2022 – things that didn’t quite make the cut

We covered quite a bit of retro tech this year, but there are a few things we didn’t talk about that are still worth a mention.

Let’s start with the automotive world. One of the more unusual vehicles to ever be produced in quantity is the DUKW (colloquially called the “Duck”), a six-wheel drive amphibious vehicle designed during World War II and manufactured by General Motors from 1942 to 1945. Excelling in amphibious attacks and traversing beaches, the DUKW could carry supplies or troops in a wide variety of environments. 21,000 of these machines were built, and some are still in use as tourist attractions today.

Where the DUKW was a bit of a barge, the Volkswagen Phaeton – introduced in 2002 – was a different type of barge. A large luxury car, sharing some of its DNA with Bentleys, the Phaeton was a rare entry into the luxury car market for the Volkswagen marque. Elegant and very understated, the Phaeton was a very discrete vehicle which gained some fans, but most luxury buyers were not interested and it wasn’t a sales success even though production continued until 2016. Today, the Phaeton is an extremely inexpensive buy for what it is, but it can be prone to enormous garage bills if it goes wrong.

From real-world cars to a fictional one – the Knight Industries Two Thousand (or “KITT” for short) was one of the stars of the 1982 TV Show “Knight Rider”. Based on a Pontiac Trans Am, KITT featured its own AI system which was capable of self-driving, speech recognition and synthesis, in-car communications (all of which are available today) and… errr… well a load of stuff that frankly isn’t. 23 KITT cars were made for filming, but most of these were destroyed. A handful of originals survive, but you are most likely to come across a replica.

DUKW, Volkswagen Phaeton, KITT Replica

Computers and cars came together in a different way with the 1982 Namco game, Pole Position. One of the first 16-bit arcade games, Pole Position offered unrivalled gameplay for a racing game, usually coming in a sit-down version with a proper steering wheel, pedals and gear shifter. The highest-grossing game of 1983, the game was officially ported to post microcomputer platforms of the time with many unofficial clones. 

Gaming was big in 1982, one mostly forgotten console that was launched that year was the ColecoVision. Selling strongly at launch due the bundled Donkey Kong game, this Z80-based system faded quickly and was out of production by 1985. Quite collectable today, a ColecoVision in good condition with games and accessories can cost you several hundred pounds.

Games consoles became popular in the 1980s, but the very first console was the Magnavox Odyssey launched in 1972. The basic but playable games were enhanced with accessories such as cards, dice and screen overlays. 350,000 Odyssey systems were sold over three years, today these are also very collectable with prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of pounds.

Pole Position, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey

Taking another step backwards, 1962 saw the world’s first computer-controlled factory running on the Ferranti Argus industrial computer platform. Argus was originally designed for military applications, but it found its true strength in running as an industrial controller. Development continued into the 1980s, seeing use in everything from oil production to telecommunications, and importantly also in controlling nuclear power stations where they are still in use today.

Another technology designed originally for military use was the frequency-hopping spread spectrum. The concept was originally patented in 1942 as a way of preventing radio-guided torpedoes from being jammed by the enemy. A paper tape in the torpedo and guidance system allowed the radio frequency to change in a predetermined way, avoiding enemy jamming. This technology eventually found itself into Bluetooth and WiFi communications. Although this all sounds very dry, the inventor was Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr, who in addition to being one of the greatest actresses of her era was also a talented inventor.

While we are on the subject of war and weapons, the Gatling Gun was the world’s first widely-used machine gun, in service from 1862 with the US Army and finding its way into use worldwide until the early 20th century. The Gatling Gun marked the beginning of industrialised warfare and a technological arms race that continues to this day.

1970s Ferranti Argus system, Hedy Lamarr, Gatling Gun

120 years later, 1982 saw another technological race as the computer systems evolved rapidly in every market from home users to research institutions. One of the leading companies of the time was Digital Equipment Corporation (usually known as “DEC” or just “Digital”). The DEC Rainbow was an attempt to compete for the same market as the IBM PC, running on both a Zilog Z80 and Intel 8088 processor, the Rainbow could run either CP/M or MS-DOS. Despite the “Rainbow” name, the machine was monochrome only by default, outputting to a monitor very similar to a VT220. Despite the support of one of the biggest names in the industry, it was not a success except for the iconic LK201 keyboard which was widely emulated.

Where the Rainbow was an attempt to create a new microcomputer from scratch, the DEC Professional was an attempt to shrink the PDP-11 into a desktop package. Although a promising idea, poor execution and market indifference let to its failure.

One of the more advanced machines of the time was the DISER Lilith, launched commercially in 1982 after being used as a research platform for a couple of years. Unusually, the Lilith ran Modula-2 and has a large portrait graphical display. Based in part on work done on the Xerox Alto, the Lilith was probably too advanced to be a sales success but remained influential, especially the mouse design which later influenced the first mice designed by Logitech.

If PDP-11s and the Lilith just weren’t powerful enough and you had very, very deep pockets you migth consider the Cray X-MP, launched in 1982 at an approximate starting price of $15 million. For that you got not only the fastest computer in the world, but also one of the most remarkable looks with a central processor core that looked like nothing else – complete with padded seats. The X-MP was a success, and there were a number of successors. Today, Cray is part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

DEC Rainbow, DEC Professional running as a VAX Conole, Lilith Prototype, Cray X-MP

The X-MP was a niche but successful product, as was the Bloomberg Terminal which was originally launched in December 1982. A specialist system aimed at stock market traders, the original terminal was a simple device that could connect to any type of financial data that Bloomberg could make available. Several generations followed, built on custom hardware and software. Today the Bloomberg terminal is still available, but the latest generation will cost you around $2000 per month.

Aimed at a rather broader market – which it failed to reach – the Jupiter Ace also ended up being popular with a very specific niche. Somewhat similar to the ZX81 in terms of hardware, the Ace had the unusual feature of running Forth as a programming language instead of BASIC. Forth was very well suited to simple computers, however it turned out that most customers wanted to learn BASIC instead. Despite making a splash at launch, sales were low and production ended in 1984. Today the Ace is very collectable with good examples selling for £1500 or even more.

1982 was a good year for computer systems that might have hit the big time had circumstances been different. The Sord M5 is one of those, an elegant Japanese system running on a Z80 with 16Kb of RAM, colour graphics and sound plus a cartridge slot. The M5 sold well in Japan, and saw some popularity in the UK (as the CGL M5) and Czechoslovakia. Locally-produced derivatives of the M5 also sold well in South Korea. Although it showed promise, by the time it hit the shops the market was becoming crowded and it didn’t last long. Working M5s in good condition can sell for £500 or more, and cartridges are worth around £50 to £100 or so.

2010s Bloomberg Terminal, Jupiter Ace, Sord M5

Not all computing innovations are welcome. The world’s first computer virus – Elk Cloner – was also invented in 1982 by Rick Skrenta. This boot sector virus infected Apple II floppy disks, although it usually did no real harm.

One other technology product to come to market in 1982 was the CD player. The world’s first model was the Sony CDP-101 launched in Japan in October. In the rest of the world, the Philips CD100 was the first available model. Sales were slow at first due to the cost, but by the late 1990s and early part of the 2000s the CD player became the most popular medium for music.

Elk Cloner, Sony CDP-101

A decade later, 1992 was a pretty good year for technology too. This was the year that Windows 3.1 launched, a significant upgrade to the first usable version of Windows – Windows 3.0 launched in 1990 – version 3.1 added more polish and stability. For many people, Windows 3.1 was their very first experience of Microsoft Windows.

Perhaps not many Windows machines of that era are memorable, but the IBM ThinkPad launched in 1992 had a reputation for good design, robustness and reliability. A strong seller for IBM, especially to corporate customers, the ThinkPad line was eventually acquired by Lenovo in 2005 and is still made today.

An ideal peripheral to complement your Windows-based laptop might be the HP LaserJet 4. An exceptionally reliable laser printer, it was also more compact than previous models, easier to maintain, faster and gave better quality printouts. The LaserJet 4 was capable of producing over a million pages during its individual lifetime, and although parts did wear out they could be easily replaced. It was easy to connect to a LAN via an optional network card, or you could use a parallel cable. Although seemingly obsolete today, aftermarket spares kits are still available indicating that there are still LaserJet 4 series printers still in use.

Windows 3.1 box, IBM ThinkPad, HP LaserJet 4

Not every computer of the time was a Windows or Intel-based computer. The Atari Falcon030 was the final evolution of the once-popular Atari ST line. Based on a Motorola 68030 CPU with a Motorola 56001 DSP supporting sound and graphics, the Falcon030 made a good games machine, was excellent for music and MIDI interfacing and came with a wide variety of expansion options. However, Atari was struggling and the Falcon030 was dropped just a year later. Around the same time Atari was working on the Falcon040, a 68040 power version. The Falcon is another collectable system, with prices for a good example being well in excess of £1000.

DEC was also coming up with innovative products in 1992. The DEC Alpha 21064 CPU was a powerful RISC processor designed for workstations and more powerful systems. Capable of much faster performance than Intel’s rival CPUs, the Alpha architecture saw some success in the 1990s but it faded away after DEC was bought out, first by Compaq and then by HP.

Atari Falcon030, DEC Alpha 21064

Another decade later to 2002, and mobile phones were becoming popular, and some of these were beginning to blur the line between a phone and a computer with the introduction of smartphones. The Sony Ericsson P800 was a Symbian-based device with a stylus-driven touchscreen and a camera, which is effectively one of the ancestors of modern smartphones today. Due to the high price and complexity, it didn’t sell in huge numbers but it did appeal to those who could see the advantage of having a computer in your pocket.

If you wanted something simpler and more robust, you could try the rubbery Nokia 5100. A weird-looking thing by modern standards, the 5100 comes from a golden age of phone design where every new model had its own distinctive looks. The 5100's key selling point was its robustness, although most Nokia phones of that era seemed pretty indestructible. 

Technology was coming to other more mundane devices as well. The Roomba is an autonomous robot vacuum cleaner, first introduced in 2002. Capable of cleaning a floor by itself and then returning to its dock to recharge, the Roomba is more of a pet than a domestic appliance – sometimes needing rescuing when it has gotten itself stuck on something. Twenty years of development have made Roombas even smarter.

Sony Ericsson P800, Nokia 5100, 2002-era Roomba

Finally… well, a different sort of invention altogether. 120 years ago in 1902, the Teddy Bear was invented. Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, the teddy became the most popular type of soft toy of all time. Go and cuddle one right now.

1903 Teddy Bear

Image credits:
DUKW: 270865 via Flickr - CC BY-ND 2.0
VW Phaeton: Greg Gjerdingen via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0
KITT Replica: Interceptor73 via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0
Namco Pole Position: Steve McFarland via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
ColecoVision: Georges Seguinia via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Magnavox Odyssey: Jesmar via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Ferranti Argus 700: Rain Rabbit via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Hedy Lamarr: MGM via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Gatling Gun: Max Smith via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
DEC Rainbow 100: David Alcubierre via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
DEC Professional running as VAX Console: Michael L. Umbricht via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Prototype Lilith: Tomislav Medak via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Cray XMP: Rama via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 2.0 FR
2010s Bloomberg Terminal: E.W. Scripps School of Journalism - CC BY-NC 2.0
Jupiter Ace: Soupmeister via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Sord M5: Staffan Vilcans via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Elk Cloner: Richard Skrenta via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Sony CDP-101: Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Microsoft Windows 3.1: Darklanlan via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
IBM ThinkPad: Jarek Piórkowski via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
HP LaserJet 4: DuffDudeX1 via Wikimedia Commons – CC0
Atari Falcon030: Wolfgang Stief via Flickr – CC0
DEC Alpha 21064: Dirk Oppelt via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Sony Ericsson P800: Sony Ericsson Press Release
Nokia 5100: Nokia Press Release
Roomba: Larry D Moore via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 4.0
1903 Teddy Bear: Tim Evanson via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0

Donkey Kong (1981)

Introduced July 1981

Donkey Kong was the arcade game that established Nintendo as a success in the North American market – introducing two of their most iconic characters in the process. But unlike many other games from the golden age of arcades, the development story for Donkey Kong begins in failure.

Donkey Kong detail

In 1980, Nintendo had attempted to break into the US with a game called Radar Scope which was a 3D space shoot-‘em-up with some advanced graphics for the time. 3000 machines were built and shipped to the States, but sales were poor and 2000 of the cabinets were unsold, prompting a financial crisis for Nintendo.

Donkey Kong was developed initially as a way to reuse the existing cabinets. Instead of a space-based game, this was a platform game where an Italian plumber attempts to climb to the top of the level while being bombarded by barrels thrown down by a primate.

The names of these characters? If you hadn’t guessed, they were Mario and Donkey Kong. Unusually for a game of the time, the characters came first and the game followed after. This process eventually meant that Nintendo had a cast of digital stars they could put into their own games which helped them grow in popularity even more.

Nintendo reworked the logic board from the original Radar Scope game, Donkey Kong had simpler hardware requirement than the shoot-‘em-up, it still possessed colourful graphics, sound effects and music all powered by a Z80 CPU. It wasn’t hard to port it to the booming microcomputer marketplace, and licensed and unlicensed clones were soon everywhere.

Donkey Kong arcade machine

As well as direct sequels (many of which were based on the same hardware) a whole range of Nintendo games built on the characters and added many more. Mario in particular went on to star in what is probably the most successful video game franchise ever including Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart and many others. Donkey Kong starred in Donkey Kong Country and many other games, often crossing over with Mario.

It’s quite possible that if Nintendo hadn’t been sitting on a couple of thousand Radar Scope machines that such a novel concept might not have been risked. As it was, the descendants of the original Donkey Kong game gave Nintendo a unique edge in the future… which turned out to be not just shoot-‘em-ups after all.

Image credits:
Wordshore via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Microsiervos via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

Frogger vs Centipede (1981)

Introduced June 1981

Early popular arcade games tended to be space-themed shoot-‘em-ups, which tended to appeal to male customers. However, games such as Pac-Man had a much broader audience and were especially popular with female players.

Fighting for a share of this market - and introduced roughly at the same time as each other – were Frogger (by Konami and Sega) and Atari’s Centipede. Both these games are regarded as classics of the golden age of arcade machines, but both had very different gameplay.

The origin story for Frogger is as cute as the game itself. Konami employee Akira Hashimoto was watching a frog trying to cross the road from his car, and was thinking about the difficulties the poor creature was having… which led to the inspiration for creating the game. Only the poor old frog in Frogger has an even tougher time.

Frogger machine from Seinfeld

In the game, the player starts at the bottom of the screen and tries to make it to the frogs’ homes at the top. To do this, the frog has to cross several lanes of traffic, and then cross a river on floating logs and diving turtles while avoiding alligators. There are many ways to die. Colourful graphics and a catchy soundtrack added to the appeal of the game, and it was a huge hit.

Centipede was another animal-themed game, but very different in execution. From a gameplay perspective, this was closer to a traditional shooter game, but here the adversaries were various bugs that you had to defend yourself against, primarily a long centipede which wound its way down the screen and which would split up if you shot it. Fleas, spiders and scorpions appeared with different behaviours, and the playfield was full of mushrooms which changed the course of the centipede when it hit.

Atari Centipede

Like Frogger, Centipede was a huge hit particularly with female players. Both games were widely ported – officially and unofficially – to the booming home computer and console markets. Indeed, both arcade machines shared many hardware parts with theses home machines – Frogger ran on a Zilog Z80 with the versatile AY-3-8910 sound chip and Centipede used the MOS Technology 6502 with Atari’s own POKEY sound chips which found their way into every Atari product of the time. This symmetry in hardware capabilities allowed this generation of video games to be a huge hit away from the arcades. Eventually powerful home computers and then consoles would end the golden age of arcades but by 1981 that was still some way off…

Image credits:
Arturo Pardavila III via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 2.0
Matt M via Flickr – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Defender (1981)

Introduced February 1981

The Golden Age of Arcade Machines really started in 1978 with Space Invaders, an addictive game built on simple hardware. But technology was pushing ahead at a pace, and the same sort of hardware that was finding itself into microcomputers of the era was also finding its way into the arcades.

Defender is a case in point – the first arcade game from pinball masters Williams, the Defender machine used the relatively new Motorola 6809 CPU and a 16 colour monitor with a 320 x 256 pixel resolution, with a second Motorola CPU (this time a more basic 6800) handling the sound. Of course, powerful hardware is one thing, but good gameplay is even more important.

Defender

Thematically, Defender was a sort of cross between Space Invaders and Asteroids. The player controls a small spaceship which is tasked with protecting humans on a barren planetoid from hostile aliens. The ship can move left and right, causing the screen to scroll with it, or up and down to the top of the screen. The play area wraps around from left to right, and is displayed on a mini-map at the top of the screen. Aliens will either try to kidnap and mutate the humans, or will attack the player’s ship directly. Compared to other shoot-‘em-up space games, Defender allows the player a large degree of mobility and they can develop their own strategies.

However, the game was notoriously difficult to play. The controls consisted of an up/down joystick, a thrust button, reverse button, fire button, smart bomb button and away from all the others was the emergency hyperspace. Pressing “thrust” would make the ship accelerate in the direction it was pointing (left or right), keeping the button pressed down make it go faster and faster until usually you smacked into an alien invade. Slowing down required the use of the reverse button and then reverse thrust. While trying to do this, invariably you would need to shoot at stuff and keep an eye on the minimap. Newbies would die very quickly – and this being an arcade game, they’d need to put in more money to try again.

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Ergonomics? What's that? Defender's notoriously difficult control panel

The Defender game itself had been subject to a prolonged period of development difficulties (although the Motorola EXORciser used to develop it is a whole rabbit-hole by itself), and had taken up a considerable amount of time and money at Williams. When it finally hit the arcades in 1981 it was unpopular at first, most likely due to the difficult gameplay. But as people got used to it, Defender became more popular.. and eventually turned into a massive hit. Williams shipped nearly 60,000 arcade machines which brought in more than $1 billion of revenue.

The humble 8-bit 6809 CPU was pushed right to the end of its performance with the game – indeed, it could often suffer from lag when there was too much going on. But it made a good candidate for conversion to the growing market of micros and consoles which were also expanding in capabilities at the time, with a variety of official and unofficial ports available for almost every system that could keep up with the demands of the game.

Defender demonstrated that video games could be more complex than the simple format inspired by Space Invaders, although not many games would succeed if they were as unforgiving to newbies. But other side-scrolling games followed, including Scramble which hit the arcades later the same year. Today Defender machines are quite collectable today assuming you have the space and.. errr.. about £7000 or so.

Image credits:
Matt Grommes – CC BY-SA 2.0
Rob DiCaterino via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Atari Battlezone (1980)

Introduced November 1980

Displays on early computer systems – and arcade games – tended to be divided into two categories. Most used a series of dots created line-by-line, like a domestic TV set – these were raster scan devices. But you don’t have to create a picture like that with an old-style cathode ray tube (CRT), you can draw lines from point-to-point too – these are vector devices.

Atari’s Lunar Lander and Asteroids games used vector displays to create cool space-age graphics, modelled in part on the look and feel of Spacewar! on the PDP-1 decades earlier. The next stage for Atari was an impressive evolution of vector graphics, with Battlezone.

Modern rendering of the periscope view of Battlezone

Launched in November 1980, Atari’s Battlezone was set firmly on the ground. Instead of a spaceship, the player controlled a tank with two controllers that pushed backwards and forwards. Push both forwards, and the tank moved forwards, you would go backwards if both were pushed backwards, and to turn you would push one back and one forwards. A button on one of the controllers fired a shell towards enemy tanks prowling around the landscape, or faster super tanks, UFOs or missiles.

The gameplay was fairly straightforward, but the graphics set it apart. In the standard versions, the player would look through a periscope with a lens in it and some painted on artwork, to simulate a real tank. What they saw was a flat plane with an occasional enemy, distant mountains and a live volcano, a crescent moon and random geometric shapes scattered around which could act either as cover or as obstacles. The wire-frame vector graphics, given a primitive but compelling 3D experience.

The enemy often wasn’t visible at all, except for being on radar. A frantic swing around to find the opposing tank would often be too late to avoid an incoming round. Unseen objects could block escape routes, or alternatively save your bacon and block an attack. All the time, the mountains beckoned in the distance. Could you ever reach them? All sorts of rumours and myths abounded, sadly untrue.

Battlezone machine with periscope

The game was a huge hit, but the periscope remained one of the most divisive parts. Although it added to the feel of the game, you had to be able to reach it and it wasn’t always the most hygienic thing to press your face into. Some later versions removed the periscope which made the game more accessible.

Battlezone also had official ports to most of the popular systems of the early 1980s, include the Apple II, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari 8-bit machines and the Atari ST. Unofficial versions and games inspired by Battlezone proliferated across every  platform you can think of and are still popular today. Vintage machines seem rare, with prices in the US being around $5000, but if you want a more modern (and compact) VR experience you could try something like the PlayStation 4 version.

Image credits:
Gamerscore Blog via Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0
Russell Bernice via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

Berzerk (1980)

 Launched November 1980

The golden age of arcade games features many classic games that are still fondly remembered and played today, but one that has been somewhat forgotten is Berzerk, launched by Stern Electronics in November 1980.

The basic gameplay of Berzerk was that the player was trapped in a series of mazes and had to shoot robots who were themselves shooting back. An indestructible enemy called Otto would turn up. Getting shot by a robot, walking into a robot, being too close to a robot that was shot, bumping into the electrified walls or being caught by Otto would all result in death. The player does have the option of escaping to another one of the thousands of possible rooms to fight again.

Berzerk

Although the gameplay was novel, what really made Berzerk stand out was speech synthesis. Although the game itself was powered by the popular Zilog Z80 processor (clocked at 2.5MHz), the speech was provided by a TSI S14001A chip that had originally been designed for a talking calculator. The games used speech to attract players with “coin detected in pocket” and then chattered and taunted the player throughout the game.

Berzerk was a hit – gaining some notoriety along the way – and was successfully ported to Atari and Vectrex gaming consoles. Stern followed up with a successful partnership with bringing Konami games to US markets, but by the mid-1980s the bottom dropped out of the market in a huge crash that took Stern with it.

Ports and conversions of Berzerk exist to this day and aren’t hard to find, but collecting arcade machines themselves is a bit of a niche hobby. We found an original cabinet in the US for $1200, which is not much compared to some better known games.

Perhaps the lasting legacy of Berzerk was that it helped to kick start voice synthesis, although it took decades for this to became good enough to use all the time. Stern themselves were resurrected as a brand in 1999 when the assets of Sega’s pinball operations were spin off, and Stern Pinball make machines to this day.

Image credit:
The Pop Culture Geek Network via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0

Missile Command (1980)

Missile Command screenshot

Introduced July 1980

It’s the height of the Cold War, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation is always just around the corner. Everything you know and everyone you love could be swept away in an instant and there would be very little you could do about it.

So, for some escapism what about a game where everybody dies in a nuclear conflagration? Welcome to 1980 and Atari’s Missile Command.

The golden age of arcade machines featured many escapist games, usually of the shoot-‘em-up variety. As with microcomputers of the time, arcade machines were being propelled by improvements in microprocessors and other silicon chips leading to a rapid improvement of hardware. Missile Command used a 1.25 MHz 6502 CPU with an Atari POKEY chip handling sound. Graphics were 256 x 231 pixels in 8 colours, and unlike Lunar Lander and Asteroids, Missile Command used a raster scan monitor.

Missile Command arcade machine

The gameplay was this: the player had to defend six cities at the bottom of the screen from waves of nuclear weapons (represented with a line with a blob on the end). The player would launch their own missiles from three bases into the sky to destroy the nukes, and those bases themselves can be destroyed. As the game progresses the player is attacked by missiles with multiple warheads, bombers and satellites. The game ends when all six cities are destroyed, and invariably they ARE destroyed.

Unusually, the primary control for the game was a large trackball which emulated the sort of thing that real military bases would use for controlling systems. Combined with the (then) advanced graphics and sound, it made Missile Command a distinctive and popular gaming experience.

Although the game was distributed by Atari in North America, Atari chose to partner with Sega to distribute it in Europe. This gave Sega a useful foothold in the arcade game market. In Asia-Pacific markets a smaller number of Taito cabinets were made. But as a classic video game, it was ported to many platforms from the 1980s onwards and there are still licenced version and clones available today. Or if you still have Flash installed on your computer, you can play it for free here.

Image credits:
John Cooper via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
James Brooks via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Pac-Man (1980)

Introduced in Japan, May 1980

The Golden Age of Arcade games is in full swing by May 1980, and it sees the launch of a gaming icon – Pac-Man. Developed in Japan by Namco, it followed on from their successful Galaxian shoot-‘em-up, but Pac-Man was a completely different type of game.

As with Galaxian, Pac-Man was powered by a Z80 processor, it had colour graphics with sprites and a dedicated graphics co-processor and a three-channel sound chip. Utilising and impressive array of technology from the era, the capable hardware platform allowed for a much richer gaming experience than earlier generations.

The game itself – first called Pakkuman and then Puck Man before becoming Pac-Man - is familiar to most, but in case it somehow passed you by, the player controls the Pac-Man (essentially a circle with a chomping mouse) who is chased around a maze by four ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde). Pac-Man’s job is to eat all the dots in the maze, if caught by a ghost he loses a life… but various power pills around the maze allow Pac-Man to eat the ghosts instead. The ghosts have different personalities and between them try to chase and trap Pac-Man.

With appealing graphics and sound, Pac-Man was a fun game to play – and it was also something different from the alien invasion or war games that dominated arcades. A slow burn at first, when Pac-Man hit the US in late 1980 it became a smash hit and the most popular game around, shipping 100,000 cabinets by 1981.

After arcade success came conversions to home computers and consoles, official and unofficial and of varying quality, and then there were endless sequels (notably Midway’s Ms. Pac Man), board games, TV shows, toys and other things you could spend your cash on. The franchise raked in billions of dollars and created an iconic character recognised throughout the world. Although there are many different ways to play Pac-Man today, if you want an original cabinet in good condition then you can expect to pay several thousand pounds.

Image credits:
Peter Handke via Flickr - CC0 1.0
Marcin Wichary via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Galaxian (1979)

Introduced November 1979

Galaxian was launched at a time when arcade games were becoming really popular – and profitable. Following the trail laid by 1978’s Space Invaders was Namco’s Galaxian. Despite there only being about a year and a half between these two products, Galaxian was a huge improvement.

Fundamentally the concept of the game was pretty similar to Space Invaders – the player controlled a spaceship at the bottom of the screen which could move left or right and fire. Arranged in neat rows at the top were hostile aliens that the player had to wipe out. But Galaxian was a much richer gaming experience.

The most obvious improvement that this game was in colour, unlike the monochrome Space Invaders that used plastic strips to give the *illusion* of colour. And instead of the aliens slowly shuffling their way across and down the screen, the enemies in Galaxian swooped down shooting, either singly or in a group. Combine that with simple but well-polished sound effects and it all added up to a game that made Space Invaders look primitive.

Inside was a Zilog Z80 processor which really was next-generation stuff compared to the old Intel 8080 in Space Invaders, plus of course electronics components were improving all the time which helped enormously. It wasn’t just hardware though, Galaxian was also efficiently coded to squeeze as much out of the hardware as it could.

Namco found that it had a huge hit on its hands, first in Japan and then in North America after partnering with Midway (who had previously partnered with Taito on Space Invaders). Galaxian went on to be one of the definitive arcade games of the early 1980s and it was eventually ported to many other platforms. The official follow-on – Galaga – was an even bigger hit, and Namco themselves continue on to this day having merged with Bandai in 2006 to create Bandai Namco.

Image credits:
Wikipedia
Roland Tanglao via Flickr

Asteroids (1979)

Introduced November 1979

1979 was a landmark year for Atari – the launch of the popular 400 and 800 computers, the Lunar Lander arcade game and the continued success of the VCS games console meant that Atari was very much becoming a cornerstone technology company of the late 70s and early 80s.

Asteroids Gameplay (click to enlarge)

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Asteroids Cabinet

The next step in the story was the Atari Asteroids arcade game. Based on the same basic hardware as Lunar Lander, Asteroids was a much more playable game. In case you’ve never seen any of the many versions of Asteroids that followed the 1979 classic, the basic idea is to blast large chunks of rocks into smaller chunks and then destroy them completely using a small spaceship that can move about the screen. Flying saucers will also appear and attempt to shoot the player to give it an extra degree of complexity. Although not strictly following the laws of physics, the game has a fair approximation which gives it an atypical gameplay for an arcade machine.

Like Lunar Lander, this was a vector graphics games powered by a 6502 with some rudimentary sounds hard-wired in. Although the controls were different (with five buttons to rotate left and right, fire, thrust and hyperspace).

The game was an enormous success, raking in tens of millions of dollars for both Atari and the arcade operators. Demand for the games was so great that Atari cannibalised some of their Lunar Lander boxes to meet it, and it became the most popular arcade machine in the world… for a while.

Sequels, spin-offs and clones followed on just about every console and computer system known to mankind. Forty years later it is still a popular game, although the days of CRT machines with vector graphics are long gone. If you want the original thing, they are pretty hard to come by and most of those available seem to be in the US with a price of $1500 or so for the classic cabinet version and around $500 for the cocktail table variant.

Image credits:
Michael F. via Flickr
killbox via Flickr

Atari Lunar Lander (1979)

Atari Lunar Lander (Right) next to an Atari Space War machine

Launched August 1979

It is 1979 and the dawn of the Golden Age of Arcade Games. The same technology that was bringing microcomputers such as the Apple II into homes and businesses was also revolutionising the Arcade with sophisticated machines that could prove very popular… and profitable.

Taito and Midway had launched the highly successful Space Invaders game a year previously, and now it was Atari’s turn. Based on the inexpensive but versatile 6502 processor, Lunar Lander was quite a different game.

The basic idea was simple enough – the player had to place a lunar lander module on a flat part of surface of the moon without running out of fuel or crashing out of control. In practice it was pretty tricky.

The idea wasn’t a totally new one as versions of the game had been around for a decade or so. Earlier versions of the game were mostly text-based and concentrated on balancing fuel and thrust. In 1973 DEC produced a graphical version running on a PDP minicomputer hooked up to a GT40 video terminal. Atari took the concept one stage further with an arcade version based on similar principles.

Lunar Lander Screenshot

In addition to the 6502, the Atari version of the game – like the DEC version before it – used vector graphics rather than raster graphics. Without going into detail, an old-fashioned cathode ray tube can work in two ways: when used as a raster device it can make a picture by drawing hundreds of individual lines, commonly used in TV sets. But instead of drawing hundreds of lines, the electron beam can actually be directed anywhere on the CRT with the right hardware to draw a pin-sharp line between two locations, something you might see in an old-fashioned laboratory oscilloscope. Vector graphics can be appealing if you have limited hardware to run on, but they also look rather good and space-age which is especially appealing in a game like this.

It looked brilliant, the game-play was compelling and addictive and it is probably no surprise that Atari had a hit on its hands. However, it was soon eclipsed by a new Atari came based on similar hardware called Asteroids. Asteroids knocked Lunar Lander out of the park when it came to sales figures, shipping nearly fifteen times the number of cabinets.

There are plenty of versions of Lunar Lander around today, original cabinet versions are pretty hard to come by with prices of $4000 being typical. Or you can play a free version in your browser right here.

Image credits:
Marcin Wichary via Flickr
Wikipedia

Space Invaders (1978)

Space Invaders (Midway version)

Launched June 1978

Forty years ago this month, Japan saw the launch of a simple little arcade game called Space Invaders. The premise was simple – five rows of pixelated aliens marched slowly across the screen while a laser cannon at the bottom tries to pick them off, accompanied with a basic four-note soundtrack and some sound effects. Simple it may have been, but Space Invaders became an enormous success.

The game came at a point when the technology was just becoming good enough to produce a compelling game. The Space Invaders machine itself ran an Intel 8080 CPU (a predecessor of the 8086) with a Texas Instruments chip producing the sounds (this in the same month as the launch of the Speak & Spell). A monochrome monitor in portrait mode gave a graphics resolution of 224 x 256 pixels, and in some versions of the game coloured strips across the screen gave the impression of a colour display when it wasn’t.

As with many classic games of the era, Space Invaders embraced the technical limitations of the hardware. The blocky aliens became a design icon, the simple but hypnotic soundtrack attracted curious onlookers. The fact that the very last invader raced across the screen in an adrenaline-fueled finale was simply a side-effect of the processor having less work to do.

The gameplay was simple enough but compelling, and Space Invaders machine soon started to rake in the money. A lot of money. A machine could pay for itself in a month or even less, and they soon started to pop up in all sort of places worldwide that hadn’t previously dabbled in arcade games, such as supermarkets.

There were two basic formats – creator Taito turned the game into a table-top format and cabinet with a joystick, while US licensee Midway used a cabinet with buttons replacing the joystick. Between them, the arcade versions raked in hundreds of millions of dollars of profit… and from then on there were adaptations for games consoles, home computers and a raft of sequels and spin-offs spanning generations.

Today prices for reconditioned original Space Invader machines can be £4000 or more. Alternatively for a few pounds you can buy an authentic reproduction of the original to play on your smartphone.

Image credit: Wally Gobetz via Flickr

Video: Reconditioned Taito Space Invaders machine