Memories: This sequel to one of the most beloved titles from the brief Namco/Atari licensing alliance is virtually unknown, primarily because Dig Dug II hit the arcades after the great video game industry crash of 1983. Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of it until MAME came along.

Dig Dug II is actually a very worthy successor to the extremely addictive (and almost painfully cute) Dig Dug, with one minor setback – the viewpoint is a pseudo-overhead view with shadows, unlike the original game’s purely 2-D graphics. Sometimes, when one is desperately trying to sink part of the island before it’s too late, this perspective problem can get your protagonist killed while you sit there helplessly thumping the drill button.

The islands change shape, sometimes at random, and sometimes spelling out N-A-M-C-O, the manufacturer.

Memories: I love Exed Exes (released in the U.S. as Attack Of The Savage Bees). But there’s nothing especially original about it, you know? The game play reeks of Xevious, with elements of Mario Bros. (the “pow” power-up) and even Pac-Man (bonus fruit) thrown in for good measure. The enemies appear in waves very much like those of Galaga and Gaplus, even down to their sneaky trick of attacking you from behind at the bottom of the screen.

So what makes this seemingly unoriginal game so much fun?

I guess it’s a triumph of style over substance. Exed Exes is beautiful to look at – not just its smooth parallax scrolling in the background, but the backgrounds themselves, those honeycomb-like airborne platforms, are attractive without being distracting. (And from the game programmer’s perspective, they’re easily-tiled graphics, which conserves a bit of memory and rendering time.) The calliope-esque music is deceptively calm and intriguing as well, and the whole thing is just so bright and colorful. And it is fun to play, derivative though it may be.

As famed archaeologist / adventurer Indiana Jones, you enter a vast complex of caverns through one of three entrances (which one determines how hard the game will be). Your first task is to evade and/or whip the Thuggee guards into submission as you free caged children. You then make your escape in a runaway mine cart, which you have to keep on the tracks while also whipping anyone in a pursuing cart who gets too close. After getting the children to safety, you embark on far more dangerous adventures, but with greater risks come greater rewards…

Memories: Now this is the kind of experience one expects from an Indiana Jones game – kicking butt, grabbing treasure, getting out alive, and avoiding snakes because you hate snakes. It’s by no means a perfect game, but when I need a pixellated Indiana Jones fix, this winds up being my go-to game.

For 1985, the game’s graphics and sound are impressive – yhe rendition of the Raiders March may not be anything that anyone’ll mistake for the original symphonic recording anytime soon, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. And in 1985, the giant digital Harrison Ford face in the attract mode was quite something. But there is a downside – the isometric perspective can sometimes make it difficult to figure out exactly what you’re having Indy do on your behalf, though that’s a built-in problem with that persepctive that had been dogging players since Zaxxon.

But if there’s one case where a licensed property can help to at least disguise some of the shortcomings of the actual game, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom is it. Being Indiana Jones, even a pixellated Indy, is all about cracking the whip, getting away from the bad guys, and getting out with the treasure – and this game delivers those things much better than Atari’s 2600 cartridge based on Raiders. Give it a try at least once for the giddy thrill of controlling the guy with the bullwhip.

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. Case in point? Motos, a game which didn’t get a huge amount of attention since it hit the arcades between the great 1983/84 video game industry implosion and the NES area (1986 and later).

And while it’s not entirely original – the ability to do nothing but ram your opponents was central to Gottlieb’s earlier title Reactor – Motos at least puts the game in a somewhat less abstract context. (Note I said “somewhat.”)

Not one of Namco’s higher-profile titles, the only occurrence of Motos on any ’90s-or-later console for the longest time was its inclusion on the Japanese-only release of Namco Museum Encore. It’s now returned to the mainstream – or as close as it’ll ever get to mainstream – on the PSP.

Memories: I remember encountering only one Rush’N Attack machine, which was one of the last arcade games I ever became hooked on. There’s actually something addictive, in a bloodthirsty sort of way, about this little war game.

Rush’N Attack is an example of a somewhat politically incorrect game title, though it’s worth bearing in mind that the game dates back to that period of the Reagan era in which dear old Ronnie was calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It doesn’t take too many brain cells to pronounce the game’s U.S. title out loud and come up with “Russian Attack.” Konami marketed the same game as Green Beret in the rest of the world.

The graphics and sound in Rush’N Attack are pretty good for 1985, a clear signal that the Pac-Man era was giving way to the NES era. The background graphics are just as easy on the eye as the foreground without being distracting.

Sadly, Konami chose not to include Rush’N Attack (or the same game under the banner of Green Beret) on its Playstation classics compilation released late in 1999; it would be a few years later, and Konami’s retro compilation for the Game Boy Advance, but Rush’N Attack would come rush’n home.

Two players’ vehicles start in opposite corners of a confined grid; when moved, each vehicle leaves a light cycle-style trail of that player’s color (red or gold) in its wake. But here’s the twist: the players won’t be eliminated by running over the opponent’s “wake.” Instead, running over the other player’s wake once will knock that portion of it down; running over the resulting gap refills that space with your color instead. The object of the game is to occupy as much of the grid as possible by the end of 45 seconds. (Each game consists of three 45-second rounds, and each successive round adds obstacles such as walls, or gaps through which players’ vehicles can fall, resulting in a delay while that vehicle is replaced.) The winner of the best two out of three rounds wins the game.

Memories: After being “put on the beach” by Atari’s new Warner Bros.-controlled management – a term meaning that he was out the door, but still receiving money from a bonus pool that, in Atari’s heyday, was quite substantial – founder Nolan Bushnell was left at a loose end in more ways than one. He began building his new empire, a chain of franchise restaurants called Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, which combined food service, robotic characters whose technology Atari had no interest in pursuing and therefore allowed him to retain, and arcade games. Bushnell was still eager to have something to do with the video game industry, but a non-compete clause literally took him out of that game for seven years. In 1985, that clause expired, and Bushnell was ready to get back in the game.

Calling his new game company Sente – the equivalent of “checkmate” in the Chinese game of Go, in which the term Atari had approximated “check” – Bushnell quickly absorbed a small game development house called Videa, which basically consisted of several former Atari employees working on both arcade game designs and home cartridges. Videa had numerous games in development when Sente took over, and Toggle is one of them.

In several respects, Toggle is indicative of the arcade industry’s struggle to stay above water while the home video game market was going under. Toggle isn’t that inventive – its lineage goes back to B&W arcade games of the 70s which introduced the concept that Tron would later appropriate as the light cycle game. Even once it introduces obstacles such as the gaps that the players can fall into, Toggle is then appropriating elements of Motos, a very minor Namco hit which also arrived in 1985.

That being said, none of this makes Toggle less fun. A relatively unique element of the game is that it’s structured like a mini-sporting event, with a finite number of rounds and a finite length to each round. (As Toggle died in the prototype stage and never actually made it to the arcade, it’s unknown whether or not that particular element fared well with play-testers, or even if it would have been retained for the final release.) That turns the already-familiar components of the game into a ticking time bomb of sorts, and does away with the arcade cliché of three or four “lives.” (Indeed, as I found out while playing one rather unfortunate game of Toggle in MAME, you can clumsily send your vehicle into the gaping holes in the third stage as many times as you like, and you never run out of ships. You lose, yes, but you never run out of ships!)

The power-up element also introduces something relatively new to things, including a “flip flop” power up that reverses the territory each player has claimed; if you hit that power-up while you’re way behind in the game, you can suddenly find yourself winning a round that you were miserably losing just a second before. If you accidentally hit it while you’re ahead, you might as well walk away for the remainder of that round, and slap your forehead a few times.

But all of these elements, to some degree, had been seen in other games. Would Toggle have made a dent in the arcade? At the time, game concepts were changing radically, and the repeat-and-amend-what-someone-else-already-did methodology that was seen in the early 80s wasn’t cutting it anymore. 1985 was already seeing adventurous platform games taking off (Super Mario Bros., Pac-Land), games with much more dazzling graphics and other gimmicks (Atari’s three-monitor TX-1 first-person racer, licensed from Namco), and laserdisc games were still clinging on tenaciously. Though fun, Toggle didn’t bring enough new elements to the table to draw the kind of attention needed for repeat business, which makes or breaks arcade games that live or die by coin drop.

Memories: Almost a dead ringer for its arcade inspiration graphically, the NES edition of Elevator Action actually loses a few points for having lousy sound – something I rarely count off points for, truth be told. But by the time of the NES, the means were there to replicate the arcade sound – take a listen to Super Mario Bros. for proof.

(Sadly, the B&W Game Boy edition of Elevator Action sounds better than the NES version.) Despite that, this really did stand out as the definitive home version of Elevator Action, until Taito got around to releasing PS2, Xbox and PC retro compilations which played a perfect game straight from the arcade code.

As a round yellow creature consisting of a mouth and nothing else, you maneuver around a relatively simple maze, gobbling small dots (10 points) and evading four colorful monsters who can eat you on contact. In four corners of the screen, large flashing dots (50 points) enable you to turn the tables and eat the monsters for a brief period for an escalating score (200, 400, 800 and 1600 points). Periodically, assorted items appear near the center of the maze, and you can consume these for additional points as well. The monsters, once eaten, return to their home base in ghost form and return to chase you anew. If cleared of dots, the maze refills and the game starts again, but just a little bit faster…

Memories: You’ve gotta hand it to Atari – back in the day, they were the experts at exploiting a license until just about every possible option was exhausted. They were also quite adept at staying on the map – up to a point. Where this title might have been released by Atarisoft only a year or two earlier, Atari set up a new imprint – Tengen – to create and market games for the NES. By virtue of Atari’s existing license with Namco, Tengen threrefore produced the first NES port of Pac-Man, and Namco later released its own. (It’s worth noting that the Namco-Atari connection – forged in the late 70s when Namco distributed Atari arcade games in Japan – wasn’t history just yet; Atari later handled the American release of Namco’s Pac-Mania coin-op.)

Tengen’s Pac-Man has some visual quirks – the proportion of Pac himself to the ghosts is a little off, and the maze seems to be off thanks to a series of black horizontal lines – and it doesn’t quite get the sound right, but those minor details aside, it’s hard to believe that this version of Pac-Man came out of the same company that had, only half a decade before, given the world the most miserable Pac-Man experience imaginable on one of its own consoles.

Tengen didn’t get to celebrate for long, however. Part of the problem that caused the 1983/84 video game industry crash in the first place was the glut of third-party cartridges for the pre-NES consoles, especially the Atari VCS. Nintendo intended to rectify this problem by forcing anyone who wanted to manufacture NES cartridges pay for a license to do so – and without the license, Nintendo wouldn’t hand over the security code required by any cartridge to get the machine to boot up. A few gutsy distributors like Tengen/Atari set about reverse-engineering that security code to circumvent the pricey licensing, but in subsequent court cases, it was discovered that Atari lawyers had obtained the schematics of that security system by fraudulent means (and programmers and engineers such as Ed Logg still maintain that they knew nothing of the attorneys’ end-run around Nintendo). Already locked in an expensive court battle with Nintendo over what Atari claimed were unfair business practices (though Atari couldn’t find a judge who agreed), and still smarting from a battle over the home cartridge rights to Tetris, Atari eventually gave in and paid up to make its Tengen division an official Nintendo licensee, but even then, many of Atari’s own in-house properties went unexploited on the NES.

Intrepid plumbers Mario and Luigi have fallen back on Mario’s original mandate – rescuing the damsel – as they journey through the kingdom, battling Koopas and braving falls from dizzying heights, all to rescue the princess (who, as always, seems to be in another castle). In

Memories: Right up there with Atari 2600 Pac-Man in ubiquity, and almost universally loved (think about that for a moment – how many video games reach quite that level of popularity?), Super Mario Bros. was the ticket the NES needed to break into the U.S. market.

Through Nintendo’s novel strategy of adding the ROB robot to the package and marketing the NES as a toy, the machine rode the 1985 Christmas season into living rooms everywhere, but what got the word-of-mouth advertising once consumers got the machine home? It was the arcade-perfect Super Mario Bros. port.

Not to forget, Duck Hunt is a literal blast with the Zapper light gun, and it too is a pixel-perfect coin-op translation, though I’ll admit that at first I got more of a kick out of not shooting anything and watching that goofy hunting dog pop up to laugh at me.

In short, with two compelling and fun games on board, Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt was everything that a pack-in title needs to be. And to be honest, I’m not sure any machine’s pack-in has ever matched this cartridge’s “instant gratification” factor – especially not now that we live in an age where brand new consoles don’t come with a game (what are they thinking, the machines will sell as objets d’art?). But maybe they don’t do pack-ins these days because this one has proven to be such a hard act to follow.

Who said landscaping was easy? You are Dig Dug, an intrepid gardener whose soil is infested with pesky Pookas and fire-breathing Fygars. You’re armed with your trusty pump, which you can use to inflate your enemies until, finally, they blow up. But both the Pookas and Fygars can crawl through the ground and can pop out into your tunnels, and if a Fygar sneaks up behind you, he can toast you if you’re not careful.

Memories: For some reason that I have a hard time trying to fathom, this game was released for the Famicom only – the Japanese console which was re-engineered as the NES for the English-speaking market. The reason I can’t fathom that is that this is a perfectly playable port of Dig Dug. Did Namco really think that this cute classic was past its sell-by date in the States?

The game itself looks great, the one real drawback being that the color palette of the graphics seems to have been reduced significantly, doing away with some of the distinctive bright colors of the arcade game. The sound effects are almost arcade-perfect, and the game play is as close as one could get to playing arcade Dig Dug at home in 198?. As with the NES version of Galaga, there’s a trade-off in the size of the playing field – arcade Dig Dug is played on a vertically oriented monitor, so the play area is compressed here. Sometimes this meant that enemies could reach you fast than they would in the arcade; even experienced players had to adjust their strategy and patterns accordingly.

But also like NES Galaga, Dig Dug helped to serve notice that the days of home ports of arcade games just “kinda sorta” resembling their inspiration were over. When it came to the classics, Famicom and NES were changing the rules: arcade authenticity was here, now.