Tag Archives: early

Future Spy, Arcade

In Sega‘s 1984 arcade game, Future Spy, you fly an F-15 jet fighter across an isometric landscape, shooting down enemy aircraft while at the same time dropping bombs on ships, submarines, and ground forces.

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Chip Factory, Commodore 64

Chip Factory, by Supersoft, was first released for the Commodore 64 in 1984 and is a BurgerTime variant that at least tries to do something different with the concept of dropping objects down a series of platforms and ladders.

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Burger Time, Commodore 64

This Commodore 64 clone of Data East‘s classic BurgerTime was coded by Lee Braine, with music by Chris Cox, and was first published Interceptor Software in 1984.

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Bear Bovver, ZX Spectrum

Bear Bovver was created by well-known coder Jon Ritman, with music by Guy Stevens, and was published for the ZX Spectrum by Artic Computing in 1983. It’s basically a BurgerTime clone, except you’re dropping batteries down a series of platforms, onto a car at the bottom of the screen, instead of burger buns and patties onto plates.

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Turbo, Arcade

Sega‘s 1981 arcade racer, Turbo, was designed and programmed by Steve Hanawa and was manufactured in three formats: a standard, full-sized upright cabinet, a mini cabinet, and a deluxe, seated cockpit cabinet. All three versions had a steering wheel, a gear lever with high and low gears, and an accelerator pedal.

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Venture, Arcade

Venture is an early fantasy maze shooter developed and distributed into arcades by Exidy in 1981. In some respects it is similar to Stern ElectronicsBerzerk (and its sequel, Frenzy), with simple bitmap graphics, an overhead viewpoint, and extremely challenging gameplay.

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Frenzy, Arcade

Frenzy is an arcade maze/shooter from 1982 that was developed and published by Stern Electronics. It is the sequel to the 1980 arcade game, Berzerk, and features similar presentation and gameplay.

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Galaxian, ColecoVision

The Galaxian conversion for the ColecoVision was first released in 1984 by Atarisoft, and it is a decent port of the classic 1979 arcade game from Namco. A secret message in the game credits James D. Eisenstein for writing the graphics and program (he also dedicates the game to his then wife/girlfriend, Jeneane).

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Dig Dug, Arcade

Dig Dug is a cute arcade digging game from Namco that was a cult hit during the early to mid-1980s. It was first distributed into arcades in 1982 and was much cloned by other game developers, and was also officially ported to many home systems of the time, including for the Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision (among many others).

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