Karate Champ is an early one-on-one beat ’em up that was pioneering and influential, and was a precursor to fighting games that followed. It was developed by Technos Japan and manufactured into arcades by Data East in 1984.
Tag Archives: pioneering
Flight Simulator II, Atari ST
Flight Simulator II, by Sublogic, is an early, pioneering flight simulation game designed and written by Bruce Artwick and first released for the Apple II in 1983. This enhanced Atari ST conversion was first released in 1986.
Pilotwings 64, Nintendo 64
Pilotwings 64 is an arcade-style flight simulator released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996. It is the sequel to the classic SNES game, Pilotwings. The game was designed by Nintendo and developed by Texas-based Paradigm Simulation (later to become Paradigm Entertainment).
Hard Drivin’, Arcade
Hard Drivin’ is a 1989 arcade game developed and manufactured by Atari Games. It allows the player to drive a sports car on a track that emphasises speed and stunts, and was one of the first driving games with a fully 3D polygonal environment.
Brainstorm, ZX Spectrum
Written by Pete Cooke and published by Firebird (as a £1.99 budget game) in 1987, Brainstorm is a clever puzzle/strategy game where the aim is to draw lines using a pointer in order to make a bouncing ball travel over coloured sections of the screen, to accumulate points.
ActRaiser, Super Nintendo
ActRaiser is an interesting Japanese fantasy action game that was developed by Quintet and published by Enix on the Super Nintendo in 1990. It has side-scrolling, platform-based hack-and-slash sections, with an interesting overhead ‘God game’ component.
Shinobi, Arcade
The arcade version of Shinobi was developed and published by Sega in 1987. It is a scrolling run-and-gun action game featuring a lead character called Joe Musashi who is on a mission to defeat the Zeed terrorist organisation. The aim of the game is to rescue kidnapped students of his clan and each level has a certain number of hostages to release.
Contra, Arcade
Contra is a run-and-gun arcade game developed and published by Konami in 1987. It is the first game in the long-running Contra series and was renamed as Gryzor – and tweaked slightly – for European arcades.
Renegade, Arcade
Renegade is an arcade beat ’em up that was developed by Technos Japan and distributed into arcades by Taito in 1986. Although Renegade might appear basic by today’s standards it was in fact an important game in the fighting genre and one that defined many of the gameplay standards we still see today.
Batalyx, Commodore 64
Written by Jeff Minter at Llamasoft and first published by Ariolasoft in 1985, Batalyx is a compendium of six minigames that can be played in any order. Completing them all must be done within a set time limit in order to beat the game.
The King of Grabs 