Tag Archives: 1989

Quarth, Arcade

Quarth is a brilliant mixture of Tetris and shoot ’em up and was first played in arcades in Japan in 1989. Outside of Japan it is known as “Block Hole“, which – let’s face it – is a stupid name, so I’m sticking with the original name, Quarth.

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APB, ZX Spectrum

Another fine conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game, APB (All Points Bulletin), this time converted by Walking Circles for Tengen and first published by Domark in 1989.

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California Games, Atari Lynx

Epyx‘s classic C64 game, California Games, was converted (by Epyx themselves) to the Atari Lynx and released in 1989.

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Atari Lynx Special

The Atari Lynx is a handheld console that was developed by Epyx and manufactured by Atari Corporation from 1989 to 1995, and it features a wide variety of colourful and playable games available in cartridge format.

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Toki, Arcade

Toki is a relatively obscure platform-based arcade game, by Japanese developer TAD Corporation, which was first released in 1989. And it is as bloody hard as nails!

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Herzog Zwei, Megadrive/Genesis

Developed by Techno Soft and first published in 1989, Herzog Zwei is an early real-time strategy game, predating Dune II by three years. It is the sequel to Herzog on the MSX2 and it shares the same DNA as that game.

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Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Megadrive/Genesis

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle is a 1989 platform game released for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis. It was developed in-house by Sega as a competitor to the Nintendo Mario games, which were hugely popular at the time.

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The Untouchables, Commodore 64

The Untouchables is a classic movie-licensed action game developed and published by Ocean Software in 1989. It mixes a number of different gameplay styles.

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Fighting Hawk, Arcade

A relatively obscure Taito arcade game from 1989*, Fighting Hawk is a vertically-scrolling bullet hell shooter where you fly an A-10 ‘Tankbuster’ up the screen, fighting its way through waves of enemies and bosses.

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Skull & Crossbones, Arcade

I hadn’t seen this 1989 arcade game from Atari Games before, until I played it recently, and even then I found it on the Commodore 64 first, then realised that it was an arcade conversion.

Skull & Crossbones has all the ingredients of a classic arcade action game, but – having played it extensively now – I can see why it failed…

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