The Sprint series began in 1976 with Sprint 1 and Sprint 2 – not, as you may think, a first game and a sequel, but the “1” and “2” denotes the number of players who can play the game.
Sprint 1 had a single steering wheel, and Sprint 2 had a pair of steering wheels, and in each game players control their vehicles through a variety of overhead, black and white race tracks.
This infamous 1983 arcade game from Bally Midway is a bizarre multi-stage action game where you play members of the prog rock band, Journey, trying to retrieve their instruments “from the dangers of the five galaxies”.
Xenon 1 by IJK Software is a very early shoot ’em up for the Oric 1 home computer. It shows off what the Oric is capable of, which is: not very much… 😉
Although it’s pretty laughable now, Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke‘s 1984 football game, Match Day, was a groundbreaking Spectrum game for the time.
Match Day wasn’t the first football video game ever made, but it was one of the first to at least make a reasonable attempt to translate the sport into something playable.
The Commodore 64 has a version of Design Design‘s classic Halls of the Things and it looks and plays very similarly to the original Spectrum version. Which is no bad thing, because this is a challenging and fun little action game.
Written by Howard Scott Warshaw and published by Atari, Inc. in 1982, Yars’ Revenge is one of those old video games that plays a lot better than it looks, and is much more subtle that you might think upon first inspection.
In fact, it took me decades to actually ‘click’ with the game and finally be bothered to learn how to play it properly.
Taito‘s American division developed this vertical screen base defence game in 1981. Colony 7 owes quite a bit to Missile Command, if the truth be known, and was also probably the very first video game to feature “rip-off” micro-transactions too…
Written by Carol Shaw for Activision and published initially for the Atari 2600 in 1982, River Raid is an early vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up with simple graphics, challenging gameplay, and its own unique set of rules.
The first game in the Sir Arthur Pendragon series, The Staff of Karnath was released on the Commodore 64 in 1984 to some acclaim. Mostly because it was an Ultimate game, and in the eyes of many people (myself included), Ultimate could do no wrong.
This obscure 1984 release from Ocean Software is basically a clone of Sega‘s classic arcade game, Pengo, but with an extra level tacked-on at the beginning. Similar in many ways to Ocean‘s Mr. Wimpy, which was BurgerTime with an extra level tacked on at the start. As if it would confuse the copyright police… “These are not the clones you are looking for… It is a completely different game… Look… [waves hand like Obi Wan]”
The King of Grabs 