Notes

Top Ten Classic Video Games
10. Pong

Origins: Pong was predicated on a game called 'Tennis for Two' that was a simulation of a casino game of tennis on an oscilloscope. Physicist William Higinbotham, the designer, goes down ever sold as creating among the first electronic games to employ a graphical display.

The Concept: The game is supposed to represent a casino game of Tennis or Table Tennis (Ping Pong). Each player has a bat; the bat could be moved vertically. The screen has two horizontal lines on the top and bottom of the screen. A ball is 'served' and moves towards one player - that player must move the bat so that the ball hits it. The ball rebounds and moves back another way. Depending on where the ball hits the bat, the ball will move in different directions - should it hit one of the top or bottom lines, then it will bounce off. The theory is simply to help make the other player skip the ball - thus scoring a spot.

Game play: while it sounds utterly boring, the game play is in fact very addictive. You can easily play but very hard to understand, especially with faster ball speeds, and more acute angles of 'bounce'.

Nostalgia: for me here is the father of video games. Without Pong you probably wouldn't have video games - it started the craze that would continue grow and become a multi-billion dollar industry. I will remember this game!

9. Frogger

Origins: this game originated by Konami in 1981, and was the initial game to introduce me to Sega. At that time it had been very novel and introduced a fresh style of game.

The Concept: Easy - you intend to walk in one side of the street to another. Wait one minute - there's a lot of traffic; I better dodge the traffic. holywin88 Managed to get - hang on, who put that river there. Better join those turtles and logs and get to the other side - hold on that's a crocodile! AHHH! It sounds easy - the cars and logs come in horizontal rows, and the direction they move, the quantity of logs and cars, and the speed can vary. You will need to move you frog up, down left and right, avoiding the cars, jumping on logs and avoiding nasty creatures and get home - do that several times and you move to another level.

Game Play: Just one more simple concept that is amazingly addictive. This game depends on timing; you're dinking in and out of traffic, and sometimes going nowhere. The graphics are poor, the sound is terrible, however the adrenalin really pumps as you try to avoid that extremely fast car, or the snake that is hunting you down!

Nostalgia: I love this game for many reasons. I played it for years, but never really became an expert - however, it was the initial ever game I were able to reproduce using Basic on my ZX81 - I even sold about 50 copies in Germany!

8. Space Invaders

Origins: Tomohiro Nishikada, the designer of Space Invaders was inspired by Star Wars and War of the Worlds. He produced on of the initial shooting video gaming and drew heavily from the playability of Breakout.

THE IDEA: aliens are invading the Earth in 'blocks' by moving down the screen gradually. Because the intrepid savior of the Earth it's your task to use your solitary laser cannon, by moving horizontally, and zapping those dastardly aliens out of your sky. Luckily, you have four bases to cover behind - these eventually disintegrate, however they provide some protection from the alien's missiles.

Game Play: this is a very repetitive game, but highly addictive. Each wave starts a little nearer to you, and moves a little fast - so every new wave is really a harder challenge. The overall game involved a fair amount of strategy and good hand eye co-ordination.

Nostalgia: I wasted considerable time playing this game. While originally simply green aliens attacked, some clever geek added color strips to the screen and the aliens magically changed color the lower they got - that was about as high tech as it returned in the times of monochrome video games!

7. Galaxians

Origins: Galaxians expanded on the area Invaders theme insurance firms aliens swoop down on the defender. It had been one of the first games to possess colored sprites.

Concept: Take Space Invaders, then add color, take away the bases and make a number of the aliens swoop down at you and you have Galaxians. Basically the concept is equivalent to Space Invaders, you're defending the planet against alien invaders, but rather compared to the whole screen full of aliens moving down at you in a nice orderly fashion, you obtain groups of aliens swooping down in haphazard ways.

Game play: if you liked Space Invaders then you'll love this. The strategies will vary, as you often have to avoid several different sets of alien 'swoopers' but if you can shoot them because they swoop, then you get some good great bonus points. The game is difficult and soon you get used to a number of the patterns

Nostalgia: this was among the first games that I played on a desktop computer that was almost exactly like the arcade fame. I had an old Acorn Electron, and this game was almost perfect with this little machine. I miss my old Acorn Electron!

6. holywin88 : This game was made by Williams Electronics in 1980. THE OVERALL GAME was created by Eugen Jarvis, Sam Dicker, Paul Dussault and SLarry DeMar. It had been among the first games to feature complex controls, with five buttons and a joystick. While slow to catch on due to its difficulty, it still was a popular game.

Concept: The majority of the shoot-em-up games of the era were horizontal shote-em-ups. This game changed the playing field by being a vertical shooter. Just as before aliens are intent to do nasty things to earth - this time around they're trying kidnap 10 humans. You are in charge of the sole defender and must kill the aliens before they kidnap the humans. You fly over a 'landscape' and may see your humans mulling around at first glance. The aliens appear and drop towards the humans - you can kill them at this time, but as long as they grab an alien, you must shoot the alien, and catch the human prior to the alien reaches the very best of the screen.

Game play: This is a great game that has been easy to play but tough to master. Shooting the aliens and catching the humans gave the best bonuses, and this formed a major portion of the strategy. There were some different kind of aliens that chased you making the game far more hectic than others; often it was just a relief to finish a level. While not as addictive as some, it did give a feeling of achievement once you reached a higher score.

Nostalgia: I continued vacation with a pal for a week and we spent the entire week in the arcade playing this game and the main game on my list (I won't reveal the name now!). It had been one of the best memories of my teen years!

5. Missile Command

Origins: In July 1980, Atari published a revolutionary game. It didn't have a joystick, but had a ball that controlled an on screen cursor. It was programmed by Dave Theurer and licensed to Sega.

Concept: Those pesky aliens are getting smarter. Rather than sending space ships down to fight, they're hiding in deep space and sending a bunch of missiles to blow up the Earth's cities. This game was unique since it use a 'round' joystick. You used this to move to a point on the screen and fire a missile into this spot - the culminating explosion would destroy any missiles that hit the 'cloud'. The missiles were essentially lines that moved down from the very best of the screen at varying angles and speeds - many of them would put into multiple 'missiles' half way down.

Game play: this is usually a very strategic game. Placing your bombs in the proper place and timing them right could essentially clear the alien missiles quickly and easily. As the game move ahead you found yourself spinning the wheel frantically trying to get the bombs in the right place. This game was adrenalin pumping fun - sometimes you appeared to be against impossible odds yet you'd breath a sigh of relief when one city survived.

Nostalgia: this was one of the first games I played on a table top machine. While these didn't really catch on, it had been still fun in order to put a can of soda down when you played!

4. Breakout

Origin: This game was heavily inspired by Pong. It had been created in 1976 by Atari, with Nolan Busnell and Stew Bristow being the key designers. It's probably one of the cloned games ever, even today you can find new games using the same theme coming out. Apparently the Apple II computer was inspired by this game - wow where would Steve Jobs be now without Breakout.

Concept: The idea is easy - you have a bat at the bottom of the screen that can move backwards and forwards. Above you is a wall of bricks. A ball will move from your bat - every time it collides with a brick, the brick disappears and the ball bounce back at you. Your task is simple - stop the ball going off the bottom of the screen by placing your bat in the way and bouncing the ball back at the wall - you might also need to remove all of the bricks in the wall to advance to the next level!

Game play: this can be a fairly difficult game to understand. Because the bricks get lower each level and the ball speed increases, it becomes a lot more difficult to 'break out'. Also, sometimes the angle that the ball comes off the bat is so acute that it is very difficult to judge where the ball will bounce! It's one of those games where you just keep on saying 'just yet another game' and before you know it five hours have passed.

holywin88 : when I lived in Wales we'd a little utility room that housed books and my little ZX Spectrum - I used to spend hours playing this game as my dad sat and studied. It had been like a male bonding session!

3. Hang On

Origin: This game premiered in 1985 and originated by Sega. It had been among the first '3D' racing games and one of the first ever to introduce a 'realistic' aid to playing the game - that it a larger replica motorcycle style cabinet, with speedo, brakes and a throttle. This game became the benchmark for future racing games and lead to the highly praised Out Run series. The game cleverly used 'billboards' and trees to provide you with the feel that you were moving at high speed.

Concept: You are a motorcycle racer - you take a seat on top of a bike and also have to race around a 3d race track, overtaking other riders and reaching certain checkpoints within a time limit. The game featuring different places and conditions (such as night).

Game play: Another easy game to play but very difficult to master. Timing the turns was essential, especially if other bikers got truly in the way. Each slight touch of another bike, or crash right into a barrier slowed you down and made it harder to reach the checkpoint in time. The awesome graphics (for the time) made this game pleasurable to play as you truly felt you're in a race. It really is another game that kept you returning for more.

Nostalgia: As a kid I always wanted a real motorbike, so this gave me a feeling that I actually had one. I was very good as of this game (an d Pole Position) and constantly had my name on the high score table - it's possibly the only game I possibly could truly say I was a master.

2. Pacman

Origin: Produced by Toru Iwatani, and programmed by Hideyuki Moakajima San, this game arrived in mid 1980. The name comes from a phrase that pertains to the sound whenever your mouth opens and closes (allegedly). Namco produced the game, but it really became popular in America when Midway released it.

Concept: You're Pacman and you have become hungry. You discover a maze filled with 'dots' and zip around eating them. Unfortunately there's some ghosts who aren't too happy concerning this and they will chase you and eat you - but hey, there's some really big dots that provide you the energy to banish the ghosts back again to their central cage. The maze is complex, filling the complete screen, but there are no dead ends - gleam passage way between each side of the screen. In the center, is the cage that holds the ghosts - occasionally bonus fruit appear close to the cage. You essentially have to eat all of the dots so as to progress.

Game play: That is a simple concept, but with pretty decent graphics and an addictive tune it became an enormous success. There is a lot of strategy to the game - each ghost follows a set pattern (although eventually they'll forget this and follow you) - in fact there are books dedicated on the best route to avoiding the ghosts. The game gets harder as you go, with the ghosts accelerating and getting smarter.

Nostalgia: there's something about the music in this game that is just so catching -even as I write it I could hear it in my own mind. It's one of the first games that I could remember using music as a major selling point. I wasted several hours playing this game, and even though I was never great I always had fun attempting to devise new routes. It is also probably my most successful programming achievement - I designed a version of this for the Acorn Atom and I actually sold a couple of hundred copies (again in Germany) - I'm proud that as a twelve year old, I could use logic and programming skills and make some money doing it.

1. Asteroids

Origin: It's truly amazing to think that this game was initially released in 1979 - I've been playing it for 30 years now! Developed by Atari and created by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, the overall game cleverly used vector graphics and real inertia physics to convert a simple concept into a classic game.

Concept: Your little space ship has strayed into an asteroid belt. By using thrusters, a trusty laser cannon and a hyperspace unit, you must move your spaceship everywhere over the screen and prevent the asteroids. You can go anywhere on the screen and even going off the edge is OK - it just happens to be a wrap around universe. The asteroids come at you from all angles. Initially they're large, and are fairly slow. Once hit they put into smaller asteroids, and these smaller asteroids split again - small the asteroid the faster it goes. Occasionally an awful alien ship will appear and start firing at you - he'll occasionally hit the asteroids and split them. The thought of the game is simple - destroy all of the asteroids without colliding into them or getting shot by an alien.

Action: Wow what can I say. To really succeed at this game you should use strategy - firing at all asteroids will fill the screen with plenty of small fast paced asteroids, making it difficult to avoid collisions. Which means game required that you select off one asteroid at a time, and then deal with small asteroids. While doing this, you also had to go gingerly; with real inertia, you often found yourself drifting without realizing it and suddenly you'd be in the center of four or five asteroids.
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