Play Classic 80’s Arcade Games Enjoy your favorite video games and remember the great decade that was and still is the 80’s. Best of all, NO tokens required to play these FREE online video games! Here comes the other best arcade game of the 80s. Pac-Man is a maze arcade game that was released in 1980. This game is developed and published by Namco in Japan and in NA by Midway Games. The original name of Pac-Man was Puck-Man, but it got changed for international release for some reasons. The Best Arcade Driving Games from the Mid 80s As we head into the mid eighties Sega really come into their own. Yes, they had previously released Turbo (not on this list as I never played it) but the new arcade boards and technology developed at this time by them takes driving arcade games to the next level.
While IT admins and tech lovers are usually at the forefront of sophisticated technology, sometimes it can be rewarding to step back and think about how far we’ve come. We often write about how much technology has changed the way we work, but how has it affected the way we play games?
Today, we live in a pixel-perfect era of 4K video games. Landscapes are sprawling and stunningly immersive. We can sync games to the cloud without even batting an ultra HD eye. But just a few decades ago, our primitive video games consisted of nothing more than pixelated blobs and bouncing lines.
These are just a few of the many video games that pioneered new genres and technology, laid the foundation for modern-day gaming, and spawned iconic franchises that are still successful today. And as a bonus: You can play all of these retro games online for free right within your web browser.
1. Oregon Trail
In 1971, Oregon Trail was created by several young student teachers as a way to get their students interested in the 19th-century pioneer journey out west. It was an early strategic game that introduced the concepts of resource management and risk management to players. In the early 1980s, it was released as a stand-alone game to the public on the Apple-II, making its way into schools everywhere and becoming a pioneer of the edutainment genre. [Play it here]
2. Pong
Atari’s first product in 1972—a simple table tennis arcade video game called Pong—came with just one instruction: “Avoid missing ball for high score.”
Pong was originally developed as an internal training exercise; it wasn’t even meant to be sold commercially. But soon it began appearing in pubs, bowling alleys, and JC Penney stores. In fact, people even lined up outside bars in the morning to play it. Making $3.2 million in profit, Pong was the the first commercially successful arcade game, and it ushered in video games as a new form of entertainment. [Play it here]
3. Colossal Cave Adventure
In 1975, programmer Will Crowther created a text-only, interactive game called Colossal Cave Adventure, where players entered text commands to explore a virtual cave and solve puzzles. He spawned an entirely new gaming genre called interactive fiction, hypertext, or interactive storytelling, which laid the foundation for future adventure games and role-playing games. [Play it here]
4. Space Invaders
Space Invaders, an arcade game about shooting aliens, became immensely popular all around the world in 1978. (Urban legend says it caused a national shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan.) With its blocky, iconic aliens, it visually defined the look of commercial video games. It also paved the way for modern video games by pioneering the “shoot-em-up” genre and using music as a device to influence players’ emotions. It was the first game that introduced a difficulty curve—it got more challenging as you played. But this wasn’t intentional; it was actually a glitch due to technical limitations. As you blasted away aliens, fewer aliens on the screen meant a lighter load on the processor and, in turn, faster rendering. The aliens sped up, as did the 4-note soundtrack. Video games now had the ability to feel suspenseful and formidable, and this happy accident laid the foundation for future gameplay. [Play it here]
5. Battlezone
In 1980, Battlezone was one of the first video games to use vector graphics technology, and visuals became smoother and cleaner. It is considered by some to be the first virtual reality arcade game because it featured 3D wireframe graphics and players had to look through a “periscope” to play the game. [Play it here]
6. Pitfall!
Several Atari programmers defected in 1980 and created Activision, the world’s first independent video game developer and distributor. They went on to produce some of Atari’s best-selling games like Pitfall!, where you navigated through a jungle and collected treasures. Pitfall! was an early platform game, and though it technically didn’t side-scroll, it was certainly an early version of it. It paved the way for gameplay found in Super Mario Bros. [Play it here]
7. Pac-Man
Pac-Man hit the arcade scene in 1980 and was an overnight sensation. Since the little yellow circle looked like a puck, it was originally called Puck-Man, but executives feared that name was too easy to vandalize, so they changed it. The character was half-inspired by a pizza pie missing a slice and half-inspired by the Japanese character for “mouth.” In an era where most games were space shooters, designer Toru Iwatani made the game about eating because he wanted something equally appealing to both men and women. Sure enough, it was a universal hit. Raking in more than $1 billion in quarters, it’s the highest grossing arcade game in history, as well as a major pop culture icon. Pac-Man introduced the idea that video games could cross over and have mainstream appeal if they had strong characters. Audiences loved the Pac-Man character so much that there was even a Pac-Man TV series, not to mention merchandise like Pac-Man cereal, pasta, board games, toys, radios, etc. [Play it here]
8. Donkey Kong
In 1981, the world met a carpenter named Jumpman and his pet gorilla, Donkey Kong. It was one of the first games to have an actual plot (Jumpman must climb the construction site to save his girlfriend, Pauline, who’s been kidnapped by Donkey Kong). Donkey Kong was a smash hit and a milestone in the annals of gaming history; it was one of the first jump-and-run platform games and gave rise to a new style of gaming. Players around the world loved the silly narrative, playful graphics, interesting characters, and humor. But as we’d discover a few years later, the true breakout star of the game was Jumpman (later renamed Mario). [Play it here]
9. Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo released its 8-bit NES console in 1985, helping resuscitate a flailing American video game industry that was still recovering after a massive crash two years earlier. The NES came bundled with Super Mario Bros., which introduced groundbreaking technical innovation (side-scrolling), as well as a visually rich, quirky world that players had never seen before. The jump-happy Italian-American plumber brothers known as Mario and Luigi instantly became iconic characters. Super Mario Bros. was a cultural phenomenon and a massive commercial success—it remains the best-selling video game franchise to this day. [Play it here]
10. SimCity
Eschewing the traditional win/lose dynamic of games, Will Wright created SimCity in 1989. It featured an open-ended design where players could build and design their own city. This was a tough concept to swallow. Publishers failed to see its potential (“No one likes it, because you can’t win”), so he co-founded Maxis and published SimCity himself. Though this wasn’t the first of the “omniscient God” games, it wildly popularized the genre and spawned multiple versions and spinoffs, including 2000’s The Sims. [Play it here]
11. Tetris
Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989, which came bundled with Tetris. Invented by a Soviet programmer in the USSR in 1984, Tetris wasn’t originally intended to be a form of entertainment—it was meant to showcase the potential of computer intellect. But it was a breakout hit on the Game Boy. It was simple enough to play on the go, and it was popular with both adults and children alike. Henk Rogers, the designer responsible for bringing the game to market, explained its appeal: “The basic pleasure of putting blocks together to make something is a universal basic pleasure center.” With over 170 million copies sold, it’s one of the top-selling video games of all time. It’s been played in more than 185 countries, translated into more than 50 languages, and released on more than 50 platforms. Many people credit Tetris with popularizing the puzzle genre of games. [Play it here]
12. Sonic the Hedgehog
Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991 to compete with the Nintendo juggernaut. Originally called Mr. Needlemouse, Sonic was positioned as the cooler, spunkier, edgier alternative to Mario. The game emphasized speed—unlike Mario, Sonic zoomed around in a quick blur—which was unprecedented at the time. The spiky blue hedgehog was a commercial success and became Sega’s iconic mascot. [Play it here]
13. Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II came out in 1991 in the arcades, and it was so successful that it was ported to multiple consoles. It brought a new technical complexity to arcade games that hadn’t existed before: Each characters had distinctive fighting styles and special moves, so players had to fight strategically. The graphics were also detailed, rich, and beautifully animated. Street Fighter II was hugely influential—it popularized the fighting genre and influenced later fighting games, like Mortal Kombat. By 1995, it had made an estimated $2.3 billion. [Play it here]
14. Doom
Doom, considered to be one of the most influential video games ever, came out for PC DOS in 1993. It was a pioneer of the modern first-person shooter genre, and it introduced 3D graphics and networked multiplayer gameplay. In fact, it was responsible for introducing the term “deathmatch” to mainstream gaming vernacular. This online multiplayer mode was revolutionary at the time, and it was a forerunner for applications like Counter-Strike and XBox Live. [Play it here]
15. Snake
Snake actually originated as an arcade game called Blockade in 1976, which was the first of the “snake” games. But it didn’t achieve mainstream popularity until 1997, when Nokia started preloading Snake in its mobile phones. For many people, it was the first mobile game they ever played, and it set the stage for the mobile gaming explosion a few years later. It’s estimated that it was featured on over 400 million Nokia phones. [Play it on the “Nokia phone” here]
Arcade games lived in a cruel world. Even in the happy, profitable days of the ’80s and ’90s, they were at the mercy of capricious players, and any game that didn’t pull its own weight in quarters was soon replaced by something more popular. Some games never got a good chance in the first place, as language barriers and poor distribution sentenced them to short careers.
This was particularly unfair to the young arcade rats who liked these underappreciated games. If it didn’t make enough money, that inventive shooter or cool four-player beat-’em-up might be gone the next time your mom dropped you off at the arcade. And you’d never see it again until decades down the road, when MAME brought all sorts of arcade obscurities as close as any computer screen. If you got to play any of these games in the wild, count yourself lucky.
12) Battle Circuit
You’ll see several games like Battle Circuit on this list. They’re called brawlers, belt-scrollers, beat-’em-ups, and Those Arcade Games Where You Rescue Your Girlfriend From A Palette-Swapped Street Gang. Started by Final Fight and Double Dragon, the brawler craze dominated arcades in the late 1980s, but its quality didn’t peak until the early ’90s. Sadly, that was when Street Fighter II and other head-to-head fighting games took over, and plenty of excellent brawlers went ignored.
When it came to Battle Circuit, Capcom was their own worst enemy. Released in 1997, the game was overshadowed by Street Fighter III, Darkstalkers, and other Capcom-made fighting games. And that’s a shame, because it’s a solid little brawler with that sharply animated Capcom style. The characters include an ostrich jockey and an alien plant alongside more mundane heroes, and the player can expand their moves by purchasing new attacks between levels. There’s also a weird sense of humor about the whole thing, starting with an Elvis-like boss who turns shorter and fatter once he’s defeated.
Why No One Played It:
Aside from the fighting-game competition, Battle Circuit had a limited release. It skipped North America entirely, and even arcade patrons in Europe and Asia rarely saw the game in its full four-player glory.
11) Bubbles
Some see the early 1980s as the best years of the arcade, an age when video games were a stunning new trinket and companies were throwing all sorts of bizarre ideas into the arcades. Of course, this made the scene highly competitive, and some promising creations withered away before their time. John Kotlarik and Python Vladimir Anghelo’s Bubbles was one of them.
It’s a game built from everyday abstraction: you’re a googly eyed bubble picking up dirt and ants and other debris in sink, growing larger with each item you soak up. If you get big enough while avoiding the deadly clutches of various sink obstacles, you can slip down the drain and into another sink. Bubbles shows off a unique idea in turning the player into a more vulnerable target as the bubble nears its goal, and the controls mimic that idea without being too slippery.
Why No One Played It:
If records are to be believed, arcade-goers just didn’t take to a smiling bubble as well as they did to Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. It was enough of a rejection to make Bubbles a B-lister in arcades… and only in arcades. Bubbles was never ported to home consoles or computers in its own time, and it only came home in compilations of Williams arcade games decades down the road.
10) R-Type Leo LEO
The R-Type series is hardly obscure. Made by Irem back in 1987, the original R-Type set new standards with its relentless difficulty, its novel design, and the freaky alien embryo boss of its first level. And its sequels were similarly appreciated. Well, most of them were.
R-Type Leo is the odd one of the family. It has the familiar formula of a sleek starfighter using a remote attack pod, but it’s not as rigid as its cousins. Your ship gets two enemy-seeking satellites, weapons are easy to find, and the game doesn’t demand that you beat it a certain way. You can continue right where you left off, and a second player can join in as well.
Why No One Played It:
It’s hard to find much evidence of R-Type Leo being released outside Japan. Though there’s a “World” version, the game was a rare sight in arcades. Sadly, R-Type Leo was never brought to home systems, as Irem preferred to make the all-new R-Type III for the Super NES in 1994.
9) Asura Blade/Buster
There aren’t that many underrated fighting games from the 1990s. The arcade-going public embraced most of the good ones and even a couple of the really awful ones. This makes Fuuki’s two-game Asura series all the more curious. It’s a little trite in its premise (a post-apocalyptic world where magic and technology meet!), but the artwork is solid and there’s a creative character or two sprinkled amid the beefy swordsmen and busty swordswomen. It looks like a cross between Capcom’s Darkstalkers and SNK’s Samurai Shodown, and Asura Blade borrows from both. It’s faster than the usual weapons-based fighter, and there’s a good dynamic to the battles. The sequel, Asura Buster, improves on all of this in various little ways.
Why No One Played It:
Neither Asura fighter was released in English or on a home system, and Asura Buster’s 1998 launch missed the chewy center of the fighting-game craze by a few years. When Asura Buster arrived in 2000, it simply wasn’t different enough.
80s Arcade Games Machines
8) Undercover Cops
Undercover Cops is all about the details. This brawler finds three vigilantes cleaning up a thug-infested city, and every piece of that city shows the dense, grimy graphics that Irem designers did so well (and later did in SNK’s Metal Slug series). And Undercover Cops has plenty of little gameplay touches: the heroes can swing around girders and stone pillars, while everything from fish to junked Humvees can be thrown at your greasy opponents. In fact, you can even install-kill the first level’s boss by chucking him into a trash compactor. And he can do the same to you, because fair’s fair.
Why No One Played It:
Spotlight-stealing fighting games weren’t the only problem facing Undercover Cops. It was also rushed. Back in 1993, Irem released a scaled-down version of the game in Western markets, while Japan got an improved edition with more moves, music, and visual touches. Irem later tried to make up for it by releasing the Japanese version overseas as an “Alpha: Renewal Version,” but no one really cared by that point.
7) The Legend of Valkyrie
The arcade games of old weren’t much for long epics. Most were short, easily grasped quests that followed a straight line. So Namco’s The Legend of Valkyrie stood out when it featured a sprawling world and gameplay that resembled one of Nintendo’s early Zelda titles. A superior sequel to a mediocre Famicom title, The Legend of Valkyrie sends a Norse battle-maiden hopping all over the place in her mission to save all humanity. It’s part shooter and part action-RPG, and Valkyrie gains new magic and weapons in each branching stage. A naked lizardman joins her for the two-player mode, even though he’s probably not part of the Norse pantheon.
Why No One Played It:
Only Japan got The Legend of Valkyrie back in 1989, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the game was translated into English (for a PlayStation compilation). In fact, most of the games that feature Namco’s Valkyrie heroine aren’t released in North America.
—-
6) Cyberbots/Armored Warriors
Cyberbots and Armored Warriors aren’t arcade games so much as they’re big, sloppy kisses that Capcom bestowed upon giant-robot anime. Armored Warriors, a 1994 brawler, showed this affection in numerous clashes between superbly designed mecha. The game only made a few breaks with the beat-’em-up formula (such as the ability to steal enemy parts), but the robots sure looked cool.
Cyberbots, a head-to-head fighter, reused all of those robots in 1995 and got much better results. The mecha are all piloted by a stylish array of warriors, cyborgs, rebels, and stranger characters, all the work of incomparable artist Kinu Nishimura. With that grounding, Cyberbots becomes a mecha nerd’s dream as towering machines of war wreck each other everywhere from deep-sea trenches to the streets of orbital colonies.
Why No One Played It:
We could blame the general bias that North American nerds apparently have against “serious” Gundam-style anime robots, but there’s another reason. Cyberbots was a bit too shallow to rope in the fighting-game fans who dedicate their lives to Street Fighter II combos. At least it didn’t fade completely away. Jin Saotome, the ostensible hero of Cyberbots, appeared in the first two Marvel Vs. Capcom fighters.
5) Guardians
Sure, Banpresto’s Guardians looks like a generic brawler at first. It’s all about a futuristic street war waged by anime superheroes, and those superheroes seem unremarkable. There’s a Captain Commando lookalike, a robot, a wrestler, a monster, a ninja, a different kind of ninja, and, shockingly enough, two women who aren’t wearing all that much.
But here’s the hook: each character has an impressive lineup of special moves (better than most one-on-one fighters of the day), and all of those moves can be chained together. It alleviates a lot of the repetition that often drags down games like this, and Guardians even throws in some shooting levels similar to Capcom’s awesome Alien Vs. Predator arcade beat-’em-up (which is, regrettably, too well-known to put on this list). And Guardians isn’t as bland as its cast might suggest. There’s quite a bit of background humor in the game — including two thugs caught making out inside a model castle.
Why No One Played It:
Like Undercover Cops, Guardians had the rotten luck of being an under-distributed brawler at a time when everyone wanted Street Fighter knock-offs. It was even overshadowed by some high-profile games from its own genre (such as the above-mentioned Alien Vs. Predator). Guardians was ahead of its time, but that didn’t attract kids who wanted to play Primal Rage instead.
4) The Outfoxies
The Outfoxies isn’t really a fighting game. It’s better. In this Namco game, players are dropped into a war among elite assassins, and their battles are staged in huge stages where just about everything is a weapon, be it a rocket launcher, a crate, or a pool of hungry sharks. The levels are also inventive spreads where the characters catch rides with trapeze artists, leap between train cars, and drop a life-size replica of a blue whale on each other. The assassins themselves have two stock Bond-type heroes and lumbering Jaws knock-off, but they also include an inventor in his robotic wheelchair, an actress and her pet iguana, and a chimp in a top hat and tails.
Why No One Played It:
Once again, fighting games were the problem. They loomed too large when the Outfoxies arrived in 1994. What’s more, this isn’t a game immediately appreciated, since the characters are small and the zooming perspective is confusing at first. But there’s plenty below that surface.
80s Arcade Games App
3) Ninja Baseball Bat Man
Great art is often unappreciated in its own age. Videogames suffer the same fate, whether they’re real art or not (feel free to fight about this in the comments). So perhaps it was too much to expect the arcade-playing public of 1993 to embrace Ninja Baseball Bat Man. It’s a brilliantly strange idea, devised by Irem of America employee Drew Maniscalco and brought to life by the company’s Japanese programmers. It has four robotic ninja baseball players hunting down stolen memorabilia in a world where just about everything’s themed around the sport: in place of street punks, the Bat Men pound living baseballs, bats, gloves, and cyborg catcher gear. It’s all doused in delightful cartoon silliness and a funky soundtrack. Plus there’s a bonus stage where you squeeze a baseball as hard as you can. And the baseball’s glaring at you the whole time.
Why No One Played It:
Poor distribution, for one thing. On his website, Maniscalco states that the game was promoted half-heartedly, with fewer than 50 units shipping to American arcades. Ninja Baseball Bat Man fared better in Japan and Asia, but it didn’t come into its own until the modern era. Today, it’s praised by everyone from the Angry Video Game Nerd to preteens who’ve just discovered MAME. It’s a shame that Irem’s all but given up on games these days, or else we might see more of Ninja Baseball Bat Man.
2) ESP Ra.De.
Cave’s ESP Ra.De. is an atypical shooter, and not just because it features psychic teenagers in place of heavily armed spaceships. As those Akira-esque teens shred through a multitude of tanks, jets, and rival espers, they have three different weapons at their command. Most effective is a powerful shield than can be charged up and unleashed in a burst of screen-wiping destruction. There’s a creative flow to the game’s power-up system, which lets you recharge your energy field if you’re good enough, and the enemies are fierce and abundant. Cave’s currently famous for over-the-top “bullet hell” shooters that swamp the player with multicolored shots, but ESP Ra.De. finds an enjoyable spot between “strategic” and “OH GOD ALL THESE BULLETS WHAT DO I DO.”
Why No One Played It:
ESP Ra.De. wasn’t distributed all that well outside of Japan, and Cave didn’t do all that much to promote it after the fact. Even though it led to the ESPgaluda series (available as close as your iPhone), ESP Ra.De. was never given a proper, full-bodied home version. Perhaps it just doesn’t have enough creepy schoolgirls to suit Cave’s current shooter catalog.
1) Aquario of the Clockwork
We’re willing to bet that no one reading this played Aquario of the Clockwork. In order to get your hands on it, you had to be at a few specific arcades in Japan during the summer of 1993. The game was location-tested there by Westone, makers of the delightful Wonder Boy and Monster World games. Aquario was created in the same cheerful, vibrant side-scrolling style, plus it had a multiplayer mode and let you pick up and throw both enemies and allies. Alas, few people cared about Aquario in the age of fighting games, and Westone quietly dropped it.
Why No One Played It:
Aquario was never officially released, that’s why. But all hope is not lost. The website Hardcore Gaming 101 recently interviewed Westone co-founder Ryuichi Nishizawa and asked him about Aquario. The question inspired Nishiszawa to dig through Westone’s archives and find the source code for the game. So far, he’s pulled up sprites of the three main characters (above) and other animations that show off the sort of awesome, upbeat Mario-ish platformers that Westone made many times back in the early 1990s. Nishizawa’s currently chronicling the game’s restoration on Twitter, and he’d like to hear from anyone who wants to play Aquario. And you should want to, if you have any love for side-scrolling action games.
- The 15 Greatest Science Fiction-Based Pop/Rock Songs
?As subject matter for rock, pop, and hip-hop songs, speculative fiction
Why sissies? Because the notoriously hard Mega Man game has finally