The 10 most influential video games as of 1985

I've been reworking my DDG grapher program - the one responsible for that chart in the Data Driven Gamer banner and others which I used to use more frequently in retrospectives. On the surface, it doesn't appear any different, but the data sources are normalized. On the downside, this means I had to discard about a hundred corrections that don't fit the format, but on the upside, I can run queries on it now! And I thought it might be interesting to query this - what games, measured by both breadth and depth of influence, have been the most influential?

I won't go into the exact formula, but it is points-based, and the main factors considered are - what games did it influence, how strong or direct are the lines of influence, and how important are they? Magnavox's Table Tennis, though it directly influenced Pong, didn't really impact anything else of importance, and it itself is therefore not ranked as highly as Pong. Pong, conversely, directly spawned hundreds of clones, but the vast majority are irrelevant today and do nothing for Pong's score.

You'll need to click on the charts in order to read them legibly, and then probably only if you have a pretty big monitor! You might even want to open them in a new tab.

 

10: Asteroids

 

 

Atari's most successful video game of all time plays like an update of their own Computer Space, which in turn drew heavily from SpaceWar, which I consider the first important video game, and in turn is the MRCA of that genre, and nearly anything that features 2D space physics.

Apart from the success of Asteroids steering Atari's own direction, and very likely giving vector games a lease on life, there have been dozens of Asteroids clones, and some of them by pretty notable developers. The Stamper Brothers debuted with Vortex in 1980 and led to Ultimate Play the Game, and Rare. Jordan Mechner's first game Deathbounce copied Asteroids, and if nothing else, Broderbund's rejection encouraged him to be more original. Sega's early output included an Asteroidslike Space Fury. And Defender, one of the best and most original arcade games of its era, undoubtedly carries Asteroids in its DNA with its controls, its focus on inertia and wrap-around geometry.

 

9: Pong

By some criteria, Pong is arguably the most influential video game of all time. It's not the first by any reasonable definition, but it proved the industry was commercially viable, and in the earliest years of it, one could say the industry was Pong.

Other games had longer-lasting influence in terms of gameplay mechanics; we don't see all that many Ponglikes past 1980, but before that, Pong launched Atari, where its rebound mechanics would be seen again in games like Breakout and Combat, and hundreds of adaptations and clones, including Sega's Pongtron and Nintendo's Color TV-Game series.

 

8: Space Panic

Described by Chris Crawford as the first ever platform game, Space Panic isn't anywhere near as famous as Asteroids or Pong, and in my estimation, it isn't very good, but pioneering gameplay elements still in use today makes it more influential than either by my metrics.

The ladder-based platform traversal and trap'em up mechanics launched Broderbund into the Apple II era with its weirdly successful Apple Panic and came full circle with the smash hit Lode Runner. Universal themselves would also come full circle, releasing the far superior Mr. Do's Castle in Space Panic's image after years of uninspired shooters. Other notable games made in its image include BurgerTime, Floppy Frenzy, and very possibly another.

 

7. Scramble

Here, we're starting to enter the realm of concrete genre forerunners. Space Panic is a bit, well, alien to the modern concept of a 2D platformer, lacking even a jump mechanic. Konami's Scramble has some quirks that are foreign to the scrolling shmup formula, an arcade mainstay, but it is unmistakably part of that clade. It's these quirks, like bombs, emphasis on terrain, and fuel pickups which help us identify its direct descendants, and few are more direct than Konami's own Gradius, which had to be removed from the graph to keep it readable. Universal's Cosmic Avenger, SNK's Vanguard, and Anco's Cavern Fighter & Skramble copy it unapologetically.

Others take it in some interesting directions; Irem's Moon Patrol is, in my mind, very clearly a Scramble inversion that places the ship on the ground and swaps your bombs for SAM rockets. Alpha Denshi's surreal Jump Bug, also removed from the graph, is said to be the first sidescrolling platformer, but being a multistage autoscroller that runs on Galaxian hardware, I'm pretty sure it owes something to Scramble. Namco's Xevious undoubtedly took direction from it, featuring the same forward-firing guns and surface-targeting bombs but translated to a now-ubiquitous vertically scrolling format. Sega's Zaxxon goes in an even more daring direction, albeit a dead-end one, with a 3D axonometric perspective, which funnily enough winds up feeling more Scramble-like than some of its 2D descendants.

 

6. Donkey Kong

 

A game both massively successful and massively influential, Donkey Kong established Nintendo's dominance and defined platforming for years to come, especially on personal computers where smooth sidescrolling capabilities just weren't ready yet. Atari games Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and Bruce Lee are obvious descendants, as is Electronic Arts' Hard Hat Mack, and a whole bunch of ZX Spectrum platformers, starting with Chuckie Egg.

 

5. Colossal Cave Adventure

Not many games have an entire genre named after them, let alone a mainstream one, but this is the game that adventures get their namesake from. No text adventure but the earliest and/or most obscure have not been influenced by Don Woods' Adventure. Adventureland, a 16KB BASIC reduction was the first, we see multiple points of entry into the catalogs of Infocom and especially Sierra On-Line, and we're by no means done seeing its influence in this blog, even as graphic adventures start becoming viable enough to make text adventures commercially obsolete. Rogue, another, nicher game lending its namesake to a genre is known to have been influenced too, as is Atari's Adventure.

 

4. Breakout

We're reaching the point where I need to really start pruning back items from the graph to keep it from being unreadably cluttered. Several branches are omitted entirely.

Breakout was the first DDG whale, and even more so than Pong, it seems like every Japanese developer of the era, big or small, got their start with a Breakout clone. Sunsoft, Namco, Konami, SNK, Sega, Nintendo, Universal, Irem, you name it. Atari themselves would expand on the formula with Avalanche and Super Breakout, which influenced other games in turn, notably Activision's Kaboom, and we're not done with Breakout clones yet.

Breakout also steered the direction of the Apple ]['s hardware and firmware capabilities to some extent, as designer Steve Wozniak wished to recreate it. It also is known to have been a direct influence on one of the most significant video games of all time.

 

3. Pac-Man

Everyone knows Pac-Man, right? It's only the most profitable arcade game franchise of all time. Like Breakout, Pac-Man has an obscene number of imitators, but if Breakout clones were almost universally unimaginatively derivative, Pac-Man had a refreshingly diverse spawn of games that were clearly following in its footsteps, but also distinguished themselves in a variety of interesting ways. Oil's Well had its break-neck pace and pipeline-laying gimmick. Lock 'n Chase had its maze-reconfiguring barriers and a layer of strategy that came with them. Lady Bug had revolving doors and a pinball-inspired scoring element. Blueprint (again with the Stampers!) had its machine assembling and that bizarre, googly-eye-filled aesthetic that Rare would be known for. Bomb Jack took Pac-Man's scoring system and developed it into an intricate and complex system that challenged you to navigate its bomb-filled stages with precision and grace. And, of course, Midway's Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior took the formula in their own distinct directions without overcomplicating its purity.

Namco's own Tower of Druaga would also springboard off Pac-Man's mazes and powerups to inspire a whole new aspect of gaming, but we won't be seeing that come into its own for quite some time.

 

2. Galaxian

 

With its colorful graphics and its comparatively elaborate attack formations, Galaxian might be an iterative improvement on Space Invaders, but enough of one that it quickly became the new go-to title to clone, both for the arcade industry and for bedroom micro programmers. Which leads right into our #1,

 

1. Space Invaders

 

Come on, you had to know this would be #1. Even in the brief few years it took for Galaxian to replace Space Invaders as the new standard, Space Invaders had spread its influence far and wide and at a pace faster than Breakout before it could dream of. Companies that copied Breakout now copied Space Invaders. Companies that didn't exist before copied Space Invaders. And in the years following Galaxian, the industry had gotten mature and diverse enough that blatant copying was beginning to get slightly blasé.

Space Invaders permanently affected the direction of video gaming, perfected the mechanic of "shoot things with your laser," introduced round-based difficulty curves, and to this day there is virtually no action game which can't be traced back to Space Invaders in some manner.

I expect that as my master graph continues to grow into 1986 and beyond, many of the games on this top ten will lose rank, especially Galaxian. But not Space Invaders. I've argued that Space Invaders' importance is often exaggerated, but never that it isn't the most influential game of all time.

Superauthenticity: Arcade game aspect ratios

Photo by redditor AKJVermont

Early-to-golden-age arcade games, with bespoke video hardware and no real standards, pose some unique properties concerning aspect ratio and resolution. Among them are:

• Vertically-oriented monitors
• Vector monitors with point-plot resolution
• Non-standard monitor configurations
• Variable resolutions

Most of these games, even back then, were designed for a 15Khz 4:3 monitor. Even vertically-oriented arcade games would simply output a 90-degree rotated display and expect the monitor to be rotated likewise; MAME thankfully automates this for you by default. For the most part, you can achieve a reasonably authentic aspect ratio in MAME by simply letting it do its thing.

However, my superauthenticity theory speculates that some games simply didn't account for the distorting effect that non-square pixels would have on the final display, and if these games could be identified, then authentic aspect ratio is a flaw, and by using square pixels, instead of a corrected 4:3 aspect ratio, their presentation could be enhanced in a non-destructive manner.

I'm not even going to examine pixel aspect ratio here; it's too complicated to delve into that for such a wide variety of video display types, and arcade games generally had more precise video signals than console games of the day did, with much less overscan. I've already explained why it's bad to assume 4:3 DAR is authentic, but if I'm going to analyze arcade games, it's too much trouble not to.

 

Atari 

Breakout

Data Driven Gamer's first ever whale defies resolution analysis. MAME considers the resolution to be 896x252, but a raw screenshot captures at 228x1440. In reality, the video hardware was analog and any resolution capture is just an approximation.

Just let MAME deal with it. It's fine.

 

Centipede

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

At 240x256 resolution, raw pixels give Centipede a nearly square screen layout. A vertical layout with authentically thin pixels just looks better. Right down to the font.

Verdict: 3:4

 

Star Wars

DAR:	Raw 4:3

Internally, Star Wars has a 'tall' resolution of 502x562, but this is a horizontal game. But since it plays on a vector monitor, resolution doesn't work in a typical way; 502x562 is effectively a grid of positions from which lines segments may begin or end. The line segments themselves are not bound to this grid (no staircases! no aliasing!), and because of that, the game's effective resolution is limitless.

Incidentally, vector games are a situation where I feel pixel shaders are appropriate for screenshot documentation purposes. I never use them for screenshotting raster games, as they are destructive to the raw image data, but vector games don't have raw image data, at least not in any sense that would produce a pleasing visual.

As for the best aspect ratio, MAME does provide an option to play at a tall aspect ratio, and in some ways, this actually looks better than 4:3. Fonts and 2D screen elements seem more natural, and the iconic Star Wars text crawl looks better this way. 

DAR:	Raw 4:3

But the Death Star is round in 4:3, and narrow in tallscreen, so it's clear that the artists gave some thought to the 4:3 aspect ratio. They just weren't consistent about it.

Verdict: 4:3

 

Marble Madness

Marble Madness runs slightly pillarboxed but has an output resolution of 336x240, which is extremely close to 4:3. I expect this was deliberate.

 

Paperboy

Running on a high-for-its-time-resolution 25Khz monitor at 512x384, Paperboy was designed for square pixels, and there's no other option.

 

Gauntlet

Another 336x240 resolution Atari game.

 

I think we can conclude from this that arcade game manufacturers like Atari considered display aspect ratio pretty much from the beginning. Star Wars was the only time that there was any inconsistency - I guess vector math is hard enough without also having to worry about aspect ratio. But let's look at some more, by other companies.

 

Namco 

Galaxian

DAR:	Raw 3:4 7:8

Galaxian is an odd case. The playfield, which is rendered by tile-mapping hardware, is 224x256, a 7:8 ratio. But the starfield behind it is generated independently of Galaxian's tile mapper.

Stars are not exactly pixels, but analog pulses of color on each scanline (which run vertically, not horizontally). Since each star is generated on a single scanline, a star's width is the same as a playfield pixel, but its height is smaller than one, and its vertical position can be anywhere.

MAME has to work with pixels, though, and simulates this by rendering 224 scanlines, but treats each one as being 768 pixels tall, and renders the 224x256 playfield with triple-tall pixels to fit. The simulated starfield is then 224x768, which provides a reasonable approximation of Galaxian's sub-pixel stars.

So in this case, the "raw" 224x768 resolution is definitely wrong and isn't intended to be right. Bringing the display in alignment with the playfield's 7:8 aspect ratio simply requires tripling the pixels horizontally. But an authentic 3:4 aspect ratio just looks more correct, I think.

Verdict: 3:4

Pac-Man

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

At 224x288 resolution, Pac-Man is pretty close to a natural 3:4 aspect ratio, but different enough that some stretching occurs. But not so different, it seems, that Iwatani felt it necessary to account for this. Square pixels make Pac-Man perfectly round, the dots perfectly square, and the maze perfectly geometric.

Verdict: Square pixels

 

 

Dig Dug

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

Another 224x288 game. Similarly, I think this looks just a bit more correct without the aspect ratio correction.

Verdict: Square pixels

Xevious

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

Same resolution. Same thoughts.

Verdict: Square pixels

Pole Position

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Pole Position runs at 256x224 with fat pixels... but it just looks unnaturally stretched out that way.

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Overall, Namco seems less concerned with precise display aspect ratio than Atari did, but again, it's not consistent. Galaxian, one of their earliest games, looks better at an authentic 3:4 aspect ratio, and Pole Position, one of their most advanced of the era, looks better with square pixels, but the majority of their games ran at 288x224 where it doesn't make that much of a difference. I suspect that was a deliberate choice.

 

Midway 

Wizard of Wor

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Wizard of Wor runs at 352x240 and does a similar thing as Galaxian where the starfield signal is independent of the playfield pixels, but MAME doesn't use any resolution tricks to simulate this.

An authentic 4:3 requires thin pixels, and I think this looks better. 

Verdict: 4:3

 

Tapper

DAR:	Raw 4:3

Let's look the logo that Budweiser used in the early 80's:

With fat pixels, the bartender is a bit pudgy, but that banner is a pretty close match!

Verdict: 4:3

 

Spy Hunter

DAR:	Raw 3:4

Spy Hunter's got an interesting resolution of 480x480, though this is one of those situations where the sprites are drawn at a higher resolution than the background layer and MAME just uses that as the overall canvas. Long story short, Spy Hunter only looks right with thin pixels.

Verdict: 3:4

Midway, it seems, was not afraid of experimenting with strange (and often high) resolutions, and understood how to use non-square pixels.

Konami

Super Cobra

DAR:	Raw 3:4 7:8

Super Cobra and Scramble run on the Galaxian board and have the same resolution oddities due to the starfield generator.

As with Galaxian, 3:4 looks better than triple-wide pixels. 

Verdict: 3:4

 

Frogger

DAR:	Raw 3:4 7:8

We're still on Galaxian hardware, but this time the starfield generator doesn't do anything, and we're just looking at a 224x256 playfield where every pixel is tripled in height for no reason.

An authentic 3:4 once again looks the most natural.

Verdict: 3:4

 

Gyruss

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

We're off Galaxian hardware, finally, and running at 224x256. This title screen, with the round earth, is the strongest evidence that Konami was taking non-square pixels into account.

Verdict: 3:4

Rush'n Attack

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

So much for consistency! Rush'n Attack looks terrible at 4:3.

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Gradius

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Gradius has a bit more horizontal resolution than Rush'n Attack, and because of it, the 4:3 stretch isn't as pronounced, but I think this still looks better without it.

Verdict: Square pixels 

 

Nintendo

Donkey Kong

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

We've looked at this one before when analyzing NES games' aspect ratios, and concluded that more often than not, Nintendo didn't really account for pixel aspect ratio, but sometimes they did. Donkey Kong on NES was an example where they did not; the arcade game has thin pixels and a vertical orientation, the NES has fat pixels and a horizontal orientation, and while the NES version's layout was reworked to account for this, the sprites and tiles were not.

But with the arcade original, I think they did account for the thin pixels. The rolling barrel looks rounder that way, and DK himself looks more proportionate, as do Mario and Pauline.

Verdict: 3:4

 

Donkey Kong Junior

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

DKJr likewise looks better with thin pixels.

Verdict: 3:4

 

Popeye

DAR:	Raw 4:3

Popeye is another one of those weird cases where the sprites are drawn with much smaller pixels than the playfield pixels are. MAME gives it a canvas of 512x448.

Honestly, I think this looks better without aspect ratio correction. 

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Mario Bros.

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

I noted before that both the arcade and NES versions of Mario Bros. seem better to me with square pixels. I still feel that way.

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Williams

Defender

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Defender runs at 292x240 resolution, which is pretty close to 4:3 but does stretch a bit to fit. The graphics are a bit abstract, but I don't really feel that the stretch is an improvement.

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Robotron: 2084

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Robotron has the same resolution as Defender, and this time I feel pretty certain the graphics are better left unstretched.

Verdict: Square pixels

Joust

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Joust also runs at 292x240, and looks a bit better without aspect correction.

Verdict: Square pixels

Sega

Zaxxon

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

Sega's Zaxxon is, unambiguously, intended for thin pixels. It features a true isometric projection, but this needs the 3:4 aspect to be seen correctly.

Verdict: 3:4

 

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom

DAR:	Raw Double scan 4:3

Buck Rogers involves some analog video processing and MAME simulates this by setting the canvas at 224 scanlines of 512 pixels each. A double scan results in a resolution of 512x448. To me, this looks better than an authentic 4:3, which looks a bit too stretched horizontally. Either is better than raw output, obviously.

Verdict: Double scan

Space Harrier

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Space Harrier runs at 320x224, which is the same resolution that a lot of Genesis games would eventually run at, and has thin pixels on a 4:3 monitor. It's slight, but it's better this way.

Verdict: 4:3

Capcom

1942

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

This looks a touch better at the thinner 3:4, I think.

Verdict: 3:4 

 

Commando

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 3:4

Commando likewise looks better at 3:4.

Verdict: 3:4

Ghosts 'n Goblins

Scaling:	1x 2x
DAR:	Raw 4:3

But this one, which I did not and will not cover, looks better raw! 4:3 Arthur just seems a bit out of shape for this adventure. 

Verdict: Square pixels

 

Before this dive, I had a theory that western developers were more inclined to take pixel aspect ratio into account. Based on this sample, I can't say my theory is substantiated. While there does seem to be some correlation between region and aspect ratio awareness, it's not a strong one. Every Japanese developer here had at least some games that looked better with an authentic aspect ratio, and all of Williams' games look better with square pixels.

But there is another divide which seems much stronger - vertical vs. horizontal.

Almost every vertically-oriented game I compared looked better with a correct 3:4 aspect ratio. The sole exceptions were three by Namco, which ran very close to 3:4 anyway.

The horizontal games, on the other hand, for the most part looked better with square pixels. All of the exceptions had some unusual pixel properties; Midway's games run at strange resolutions with pixels that are either thin or very fat. Space Harrier uses thin pixels. Star Wars doesn't use pixels at all. The rest of the horizontal games here all have pixels with a PAR between 1.09 and 1.25, and I find they all look nicer with a PAR of 1.

Maybe I just have a bias towards thin pixels? I think it will be interesting to revisit this topic in the future, as vertically-oriented arcade games start to become less common, outside of niche genres.

Games 441-442: Tank Battalion & Battle City

Our next whale, Namco's Battle City, is a minor one, and is one of the earliest third-party games developed specifically for the Famicom.

As it is a successor to an even lesser non-whale, I'll be playing that first.

Game 441: Tank Battalion

Scan by The Arcade Flyer Archive

 

It's hard to believe it, but this ugly-looking, clumsily-playing maze shooter came out almost simultaneously with the sublime Pac-Man! It feels like it should be a generation older.

I get ahead of myself, but Tank Battalion isn't very impressive.

The idea is fairly original and anticipates some aspects of tower defense strategy, making it a welcome break from the countless Space Invaders clones of the time. You drive a tank through a fully destructible maze and have to protect your base, represented by an eagle insignia, from an enemy tank battalion. This would be impossible if they were smart enough to coordinate and flank your base from multiple directions at once, but the AI is erratic and very stupid, so instead this is merely frustrating. The tanks don't pose much threat to you, but you can't be everywhere at once, your own firepower is limited to one shot on screen at a time, which can easily miss thanks to the enemies' unpredictable movements, and if they land a single hit on the base, it's an instant game over no matter how many spare lives you have. Consequently, there are times when you may want to sacrificially throw your own tank in front of an incoming shell in order to save the base and reset the attack pattern.

Both you and the enemies can destroy walls in the maze, which ought to provide a lot of strategic options that you otherwise wouldn't have. But this feels like wasted potential - you can only strategize so much when the enemies follow no discernible pattern or logic, and methods of reshape the maze to your advantage feel limited to optimizing your own mobility through it. Perhaps there are reliable mazing strategies that come with experience and feel, but thanks to poor framerate and unresponsive controls, I felt no desire to stick with it any longer than I did - after beating the third wave, where the maze walls disappear entirely, I decided that I'd seen enough.

GAB rating: Below average, borderline bad. The concept is decent, but it's clunky and not much fun.

Game 442: Battle City

Cover hosted by Mobygames

 

I have no idea how this Japan-exclusive Famicom cartridge got over 50 Mobygames votes - that's not a lot, but it's more than the likes of Balloon Fight and Bomberman. Unlike those, I'd never heard of Battle City before.

This successor follows the same formula as Tank Battalion before it, but with a battery of big improvements.

• Solid near-60fps framerate and responsive controls
• Greater terrain variety
  
• 35 distinct levels with level select option
  
• Level editor with cassette saves
• Two player simultaneous action
• Four enemy tank types with differing levels of speed, armor, firepower, and aggression
• Powerup system
  

 

Since this has a two-player option - one that's implicitly cooperative with you two against the battalion but with a competitive scoring aspect (and the possibility of "accidental" friendly fire), I played this one with "B," who takes player two in the below video.

 

And, well, this is a major improvement over the original! It still doesn't feel very strategic, but I can live with that thanks to much smoother controls and faster gameplay, which makes Battle City feel arcadier than its coin-op predecessor. Levels feel more like battle maps than abstract Pac-Man-like mazes, thanks to zanier designs and terrain variety with features like view-obstructing trees and water which blocks tanks but not your shorts.

The new powerup system also provides a strategic element - killing a super tank will spawn one somewhere in the stage, and these are quite desirable, including effects such as freezing all enemies in place, upgrading your cannon, extra lives, or even just clearing the screen. But it might not spawn in a convenient spot, and they vanish after a few seconds - do you disengage from your current melee to get it, do you keep fighting and try to win quickly enough that you still have time to get it, or do you ignore it?

We played for not quite 20 minutes and made it to level 13 before we got bored and decided to quit. "B" played with a riskier, more aggressive style than myself, where he spawn camped and racked up more kills and points than I did, but also lost his own lives quicker.

GAB rating: Above average.

This was fun, and one of the better early-generation Famicom games I've played. I'm sure that the level editor would have provided lots of replay value back in the day. If it were 1985 and my only gaming system was a Famicom, this would have been one of my favorite video games. But it isn't - it got repetitive eventually, and I'm not at all eager to go back and finish any of the unplayed levels.

Game 374-376: Missed arcade golden age classics

Our next whale, Tecmo's 1984 title Bomb Jack, is a lesser one that's probably more famous for its ports to the 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and its NES sequel than for the original arcade release.

The early arcade works of Tecmo - then called Tehkan - are informed by some golden age classics which had been moderately successful in their day but failed to secure much historical legacy, and didn't make whale status. For this post, I am covering these games for the first time, as ancestors.

 

Game 374: Head On

 

Developed in 1979 by Sega & then-partner Gremlin Industries, Head On is, in a word, stressful. 

Driving a car around and around a course of concentric encircling lanes, your goal is to collect all of the dots while a rival driving around the course in the opposite direction tries his darnedest to crash into you, for some perverse reason.

Similarities to Pac-Man are impossible to ignore, though without any solid evidence that Iwatani took cues here, I'm content to assume them coincidental. But while Pac-Man's mechanics afforded the player occasional breathers from the manic chase - power pills, escape tunnels, and AI patterns that alternate between "pursue" and "scatter" on an interval, Head On offers no respite from its suicidal chicken game. Wind up in the same lane as the red car and miss your opportunity to change lanes, and you crash. Change lanes too late, and you crash. Change lanes too early, and the red car changes lanes right with you and you crash. Misjudge your own lane, or misjudge which lane the red car is going to take, and you probably crash. Fail to enter the lane-changing zone at just the right time, which gets increasingly difficult to reckon as the round drags on and the red car gets faster, and you probably won't be able to avoid a crash.

There's a puzzle-like element seen here determining the optimal route to hit all of the dots without crashing. The red car's AI is simple and almost entirely deterministic, reacting mainly to your changes in position by honing in on it. You can accelerate, but at top speed you may only change one lane at a time while at standard speed you can cross two, which is often necessary in order to survive.

I only managed to reach the third round once, where you go up against two cars instead of one. I didn't last long at all - in fact the entire game lasted not even two and a half minutes. Even this meager victory was neither enjoyable nor rewarding.

GAB rating: Bad. Head On is too simplistic, too stressful, and too punishing. Pac-Man may or may not have been influenced by this, but either way, this just isn't it.

Game 375: Rally-X

 

Released by Namco a few months after Pac-Man, Rally-X is ostensibly another maze chase game, but unlike Iwatani's pizza-shaped sensation, openly takes after Head On, though it more resembles Pac-Man in all ways except for theme. Racecars chase you through a maze - a four-way scrolling maze far bigger than Pac-Man's single screen - as you try to collect ten flags scattered throughout.

The large maze makes all the difference here, and frankly it isn't for the better. Skillful twisting and turning - or use of the smoke screen weapon - can put several screens of distance between you and your enemies, which was obviously impossible in Pac-Man, but since the screen can't show you the whole maze at once, and the game speed is much faster, you can't really develop Pac-Man's type of complex evasion strategies either. Here, enemies pop in from off-screen, your only advance warning being a small radar display showing their approximate positions, and will crash into you under a second.

 

Scoring hasn't got much nuance either. Doing well in Pac-Man requires developing tactics to clump ghosts together so you can eat them all in one go, but here, you're rewarded mainly for efficiency - finishing quickly and with minimal use of smoke screen gives you a larger bonus for remaining fuel. The only other factor is a special flag which doubles the value of all subsequent ones, worth up to 4,500 extra points if you collect it before all others, and it is absolutely not worth spending time prowling the maze to find it and ensure you get it first.

Retrogame Deconstruction Zone offers an insightful and more thorough comparison that I recommend for further reading.

I made it to round 6 in my best attempt before getting bored. I'd have stuck with it longer back when I was playing 1980 whales, but for whatever reason I just don't have as much patience for these early arcade games as I used to.

GAB rating: Above average. This is fine, definitely a better game than Head On, but it's no Pac-Man.

I should note - in 1981, Namco followed up with New Rally-X, which is a big improvement over the original. I prefer the original game's earthier colors and music, but New Rally-X plays more fairly, with a gradualized difficulty curve, mazes with fewer dead-ends, fewer cars, and the special flag is highlighted on the radar, making it actually viable to go for it early instead of just hoping you luck into it (a new "lucky" flag supplants that niche). I do think it errs a bit on the easy side - reducing the vehicles makes it takes longer for things to get challenging - but slightly too easy is better than unfairly hard.

Game 376: Phoenix

Phoenix might be the most notable of these missed classics. There's an air of mystery about it. 

For one, no other game of its era, or indeed any era, quite looks like this, with so many sprites moving around the screen in erratic unison, animated so fluidly, and yet a bit jerkily, being somehow both evolved years ahead of its time and not quite up to par for its time. This surreal look and feel, motivated by the unconventional technique of using animated background tiles in lieu of hardware sprites to draw everything (a technique which Galaxian also utilized but committed to less fully), is difficult to appreciate when looking back from games of 1984, but we need only compare it to Rally-X to observe just how different Phoenix looks from anything else in its generation.

We also don't know for sure who made this game. Mobygames credits Amstar Electronics (their sole sitewide credit!), but a trade magazine sourced on Wikipedia notes Amstar as the manufacturer of the U.S. cocktail table version as a counterpart to Centuri's upright cabinet version. There are many early and obscure video games whose developers are unknown, especially from Japan, but Phoenix may be unique among them as a multinational hit, which brought its respective manufacturers money and fame and spawned a strong selling console conversion and multiple imitations.

Phoenix's Galaxian-inspired gameplay unfolds in a loop of five stages, and is possibly the first of its kind to.

In the first, things indeed look very much like Galaxian. Small, flying aliens, more resembling bats than the Space Invaders of old and with a slick wing-flapping animation, flit about the screen and swoop down to attack. Unlike Galaxian, these are no simple, predictable dive-bombing passes, but chaotic dances that makes it even more of a challenge to hit them.

Aliens that make it to the bottom tend to linger there for a little while, where they may try to kamikaze your ship, or just hover above at a close range so that hitting them is easy, but avoiding fire should they shoot as you pass below is nearly impossible, making it risky to pass. To help the odds a bit, you have a shield, but it's difficult to use defensively as like so many other shields, by the time you realize you need it it could be too late. It can be used offensively to ram them, but this carries risks too - it immobilizes you for the duration of the shield's pulsations, and sometimes it doesn't even work and the enemy or its shots go right through the shield and destroy you!

The second round is just a repeat of the first round, but you have double the firepower. Both rounds have some tricks to score extra points, but it's peanuts compared to what you can get later. Except for one trick which I've never been able to pull off and is probably a glitch - shooting three aliens in rapid succession during the right animation frames gets you a massive 200,000 points!

 

The next round introduces the phoenixes, large, swooping birds in an eternal cycle of fluidly animated birth, life, and rebirth. Until you shoot a laser up their smug little beaks.

Despite their predictable motion patterns, it is difficult to hit them at any part of their sinusoidal flight paths except at the very crests, which tends to put you in the corner where you are most vulnerable.

Some decent points can be scored here by clipping the birds' wings before finishing them off. The payoff is random and not worth taking unnecessary risks to pursue, but if the opportunity presents, go for it.

Round 4 is just a repeat of round 3 except the birds are pink.

The final round is an attack on the mothership, whose outer hull and inner shield must be blasted apart before landing a shot on the purple commander. You've got three zones of death here - the center, where the mothership fires, and as usual the corners, where you can only escape in one direction when things get hot. The flier support will do its best to drive you into these danger zones!

This fight offers the real jackpot - 8000+ points - and it's risky but well worth it, even if you lose a life in the process. The mothership descends throughout the stage, and each pixel it advances not only makes its bullets harder to dodge, but also shields the fliers from your own bullets, making them deadlier as well. To score big, you must allow it to descend to the lowest point possible before landing the killing shot!

One pixel higher and you get nothing.

Easier said than done, but the best method is to punch away at the center hull early on while it's still possible to dodge the return fire, and then chip away at the rotating shield from the edge where you're safer, and cannot accidentally hit the commander. Kill the fliers when you can - the more you can kill, the less you'll have to deal with while waiting out the mothership's final descent.

I was only able to clear a single loop before feeling done with this game - once again, I think I'd have had more patience and more will to improve had I covered this game years ago rather than now.

GAB rating: Above average. In a way, Phoenix feels like an evolutionary dead-end, building on Space Invaders and Galaxian in areas that the industry wasn't quite ready for. It's a visual spectacle, and offers a gameplay variety that anticipates Gorf of the following year, but I can't help feel the overall experience is a bit unpolished. Galaxian consistently rewarded precision and strategy, but the chaotic enemy movements and sometimes unreliable hit detection make Phoenix feel random and frustrating. And the longer a round goes on without thinning out the enemies, the worse it exacerbates. It's worth playing, but it isn't my favorite.