I have M.A.M.E. installed on my gaming computer, and writing this post about classic arcade games and how they lead to the games I play today just sent me on a huge trip into the past… literally. I just played through the first three levels of Cadillacs & Dinosaurs….
I am lucky enough to have grown up through the rise and the fall of the arcade. I lost quarters at the bowling alley, in the lobby of the local Ramada Inn, at the King’s department store when my mom took me shopping, at the pizza place on the corner. If I had quarters, I was spending them. I played a lot of arcade games, but when I look back at them all, there’s only a few that I think really inspired me.
Xevious
There was no question at all that Xevious would be at the top of the list. This was always my warm-up game that I’d play for awhile to get into that Zen state where the rest of the arcade fades away, and you’re focused on the screen, bombs arcing away for ground targets, lasers shooting the flyers, alert for the patterns…
I can’t get into that state anymore, and I don’t do well when I try to play this game now. I could really use that ability to shut out the world, sometimes.
Xevious is a vertical scrolling shooter. Eventually this genre would morph into what we call bullet hell shooters today, but Xevious never had that many bullets. It was all about memorizing patterns.
Years later, when I had a son and he’d grown to the right age, we played another vertical scrolling shooter, Radiant Silvergun, on the Sega Saturn. I think I got it from the local Japanese bookstore/grocery store, Kinokuniya. Anyway, it was entirely in Japanese, and we had to go online to figure out what the plot was. This one was a true bullet hell, and you couldn’t just shoot what you wanted. Key to winning the game was to build up chains of shooting enemies of a given color to build up a chain bonus, which would power up your most powerful weapons.
More recently, I discovered Viewpoint, and I don’t remember how. I had it on the PSX emulator, had a lot of fun, but decided, as one does, that I needed the physical disk. Which I now have.
Viewpoint is more akin to an early isometric, 3D-ish arcade game called “Zaxxon”, than Xevious, actually, and I was never good at Zaxxon in the arcades. I wasn’t really good at Viewpoint, either, but I decided I would figure it out and managed to get the patterns enough to make it quite far.
The second problem with playing arcade style games these days is my hands start to hurt.
Still, I’ve always had a soft spot for these scrolling shooters. Always something new coming at you, but you’re really just waiting to see what the next screen-filling boss is going to do to you 😉
Gauntlet
Yes, I just finished playing a bit of Gauntlet online. It’s addicting. Once, my boyfriend and I, while visiting New Hampshire, went up to the last remaining Funspot in Laconia. I bought a bunch of quarters and we played to finally see the end of the game, something I was never good enough to do back in the day.
We got super deep until we just gave up and let it run itself down, warrior and wizard gasping for food. I looked it up. Gauntlet has no end, at least not the original one.
The lure of Gauntlet was strong. The gameplay was simple — to start, anyway. Monsters are coming at you. Wade into them with whatever weapon you had. Find their source, kill it, and move on. When Death comes for you… either zap them with a magic potion or flee. And always, always, save keys to open doors and never shoot the food.
This might have been the first arcade game I played that let you select different characters. I’m certain it wasn’t the first one that did that, just the first one I happened to play. If someone was playing it, you could just join in.
I’ve thought Rogue led most directly to Diablo, but it took a detour through Gauntlet to get there. Few games have done hacking and slashing better than Gauntlet. I’ve played the sequels, including the relatively recent reimagining, but nothing beats the original. The later levels are truly twisted, but you’ll have to take a cup of quarters to the local Funspot to find out.
Star Wars
Star Wars was the first movie I remember really geeking out over. I saw it a bunch of times the summer it came out. I got my uncle to buy me the double vinyl record and played it until it got too scratchy to play. My cousin had the book about it you could buy at the theater.
There was never a chance I wasn’t going to obsess over the arcade version. No chance at all. And I got good at it. This was another Zen game. The levels never really got too hard and I could play for a long time on two quarters.
Like a lot of early arcade games, it used a vector display, similar to Space War, Asteroids, Battle Zone, Omega Race and so many other classics. When the only home console with a vector display, the Vectrex came out, I wanted it soooo bad, but I just couldn’t afford it. If I see a Vectrex at Retro World Expo in a couple of weeks, I might do it. Maybe not.
Drawing a line between the arcade game and the DOS games like X Wing and Tie Fighter is pretty easy, but I only had that feeling of being at the controls of a space fighter in the same way when I played Wing Commander.
Back in those days, most games took every bit of RAM on your PC. And because the “640K is all anyone would ever need” meant it was hard to add enough memory for games past a certain point, finding ways to make your games work was non-trivial. Wing Commander was the first game that I bought special hardware to play. I had to buy a special sound card to get that orchestral music. Good speakers. A flight stick. And a bunch of memory utilities that would move stuff around to give Wing Commander the space it needed to fly.
I played all four of the mainline games to death, and a few of the spinoffs, like Armada and Privateer.
Today? I have a full HOTAS setup sitting under the desk next to me. I haul it out for Microsoft Flight Simulator and Elite: Dangerous, but the true follow-up I never got to play (because it was never released) would have been the Bablyon 5 Starfury game.
That would have rocked.
There’s a demo of the game hiding around somewhere, and fan projects to recreate Babylon 5 and the ships of the series as mods to more modern games. But they’re missing the fully voiced characters and plot of the original. That’d have been awesome.
Well, unfortunately, between pretty much every paragraph I’ve been writing tonight, I’ve been playing old video games online (the Internet Arcade has a bunch of them), or watching videos, or just reminiscing, so I’ll leave it at three arcade games.
Part 3 will cover the home console games that defined me 🙂
