Tag Archives: 1985

Paperboy, Arcade

Atari‘s 1985 arcade hit Paperboy features an isometric road to cycle down and houses to throw newspapers at. It’s an attractive proposition for an arcade game. Especially when the game has real bike handlebars for steering, which the original arcade cabinets did.

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Space Harrier, Arcade

Developed by a team led by Yu Suzuki at Sega in 1985, Space Harrier is a super-fast third-person, flying-into-the-screen fantasy blasting game, originally housed inside a hydraulic cabinet in arcades. This would jerk around as you moved the control stick, giving you a feeling of movement as you played the game.

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Beach Head II, Commodore 64

Soooo much better than the first Beach Head… Beach Head II is a balls-to-the-wall, digitised speech-laden action game that sees “The Allies” versus “The Dictator”. The game was developed by Access Software and first published in 1985.

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Wriggler, ZX Spectrum

A weird, colourful, original worm-based race game on the ZX Spectrum, released by Romantic Robot in 1985.

Actually, Wriggler is less of a “race” game and more of a “crawl” game. The pace is not very fast at all.

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Gyron, ZX Spectrum

Gyron was developed by released by Firebird Software in 1985 and was something of a bolt out of the blue at the time. Nothing quite like it had been seen before.

You play as a Hedroid and roam a wireframe 3D maze, avoiding towers and spheres, while searching for the exit goal. In other words: you’re just trying not to get squished on your way out…

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Jet Set Willy, ZX Spectrum

Here are all the screens from Matthew Smith‘s original classic ZX Spectrum platform game (and sequel to Manic Miner), Jet Set Willy. All 61 of them. Plus the ending after completing the game.

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Mercenary, Commodore 64

Novagen‘s classic 3D exploration game, Mercenary, was first released for the Commodore 64 in 1985. It was designed and coded by Paul Woakes.

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Rescue On Fractalus, Commodore 64

LucasFilm Games‘ classic space shooter, Rescue On Fractalus, was first released on Atari 8-bit computers in March 1984, and this Commodore 64 version came a year later, in 1985.

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Racing Destruction Set, Commodore 64

Racing Destruction Set was an early Commodore 64 release for Electronic Arts, first released in 1985.

I’d consider it a timeless classic – especially among C64 race games.

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