History of Arcade Games

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Pole Position, Namco/Atari, 1982

 

Pole Position started the trend for foto-realistics graphics in video games. It was a driving game with persceptive from the car view point, just like Night Driver. In addition to great graphics, it had great game play and it was a huge success, dominated game charts for almost about 2 years. Modern driving games are still more or less based on Pole Position, only graphics have improved.

Robotron: 2084, Williams Electronics, 1982
 

Robotron was designed by the same people who created Defender. It had excellent gameplay and two joysticks were used for input.

Tron, Bally/Midway, 1982

 

Tron was designed in conjunction with the Disney's film of the same name. The game became an important part of the movie. Tron video game produced more profit than the movie.

Zaxxon, Sega Ltd., 1982

 

Zaxxon introduced an 3D-lookalike isometric perspective to video games. It had brilliant graphics for its time and it became a big hit.

Star Wars, Atari Inc., 1983.
 

Star Wars was based on the Star Wars movie by George Lucas. It was designed by Mike Hally and it was programmed and developed by Greg Rivera, Norm Avellar, Eric Durfey, Jed Margolin and Earl Vickers. It was great multi-color vector graphics, 12 channel music and sound effects with speech. In 1985 released a sequel for the game, called The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars is the most successful movie of all time and more games have been made of it than any other movie.

Dragon's Lair, Starcom/Cinematronics, 1983

 

Dragon's Lair was created by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth. It was an interactive animated film and it was the first video games utilize laserdisc. Its graphics were much better than any of games of its time - of movie quality - and it had great stereo sound, but the gameplay wasn't good (player had only few choices to select from). Its incredible graphics created a huge media hype. Journalists predicted that laser video games would the soon dominate video games. But laserdisc players were very expensive in that time and laservideo games machines were very unreliable.

In 1984 Magicom/Cinematronics released another laser disc animation-movie-game, called Space Ace which was designed by the same team. The success of laser video games was short and it started to fade in the middle of 1984. About a decade later interactive movie type games re-apperad in CD-ROM format for home computers and are now one of the most popular PC game genres.

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