Best Arcade Game of All Time!

Some game about landing on the moon

Lunar Lander. I loved that one too.

Lunar Lander and Gravitar were the only two games of their time that were more about soft touch than reaction speed. You had to be way out ahead of situation in order to succeed. Mistakes you made would cascade until you paid for them ten or even fifteen seconds later.

Lunar Lander used to sit right next to Robotron in my local arcade ("Space Port") which is frenetic as hell so you ended up with two very different crowds piled in next to each other when good players were at both games.

Shellhead wrote: some domed hockey game with foosball-type levers and nearly 2D hockey players that would pivot 180 and slide up and down the table.

Bubble hockey is the only name I know for it. I love this game still.

some pvp tracball football game where the players were represented as Xs or Os; once spun the tracball so fast that my thumb got caught and I lost a small chunk of it while pulling free

Probably "Atari Football", a legendary thumb eater. I got some wicked blood blisters from that as well.

some pvp spaceship game - one ship looked like the Asteroids ship and the other looked like the Enterprise

Hmm, might be Space Duel, or maybe one of the arcade ports of Spacewar.

some night driving game

Probably Night Driver, another early Atari game. (with a super-shitty 2600 port)


I too spent a shitload of time and money in arcades. More time than money, so I was always trying to stretch a quarter.

Top 5 is rough, but let me see.... (not counting pinball machines)

5. Spy Hunter - so much fun, with weapon powerups, boat levels, and the Peter Gunn theme in 8-bit glory.
4. Paperboy - Fun to play with unique controls, and you could glitch the score into the billions or trillions. Useful for a local arcade who gave an extra token per buck for owning a game highscore.
3. Black Tiger - loved this game, and there was one close to my house for a long long time. Pretty rare, though.
2. X-men (only the 6-player doublescreen version, not the cut down 4-player one).
1. Gauntlet - still the king.

So many more, somehow I managed to do that list with no "bullet hell" flying game (like R-Type, or Twin Cobra), or Ikari Warriors (or Victory Road, the even more bizarro sequel)

Shit.

Spy Hunter! Forgot about that one. That was probably my last regular game before I stopped playing arcade games. Yeah, the Peter Gunn theme as background music was great, and the gameplay reminded me of original edition Car Wars, where all the maps were just highway road sections.

Without a doubt Spy Hunter had the best video game soundtrack of all time. It even had solo parts where each of the non-existent band members got to riff the shit out of the tune for about 64 bars. I swear there were times where I busted my ass to stay on the road just so I wouldn't interrupt the guy's jam.

Two things really screwed video games -- Mortal Combat games and First Person Shooter games. I don't have anything against either one, but they became such an overpowering influence that games like Star Wars, Atari Football, Spy Hunder and the like with different controls and different concepts for play just got rolled out of the arcades. I remember stopping into an arcade as a 25 year old (1989 or so) and seeing one Mortal Kombat game after another, one with dinosaurs of all things, lined up in a big long row. Games with steering wheels or track balls evaporated from the industry.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote: Two things really screwed video games -- Mortal Combat games and First Person Shooter games. I don't have anything against either one, but they became such an overpowering influence that games like Star Wars, Atari Football, Spy Hunder and the like with different controls and different concepts for play just got rolled out of the arcades. I remember stopping into an arcade as a 25 year old (1989 or so) and seeing one Mortal Kombat game after another, one with dinosaurs of all things, lined up in a big long row. Games with steering wheels or track balls evaporated from the industry.

S.

Totally.

The thing that amazes me the most when I think back to all those arcade games is the astounding variety: in concept, in gameplay, even in controls. Track balls! Two joysticks! No joysticks, just buttons! Steering wheels! A rotating knob! That whole Defender/Stargate array of cockpit controls! Fantastic stuff.

Spy Hunter was awesome. Buttons in the steering wheel!

Loved Black Tiger, Punch Out, Asteroids, almost everything people have named.

One that I adored that I only remember seeing once in the arcade was Empire Strikes Back. It was vector graphics just like Star Wars, but obviously followed the second movie. One thing I loved is how the giant AT-ATs in the beginning and the asteroids later seems to fade in out of the darkness. Made it both spooky and difficult. I don't know if it was designed that way or if the one I saw just had the graphics too dim.

Asteroids was the first game I ever played. I discovered it while driving taxi in Calgary, Alta when I was in my early 20's and played the shit out of it every chance I got, which as a taxi driver, was quite a lot!

Other games I remember liking a lot back then were Joust, Defender and Missile Command. FX's new series about the Cold War, "The Americans" has a quick shot of Missile Command in its intro.

Missile Command


Joust


Defender


Honourable mention to Gauntlet and Dragon's Lair, which at the time had ground breaking graphics but was really just a quick reflex money-sink.

Wow. 4 pages before someone mentioned Joust.

The rest of you guys are clearly wrong.

I also have a bit of a soft spot for the Asteroids sequel called Space Duel. It is mostly just Asteroids in color except for co-op play, and the insane genius guy of a co-op mode where the two ships are linked by a rod.

BTW, the two player arcade battle game was probably called Space Wars. That was the most popular version.

On Monday, we fired up the PS4 to play with Towerfall. It is a truly great game, that might be the greatest multiplayer couch battle game ever made. It is insane, crazy, and with rounds sometimes lasting 5 seconds. So far the best game on PS4. Need to find people who like old multiplayer mayhem like Super Smash Brothers and the ilk. Sadly, I mostly know boardgamers.

I am also looking with some trepidation at Johann Sebastian Joust which looks too brilliant for words.

It is also a damn shame that no one has had the good sense to name Satan's Hollow. Folks, this game had a CROSSBOW for a controller.

Some others that these people have missed:

Star Castle
Omega Race
Major Havoc
Mappy
Mr. Do (I FUCKING LOVE MR. DO)
720
Crystal Castles
Trojan
Thayer's Quest
Cobra Command (still my favorite laserdisc game)
Death Race (the first controversial video game)
Pac-Man Junior (with attached mini-pinball table)
Mr. Do (I FUCKING LOVE MR. DO ENOUGH TO LIST IT TWICE)
Bionic Commando (not the same as the NES game)
Strider (not the same as the Genesis or NES game)
UN Squadron
Bad Dudes
Jungle Hunt
Karate Champ (I mean come the fuck on people)
Street Fighter (the original version with giant punching buttons)
Wizard of Wor
Mr. Do (HELL YES)
Dig Dug (not as good as Mr. Do but really good too)
Sub Hunt (Battlezone with submarines)
TARG (now THAT is an obscure one, look it up)
Gorf
Starblade
Rygar (again, very different than the home versions)
Star Trek (vector graphics)
Time Crisis (still a really great late-era arcade game)
Nintendo Play Choice 10
NARC (total trash, but loved it)
Sinistar
Rampart (a friend of mine and I spent his entire paycheck one night playing this)

But towering above them all...the TRON arcade cabinet. The second greatest arcade game of all time. That blue light-up flight stick (WTF)...

Man, I really miss when arcades were dark, smoky and kind of considered places of ill repute. Red Baron Arcade, 2001, the Gold Mine...RIP...

Zaxxon