Do you remember being able to play awesome arcade games at just 25 cents each? These days, if you want to play a cool game it cost around $60 or more. Sure the games have dramatically changed and there’s a reason as to why they cost more but, nothing beats the old times where you could just pop in 25 cents and have a couple minutes of some fun. Before you know it, that couple minutes of fun ended up turning into several minutes of fun as you kept on putting in more and more quarters to reach the next level of the game. I can also remember my parents anxiously waiting for me to finish the game and saying hurry up and I would tell them – just 5 more minutes please!
Check out these 10 Retro Arcade Games We Miss Today
10. Area 51 – 1995 arcade game
Atari Games released Area 51 back in 1995. It was considered to be one of the light gun arcade games. In this game you have to attack any aliens soldiers who might be genetically altered and at the same time of trying to bring them down, you cannot harm any of your STAAR team. The aliens only appear once you reach the office level and when that happens you’ve got to be fast and shoot them down. Oh, how I still love to play this game and now I also play it on my PC!
9. Mortal Kombat – 1992 arcade game
Midway Games Chicago studio developed Mortal Kombat as an arcade game back in 1992. Later on it became the property of the Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The classic Mortal Kombat game had a variety of sequels and then many action games and films spawned off from those sequels. Users had a variety of characters that they could pick from. Over the years Mortal Kombat changed the graphics on the game and made them look much better.
8. Tempest – 1981 arcade game
Tempest was released in 1981 and was developed by Atari Inc. Dave Theurer originally programmed this game and designed it. It was considered to be a tube shooter game. Back in its day the game was extremely popular and there were a lot of sequels of the game due to its popularity. There were some levels of difficulty and there was an even option that allowed you to skip out on the early levels of the game if you didn’t want to play them. Most of the games today don’t give you that choice.
7. Space Invaders – 1978 arcade game
Space Invaders was released back in 1978 and this was another very popular game. It might not have been as popular as Tempest but many people loved the game. Tomohiro Nishikado was the one who developed the game. In Japan, Taito sold and manufactured it originally but then later the Midway Division of Bally purchased it. This game was one of the earliest arcade shooting games. There were waves of aliens and they had to be defeated.
6. Galaga – 1981 arcade game
This was a sequel to the 1979 arcade game, Galaxian but the sequel ended up becoming extremely popular. It was very similar to Space Invaders but it was also a lot more advanced. The features of the game were more advanced and users could move around horizontally. In fact, the ones who wrote the Lost series loved Galaga so much that they would take breaks from writing and play Galaga during their break.
5. Pole Position – 1982 Arcade Game
Pole Position was a fun racing arcade video game that was released by Atari, inc in 1982. I don’t know how many of you all know this but by 1983 the game Pole Position was one of the highest grossing racing arcade games in North America. Over 21,000 Pole Position games were sold and the weekly revenues per machine was very high. I think it’s safe to say that this game was one of the most successful classic racing games of its time.
4. Frogger – 1981 Arcade Game
The game Frogger was distributed by Sega-Gremlin in 1981. This game was very popular. All players had to do was just help the frogs get to their homes. Sounds easy enough, right? Guess again. In order to get them home the frogs had to avoid a lot of cars and not get hit when they were crossing the busy roads. They also had to navigate in a river that had many hazards in it. Players who were very good at this would also get bonuses. Frogger still remains popular today and there are lots of ways and you can also play it online.
3. Asteroids – 1979 Arcade Game
This game was released in 1979 and was a famous arcade shooting game. Players had to shoot the asteroids but that wasn’t all, the game also had flying saucers and players had to shoot those along with the asteroids. The game was so popular that they had to have a maximum score of 99,990 and once it hits that score, it was then reset back to 0 and players had to start all over again.
2. Battlezone – 1980 Arcade Game
Back in 1980 the shooting arcade game Battlezone was released. The object of the game was to guide the tanks across the terrain. In the process of guiding them across it you had to avoid and destroy any enemy tanks, missiles or UFOs. David Palmer, a fan of Battlezone, set a new world record with scoring 23,000,000 points on the game back in 1985. He stopped playing after 23 hours with 4 lives remaining. To this day, no one has scored as many points as he did with this game.
1. Pac-Man – 1980 Arcade Game
When Pac-Man was released in 1980 it became one of the most popular arcade video games of its time and it’s still popular today. There were other derivates of Pac-Man but still, Pac-Man remains the most popular one. It’s also marked as one of the highest grossing video games of all time and has generated over $2.5 billion by the 1990’s and it still continues to make a lot of sales even today.
Conclusion
There are many other famous arcade games that I did not mention such as Street Fighter, Dragon’s Lair, Donkey Kong and Dig Dug. If you didn’t miss playing arcade games before reading this, do you miss them now?