To save the day, they called upon neophyte game designer Shigeru Miyamoto to design a new game for the unsold hardware.
It flopped, leaving the company in a precarious financial situation with a warehouse full of unsold units. In 1980, Nintendo tried to enter the North American market with Radar Scope - a Galaxian-style fixed shooter.
Your job is simply to cause as much mayhem and destruction as possible before succumbing to the inevitable.Īpart from the frenetic gameplay, it was also the first game to feature a continue screen that allowed you to pick things up without having to start from the beginning.ĭonkey Kong was a title born out of desperation. Namco's brilliant multi-directional shooter places your tiny spacecraft in space, surrounded by an endless collection of enemy space stations, enemy fighter formations, space mines, asteroids and spy ships. Here are my 8 favorite arcade video game titles from '81, in alphabetical order. The result was an onslaught of brilliantly coded and innovative games. Games like Defender and Pac Man arrived in arcades late the previous fall, and the gold rush was on to develop the next smash hit title. Video arcades flourished in the early 1980s for one simple reason - arcade consoles offered stunning gameplay unmatched by the rudimentary home consoles of the day.Įven relatively straightforward arcade titles like Namco's Galaga incorporated three Z80 microprocessors, a dedicated sound chip and a high resolution (for the time) color display - a potent combination unmatched by the blocky graphics and bleeps of Intellivision and Atari 2600 consoles.ġ981 was a landmark year.