it was incredibly popular.

 

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Pit Fighter was a precursor to the Mortal Kombat series and it came out in 1990. It was a brutal fight to the death, a chaotic celebration of violence featuring a choice of three characters portrayed by real actors, a host of enemies and the prospect of three way battles.

It was the first game to utilise blue screen technology in order to use real digitized actors in the game. They obviously captured multiple shots of the actors pulling specific poses and then slapped them together to give the rough impression of animation. This technique was later used to much greater effect in Mortal Kombat.

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