This was one of the greatest games ever developed and it ate countless hours and days of my time. Double Dragon was a side scrolling beat ‘em up with plenty of violent action. You could team up with a friend in the co-operative mode and punch, slash and batter your way through an army of evil thugs to rescue your girlfriend. Originally released by Taito in 1987 Double Dragon was hugely popular and spawned two arcade sequels and loads of home console ports.

 

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Altered Beast was an awesomely weird game from Sega which featured side-scrolling beat ‘em up action and some platform game-play. It was first released into the arcades in 1988 and put players in control of a shape shifting centurion hero raised from the dead and charged with rescuing Athena. You had to fight armies of nasty creatures across five large levels to face down the evil magician and complete the game.

 

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Chase H.Q. was a great arcade game which built on Out Run to introduce another layer of game-play and vastly improved visuals. This time you took on the role of a cop driving a Porsche 928 and along with your partner you were tasked with bringing down bad guys in high speed pursuits. Chase H.Q. was even more like Miami Vice than Out Run had been and the poster even featured a guy wearing a white jacket with rolled up sleeves and a T-shirt beneath, the height of eighties fashion.

 

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There was a time in the eighties when nothing was cooler than the Ferrari Testarossa and people wore pastel colors and t-shirts with suits. Miami Vice was the most popular thing on television and the game that seemed to capture the whole mood was the driving classic Out Run.

 

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Stern Electronics were not a particularly well known arcade game company but in 1980 they developed and published the smash hit oddity Berzerk. This completely bizarre game was incredibly simple but then many of the best games are. It certainly provided a challenge with a staggering total of 64,000 levels to try and beat.

 

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Spy Hunter was developed and published by Bally Midway in 1983 and it proved to be a major success for the company. Playing as a spy you had to drive a heavily armed car, and sometimes a boat, destroying various enemy vehicles and speeding along the vertically scrolling roads. The idea was to make it as far as possible wasting as many bad guys as you could along the way.

 

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Moon Patrol was released in 1982 and challenged the player to drive a moon buggy across the surface of the moon avoiding craters, alien landmines, rocks and even missiles fired from the UFO’s overhead. Armed with a short range cannon and an anti-aircraft gun you had to navigate the level as quickly as possible to reach the next checkpoint and extend the game.

 

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Ms. Pac-Man was released in 1981 and was the first in a long line of sequels and rip-offs that squeezed every last bit of cash out of the Pac-Man franchise. It featured Ms. Pac-Man who looked an awful lot like Pac-Man in drag with lipstick and a bow on his head. The game-play was much the same as the original but with a few additions and some new mazes.

 

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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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Dig Dug was developed by Namco and distributed in the US by Atari back in 1982. It was a nice wee game which took the Pac-Man formula and gave it a new twist. Players were cast in the role of Dig Dug, who looked like a man in a spacesuit but instead of space you were heading underground to clear away monsters and collect vegetables.

 

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