The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
The 1980s were when video games broke out of the fairground, rammed down front doors and invaded homes everywhere. But at the start of the decade home computers were still rare, so it was in the coin-op titles where all the excitement was to be found.
There were however a few developed for the mainframes found in most universities and large businesses. Some even found global acclaim.
Join V3 on this stroll through the archives as we remember the best games of the '80s, starting at the very beginning, in 1980.
Or, if you're more interested in the top ZX Spectrum games of all time, this should tickle your retro bone.
Amiga games more your thing? We've got that covered too.
Or, for a more hardware-based rundown of the best machines of the home computing era, try this.
10. Space Panic
Released originally as an arcade game in November, Space Panic is notable for being revered as the first ever platform game. The game's aim is to progress through the levels, digging holes in the platforms then knocking aliens in to kill them.
The game wasn't wildly successful, a fact which its publisher put down to its novelty - it wasn't just the first platform game, it was also the first ‘trap ‘em up', where the bad guys couldn't just be shot. Apparently this was all a bit much for audiences in 1980. What on Earth would they have made of Mass Effect: Andromeda is anyone's guess.
In 1983 CBS Electronics ported Space Panic onto the largely forgotten Coleco Vision home console - a machine which largely owed its sales success to the fact that it came bundled with the original Donkey Kong, itself often and incorrectly hailed as the first-ever platformer.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
9. Battlezone
Another standalone arcade game from November 1980, Battlezone is arguably the first ever first-person shooter, coming a full 12 years before Wolfenstein 3D, the game traditionally awarded that accolade.
In Battlezone, the player controls a tank, and looks out from its perspective, across a monochromatic, wireframe world. Unusually, the screen is viewed through a periscope set into the arcade cabinet, giving an added sense of realism, and also allowed the developers to scrimp massively on the screen size.
The game never throws more than one enemy tank at the player at a time, although bonus (and non-hostile) UFOs do sometimes appear along with an enemy. Basically the mechanics can be summarised as: if it moves, shoot it. If it doesn't move, shoot it, and see if it moves.
Intriguingly, a version known as ‘The Bradley Trainer' was commissioned by the US Army in December 1980, to train its recruits to use the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Two units were delivered, only one of which now remains, in a private collection having been found besides a skip a few years later.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
8. The Prisoner
Produced by Edu-Ware for Steve Jobs' Apple II, The Prisoner is unsurprisingly based on the 1960s British TV series of the same name.
As in the TV series, the player is trapped on an island which appears to have been designed with the express purpose of being his or her prison. The player is given a three digit number at the beginning, and instructed never to reveal it. The game makes several attempts to trick the player into giving it away, which results in an immediate loss.
Using both text, and limited graphics, the game allows the player to travel to 20 different locations on the island, all of which contain puzzles of some description, and many of which contains clues to aid the player's escape.
The Prisoner was popular with both the gaming press and players of the day, and a sequel was released in 1982.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
7. Centipede
No, not the Nokia phone classic from 1997, that was called Snake. Centipede is an arcade shooter from Atari.
In the game, the player controls what the cabinet's maintenance manual describes as a "somewhat humanoid head" fixed at the bottom of the screen. Using the trackerball embedded in the machine, players move the character around shooting at a centipede as it advances down the screen across a field of mushrooms (and hitting a mushroom is bad, because the evil arthropod then swaps direction and drops a level, moving closer to the player).
Centipede was later ported to a host of other platforms, including many of the early Atari consoles, as well as the Apple II, Commodore 64, ColecoVision, VIC-20, BBC Micro, and the IBM PC.
It was coded and designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey, the latter of whom being one of the few female gaming programmers around at the time. Centipede also attracted a large female player-base, one of the first coin-ops to do so.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
6. Bezerk
November was obviously the month to release great games, because Bezerk is yet another arcade released in that month of 1980. Released by Stern Electronics, Bezerk is set in a maze and filled with robots to shoot. Because what else are you going to do with robots?
One enemy who can't be shot however, is the game's antagonist, Evil Otto. Despite his moniker, Evil Otto is represented by a bouncing, smiley face, because true evil is insidious. There is no way to kill him, and he can even pass through the game's electrified walls with no ill effects, the nefarious bastard.
Fortunately, the game's robots are less dastardly, often dying by accidentally running into the walls, or shooting one another.
Interestingly, the game's creator Alan McNeil got his idea for the game from a dream in which he was trapped in a maze fighting robots. Evil Otto was a dubious homage to former colleague and security chief ‘Dave Otto', who would apparently "smile while he chewed you out", as McNeil told Manci Games Magazine at the time.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
5. Missile Command
One of the genuine classics of the period, Missile Command was released in July by Atari as a coin-op arcade, and quickly made its way to the firm's own console systems.
In the game, six cities are under attack by a continuous volley of missiles, which can be shot out of the sky by the player. The player moves a crosshair across the screen using a trackball and uses one of three missile batteries to create a temporary fireball in the sky which consumes any missile to enter its radius.
The cities in the game are apparently supposed to represent six cities in California: Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. According to the book ‘Blue Wizard is about to die!', Dave Theurer, the game's coder, suffered from nightmares of those cities being obliterated in a nuclear strike. But then this was pretty much the height of the Cold War, so he was probably right to be afraid.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
4. Zork I
Yet another classic to be released in November 1980, Zork I is a text adventure, or interactive fiction game. It was written using programming language MDL (MIT Design Language, how's that for an acronym within an acronym?), on the now sadly defunct but wonderfully huge mainframe computer the DEC PDP-10. They sure knew how to name things in those days.
Zork was notable for many aspects. For a start its writing was excellent, but also its ability to recognise sentences was considered ahead of its time. As Bib Liddil wrote in Byte magazine in 1981: "I was eager to test Zork's biggest selling point, intelligent input (ie: its ability to accept free-form instructions). I typed ‘OPEN THE BAG AND GET THE LUNCH,' in reference to a brown paper sack inside the house. The computer complied. There was water and food so I typed ‘EAT THE LUNCH AND DRINK THE WATER,' to which the computer responded with gratitude for satisfying its hunger and thirst. I was hooked."
In the game, the player ventures into and underground empire, aiming to return with a bunch of treasure and title of Dungeon Master, preferably not dead.
Interestingly, the game got its name from the term ‘Zork' used by MIT hackers to describe an unfinished programme. Upon the game's completion, the developers wanted to change its name to ‘Dungeon', but received notice from TSR, the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons at the time, who claimed the name violated its copyrights. So Zork it remained.
Zork was a huge commercial and critical hit, and is rightly hailed today as an all-time classic.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
3. Adventure
Adventure, in addition to being a pivotal plot point in Ernest Cline's 2011 book Ready Player One, is also a game released in 1980 for the Atari 2600 console. In it, the player controls a small square character tasked with finding a magic chalice and returning it to the golden castle.
There are enemies of course, and unusually for the time, they were able to move, and their movements tracked by the game even when off screen. Just because you leave a dragon by a tree in one area, doesn't mean it's going to be there when you come back. Just like in real life (besides the whole dragons not existing thing).
The original idea behind Adventure was that it would be a graphical version of 1977's text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure, itself the inspiration behind Zork.
The game is also notable for the fact that it contains the first widely accepted Easter Egg. There's a secret room housing a text-based credit for Warren Robinett, the game's creator.
Adventure was received warmly by critics at the time, and has over the years become recognised as a seminal classic of the fantasy adventure genre. It sold over a million copies, and has been ported to various other platforms including PC, PlayStation and Nintendo DS.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
2. Rogue
Ever played one of the exponentially expanding catalogue of games calling itself ‘Rogue-like'? Of course you have. Well here's the original. A dungeon-crawler, it was originally developed for Unix-based mainframe machines, and even made it into the official Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2 operating system, a major factor behind its discoverability, and hence success.
Another game in part inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, players control a character exploring a multi-level dungeon, with the aim of making it to the lowest level and finding the Amulet of Yendor. Of course.
Graphics are minimal, with ASCII characters doing the job of representing everything from the player character, to monsters and the dungeon itself. The game also features permadeath. So that's iron man mode by default.
The idea for the game came to one of its co-developers, Michael Toy, when he visited his father's office (a nuclear facility, no less), and played 1971's Star Trek on the facility's mainframe system. He later took up programming and met the game's other creator, Glenn Wichman at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Wichman was into Dungeons & Dragons and was writing his own adventure game.
With those parents, Rogue is pretty much the precise offspring you'd expect.
The best games of all time... from 1980
The games industry was just beginning at the dawn of the '80s, with home computing era still a couple of years off, it was the coin-op titles which kicked things off at the start of the decade. But which games were at the top of the pile?
1. Pac-Man
One of the most iconic, recogniseable and seminal games of all-time, Pac-Man sprang into life in Arcade cabinets in Japan in May 1980. Released by Namco (one of its first ever video games - the firm previously specialised in mechanical kiddie rides) , and created by Japanese video game designed Toru Iwatani, it has become a cultural phenomenon, spawning mountains of merchandise, TV series and even a hit single (Pac-Man Fever).
Interestingly, the game was supposed to be infinite - as long as the player has lives left, the game should continue increasing levels and ghost speed indefinitely. However a bug at level 255 makes this impossible, with the 256th level appearing with a jumble of nonsense characters on the right-hand side of the screen.
Whilst this level isn't passable, it is possible to eat half of the dots and kill the ghosts, so the maximum possible score in the game includes some nifty work on this corrupted screen. The first person ever to achieve this maximum score (3,333,360 points no less) was Billy Mitchell of Hollywood, Florida. It took him over six hours, which is either a triumph of patience and skill, or a colossal waste of time depending on your disposition.
Since then the same score has been achieved many times, in increasingly faster times, the record currently being three hours, 28 minutes and 49 seconds, just in case you fancy giving it a whirl yourself.
Pac-Man was treated to an initially unexcited response in its native Japan, as it was viewed as a poor alternative to Space Invaders, the most popular arcade game of the time. However it took off in North America, and then conquered the world.
And that concludes our stroll through 1980. Stay tuned for the top games of 1981, coming soon!