:: Phosphor Dot Fossils ::

The Game: Two players control one car each, careening freely around an arena filled with zombies. Faced with zombie-fication at the pedestrian crossing of the undead, the drivers have only one option: run over their opponents! Each zombie that’s squashed leaves a grave marker behind that becomes an unmovable obstacle to zombies and cars alike. Whoever has run over the most zombies by the end of the timed game wins. (Exidy, 1976)

Memories: Death Race, which didn’t even come within shouting distance of having anything to do with the movie of the same name, was the arcade game that sparked the very first protests about violence in video games. Those protests go on to this very day, with games like the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto and Bully drawing fire for depicting various kinds of real world violence. Compared to those much more recent games, it’s almost laughable to think that the abstraction of Death Race was where some parents first drew the line. Why? Because Death Race was the first person to put stick figures - a representation of a human being - on the screen and let you do something nasty to them. (Read more about this game…)

The Game: In a bizarre combination of pinball, zero gravity, and nuclear physics, you pilot your “ship” around a reactor chamber, trying to eliminate rogue radioactive particles (which are about the same size as your ship). Anything touching the outer walls of the chamber will be destroyed, including your on-screen alter ego. Two pairs of five rods can be used to cool down the ever-expanding nuclear reaction at the center of the screen, but you can only push the rods in by bumping the particle into them head-on. Trapping particles in either of two cul-de-sacs in the upper right and lower left corners of the playing field will earn you bonus points, and the best way to accomplish this is to plant one of your limited number of decoys at the entrance to one of the smaller areas. In early levels, you can keep your back to the reactor and hug it as you bounce the particles off of it, but in later levels, the reactions are exposed and become just as deadly to you as to the walls are. (Gottlieb, 1982)

Memories: A decidedly weird but incredibly addictive game. You may find yourself spending ages on it before you know it, and getting better and better at the game. This is a game which would probably be a hit in a graphically updated edition - providing the game play was left as is. Then again, adding detailed graphics would probably rob Reactor of a lot of its mystique. (Read more about this game…)

The Game: As a fearless pile of buzzard bait encased in armor, you pilot your trusty steed - who happens to be an ostrich, by the way - in an effort to impale your opponents - who also happen to be riding ostriches - before they can lance you. Other dangers include a pterodactyl who periodically arrives to thin out the ranks of on-screen warriors if things are taking too long, and platforms that disappear under your feet, plunging you into a sea of molten lava. (Atari, 1983)

Memories: Joust is an incredibly fun and addictive game with a loyal cult following, and Atari did it “joust-ice”. Many of Atari’s home versions of arcade games from this period, whether programmed in-house or farmed out to General Computer, seemed to follow a tenet of getting key graphics and gameplay right above all else, and Joust is a good specimen of that. (Read more about this game…)

The Game: As Mario (or Luigi, if you’re playing with a second person), you’re trying to rid the sewers of such pests as evil lobsters and turtles. Try to grab as many coins as you can (it’s amazing what people let fall down the drain and into the sewer system sometimes), and always be on the lookout for the fireballs which bounce from level to level. Just how did all these things get into the sewers, anyway? (Atari, 1983)

Memories: Atari snatched the home video game license for Mario Bros. and proved that it could successfully port the game to the Atari 2600, as if to thumb its nose at Coleco for the mediocre (and that’s being charitable) 2600 version of Donkey Kong Jr.. Mario Bros. turned out to be one of the better Atari arcade adaptations. (Read more about this game…)

The Game: As the pilot of a lone space cruiser, you must try to clear the spaceways of a swarm of pesky and relatively harmless drone UFOs, but the job isn’t easy. You can ram the alien ships with your ship’s shields, destroying them (but forcing your shields offline for a few precious seconds during which anything could collide with your unprotected ship and destroy you), or shoot them (which also forces your shields down for a recharge). To that screenful of bite-sized chunks o’ death, add an unpredictable Killer UFO that likes to pop in and shoot at you, and suddenly being an interstellar traffic cop ain’t so easy. (Philips, 1983)

Memories: I’ve been complaining about the small library of Odyssey2-games-in-new-clothes developed as Odyssey3 launch titles quite a bit, but here’s a game I can actually get behind. UFO is the combination of a strong game in and of itself, with a background graphic that doesn’t completely obscure the in-game action. (Read more about this game…)

The Game: This contest places you in a vehicle on a grid suspended in space. Going over the edge of the grid is bad news, and yet that’s exactly where you must ram every other object on the screen. Be careful: Isaac Newton’s laws of motion apply here, and every action begets a reaction, namely your vehicle being bounced as far back as your target has been knocked ahead. And depending on the configuration of the playing field, which eventually evolves to include gaps in the middle of the screen which can only be jumped with the proper combination of “power parts” and “jump parts,” ramming an enemy can put you over the edge too. Later levels introduce more aggressive enemies which will leave you almost strictly on the defensive. (Good tip? Position yourself between two enemies and let the recoil from attacking one help you put another one out of the game as well.) Lingering too long on the playing field will cause whoever’s in charge of this genteel sporting event to hurl projectiles at the field, blasting holes out of the grid which must then be jumped or avoided - and even your own jumps can weaken or destroy other squares on the grid. (Namco, 1985)

Memories: Say what you like about Namco, but they’ve probably introduced more singularly addictive games to the arcades than any other company out there, and those games cover a more diverse palette than today’s never-ending smorgasboard of fighting and sports titles. (Read more about this game…)