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The late 1970’s and early 1980’s are often referred to as the “Golden Age” of arcade gaming, and there is a good reason for that. It was back when you didn’t have online gaming so you couldn’t experience hanging out with your friends, being connected by something like this https://onrampwireless.com/best-cheap-budget-wireless-routers/ while you battle each other. The wide variety of great games that were made for arcades in this time period became instant classics and generated huge sales as a result of their immense appeal. Ask any gamer who lived through the Golden Age and you will realize just how many great games got their big start in the gaming industry. Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Frogger, Asteroids, Galaga, Centipede, BurgerTime, Dig Dug, and Space Invaders are considered to be some of the games that helped revolutionize the gaming industry as a whole.
One can say that in this time period game developers had a better sense of creativity fueling them to create these amazing games. While we have amazing graphics and visuals from games like League of Legends and have options to check out sites like unrankedsmurfs.com reviews (in the hopes of purchasing LOL Smurft accounts) to test your ability and switch regions easily, game developers who worked on making arcade games back in the 1980’s had to be more creative because they had limited graphics and visuals to work with. Game developers at this time had limited power in the pixels they were using, so even though you saw vehicles shaped like blocks when you played Frogger, a game where you have to guide frogs across dangerous highways and rivers and into 5 little safe spots, you knew they were vehicles since they acted like vehicles. The visual representation was clear enough.
In Donkey Kong, you played as Jumpman, who would be later named Mario, and your objective was to scale up daunting obstacle courses while avoiding falling and rolling barrels in order to save the captured Pauline. If you got hit once by a barrel, you would lose a life and start over from the beginning of the level. You were given a hammer that you could use to smash the barrels into oblivion, making your path to Pauline that much easier.
Pac-Man is a well known and beloved game that spans through decades of success, and the original game featured our round yellow hero gobbling up all of the pac-dots through courses that had more than enough twists and turns. Pac-Man has 4 enemies chasing him at all times, which are conveniently nicknamed Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, and if he gets caught by any of these enemies, he will lose a life and return to his starting position. If Pac-Man eats power pellets, his enemies all change into the color blue and will run away from him instead. This allows the player to gobble up these enemies for a limited amount of time to score more points.
BurgerTime was a game that had a unique theme attached to it. In this game you play as a chef named Peter Pepper and you are trying to form complete hamburgers while avoiding enemy foods. A food ingredient falls down one level once the chef crosses the length of that ingredient. This sometimes helps you as some of your pursuing enemies will get crushed under these falling foods. Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle and Mr. Egg are your enemies to deal with in this game, and they can sometimes be stunned by pepper shots that Peter Pepper can shake out. BurgerTime requires quite a bit of strategy and patience to master.
Space Invaders pretty much changed the game by itself when it was released in 1978. You control a laser cannon and you are shooting straight at all times. You are shooting to get rid of a massive army of invading aliens that move horizontally and then drop down a level vertically. If these invaders get much too close to your laser cannon, you are guaranteed to lose. The more aliens you defeat, the faster their army’s pace will get. The speeding up of the game’s music will be an indicator of the faster pursuit.
Today video game consoles dominate the marketplace with technology that is highly advanced compared to the Golden Age of arcade gaming, but no one can deny the initial impact that was made by these classic arcade games that still serve as great influences for today’s game developers.
