10. Pong

Origins: Pong was based on a game called ‘Tennis for Two’ which was a simulation of a casino game of tennis on an oscilloscope. Physicist William Higinbotham, the designer, falls ever sold as creating among the first electronic games to employ a graphical display.

The Concept: The overall game is intended to represent a casino game of Tennis or PING PONG (Ping Pong). Each player includes a bat; the bat can be moved vertically. The screen has two horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the screen. A ball is ‘served’ and moves towards one player – that player must move the bat so that the ball hits it. The ball rebounds and moves back another way. Depending on where in fact the ball hits the bat, the ball will move in different directions – should it hit among the top or bottom lines, then it will bounce off. The idea is simply to help make the other player miss the ball – thus scoring a spot.

Game play: while it sounds utterly boring, the game play is actually very addictive. It is easy to play but very difficult to master, especially with faster ball speeds, and much more acute angles of ‘bounce’.

Nostalgia: for me this is actually the father of video games. Without Pong you almost certainly wouldn’t have video gaming – it started the craze that could continue grow and become a multi-billion dollar industry. I am going to always remember this game!

9. Frogger

Origins: this game was developed by Konami in 1981, and was the first game to introduce me to Sega. At that time it was very novel and introduced a fresh style of game.

The Concept: Easy – you need to walk from one side of the road to the other. Wait a minute – there’s lots of traffic; I better dodge the traffic. Phew Made it – hang on, who put that river there. Better join those turtles and logs and get to another side – hold on that’s a crocodile! AHHH! It sounds easy – the cars and logs are in horizontal rows, and the direction they move, the number of logs and cars, and the speed may differ. You have to move you frog up, down left and right, avoiding the cars, jumping on logs and avoiding nasty creatures and get home – do that several times and you also move to the next level.

Game Play: Just one more simple concept that is amazingly addictive. This game relies on timing; you’re dinking in and out of traffic, and sometimes going nowhere. The graphics are poor, the sound is terrible, but the adrenalin really pumps as you try to avoid that very fast car, or the snake that is hunting you down!

Nostalgia: I love this game for many reasons. I played it for a long time, but never really became an expert – however, it was the first ever game I managed to reproduce using Basic on my ZX81 – I even sold about 50 copies in Germany!

8. Space Invaders

Origins: Tomohiro Nishikada, the designer of Space Invaders was inspired by Star Wars and War of the Worlds. He produced on of the first shooting video gaming and drew heavily from the playability of Breakout.

THE IDEA: aliens are invading the Earth in ‘blocks’ by moving down the screen gradually. Because the intrepid savior of the Earth it’s your task to utilize your solitary laser cannon, by moving horizontally, and zapping those dastardly aliens out of your sky. Luckily, you have four bases to cover up behind – these eventually disintegrate, however they provide some protection from the alien’s missiles.

Game Play: this is usually a very repetitive game, but highly addictive. Each wave starts a little closer to you, and moves a little fast – so every new wave is a harder challenge. The game involved a fair amount of strategy as well as good hand eye co-ordination.

Nostalgia: I wasted lots of time playing this game. While originally simply green aliens attacked, some clever geek added color strips to the screen and the aliens magically changed color the lower they got – that has been about as high tech as it returned in the times of monochrome video games!

7. Galaxians

Origins: Galaxians expanded on the area Invaders theme by having aliens swoop down on the defender. It was one of the first games to have colored sprites.

Concept: Take Space Invaders, add some color, take away the bases and make a few of the aliens swoop down at you and you have Galaxians. Fundamentally the concept is the same as Space Invaders, you’re defending the world against alien invaders, but instead than the whole screen filled with aliens moving down at you in a good orderly fashion, you get groups of aliens swooping down in haphazard ways.

Game play: in the event that you liked Space Invaders then you’ll love this. The strategies will vary, as you often have to avoid several different sets of alien ‘swoopers’ but if you can shoot them because they swoop, then you get some good great bonus points. The game is difficult and soon you get used to some of the patterns

Nostalgia: this was among the first games that I played on a pc that was almost the same as the arcade fame. I had an old Acorn Electron, which game was almost perfect with this little machine. I miss my old Acorn Electron!

6. Defender

Origins: This game was made by Williams Electronics in 1980. The Game was created by Eugen Jarvis, Sam Dicker, Paul Dussault and SLarry DeMar. It was among the first games to feature complex controls, with five buttons and a joystick. While slow to catch on due to its difficulty, it still was a popular game.

Concept: Most of the shoot-em-up games of the era were horizontal shote-em-ups. This game changed the playing field by being a vertical shooter. Just as before aliens are intent to do nasty things to earth – this time they’re trying kidnap 10 humans. You are in charge of the sole defender and must kill the aliens before they kidnap the humans. You fly over a ‘landscape’ and may see your humans mulling around at first glance. The aliens appear and drop towards the humans – it is possible to kill them at this stage, but as long as they grab an alien, you need to shoot the alien, and catch the human prior to the alien reaches the very best of the screen.

Game play: This was a great game that was easy to play but tough to master. Shooting the aliens and catching the humans gave the very best bonuses, and this formed a major the main strategy. There were some different kind of aliens that chased you making the game a lot more hectic than others; often it was just a relief to complete a level. Without as addictive as some, it did give a feeling of achievement when you reached a high score.

Nostalgia: I continued vacation with a pal for a week and we spent the entire week in the arcade playing this game and the number one game on my list (I won’t reveal the name now!). It had been one of the greatest memories of my teen years!

5. Missile Command

Origins: In July 1980, Atari published a revolutionary game. It didn’t have a joystick, but had a ball that controlled an on screen cursor. It had been programmed by Dave Theurer and licensed to Sega.

Concept: Those pesky aliens are getting smarter. Instead of sending space ships right down to fight, they’re hiding in deep space and sending a lot of missiles to inflate the Earth’s cities. This game was unique as it use a ’round’ joystick. You used this to move to a spot on the screen and fire a missile into this spot – the culminating explosion would destroy any missiles that hit the ‘cloud’. The missiles were essentially lines that moved down from the most notable of the screen at varying angles and speeds – some of them would split into multiple ‘missiles’ half way down.

Game play: this can be a very strategic game. Placing holywin88 in the proper place and timing them right could essentially clear the alien missiles quickly and easily. As the game move on you found yourself spinning the wheel frantically looking to get the bombs in the right place. This game was adrenalin pumping fun – sometimes you seemed to be up against impossible odds yet you’d breath a sigh of relief when one city survived.

Nostalgia: this was among the first games I played on a table top machine. While these didn’t really catch on, it had been still fun to put a can of soda down while you played!

4. Breakout

Origin: This game was heavily inspired by Pong. It had been created in 1976 by Atari, with Nolan Busnell and Stew Bristow being the main element designers. It’s probably one of the most cloned games ever, even today you can find new games based on the same theme coming out. Apparently the Apple II computer was inspired by this game – wow where would Steve Jobs be now without Breakout.

Concept: The idea is simple – you’ve got a bat in the bottom of the screen that can move back and forth. Above you is really a wall of bricks. A ball will move from your bat – every time it collides with a brick, the brick disappears and the ball bounce back at you. Your task is easy – stop the ball going off underneath of the screen by placing your bat in the way and bouncing the ball back at the wall – you might also need to remove all of the bricks in the wall to advance to the next level!

Game play: it is a fairly difficult game to understand. Because the bricks get lower each level and the ball speed increases, it becomes increasingly more difficult to ‘break out’. Also, sometimes the angle that the ball comes off the bat is so acute that it’s very difficult to judge where the ball will bounce! It’s among those games where you merely keep on saying ‘just one more game’ and before you know it five hours have passed.

Nostalgia: when I lived in Wales we’d a little utility room that housed books and my little ZX Spectrum – I used to spend hours playing this game as my dad sat and studied. It had been such as a male bonding session!

3. Hang On

Origin: This game was released in 1985 and was developed by Sega. It had been among the first ‘3D’ racing games and something of the first ever to introduce a ‘realistic’ aid to playing the overall game – that it a larger replica motorcycle style cabinet, with speedo, brakes and a throttle. This game became the benchmark for future racing games and result in the highly praised Out Run series. The game cleverly used ‘billboards’ and trees to give you the feel that you were moving at high speed.

Concept: You are a motorcycle racer – you sit on top of a bike and also have to race around a 3d race track, overtaking other riders and reaching certain checkpoints within a time limit. The overall game featuring different places and conditions (such as night).

Game play: Just one more easy game to play but very difficult to master. Timing the turns was essential, particularly if other bikers got in the way. Each slight touch of another bike, or crash right into a barrier slowed you down and managed to get harder to reach the checkpoint with time. The awesome graphics (for enough time) made this game pleasurable to play as you truly felt you were in a race. It is another game that kept you coming back for more.

Nostalgia: As a kid I always wanted a genuine motorbike, so this gave me a feeling that I actually had one. I was very good as of this game (an d Pole Position) and constantly had my name on the high score table – it’s possibly the only game I could truly say I was a master.

2. Pacman

Origin: Developed by Toru Iwatani, and programmed by Hideyuki Moakajima San, this game came out in mid 1980. The name comes from a phrase that pertains to the sound when your mouth opens and closes (allegedly). Namco produced the game, but it really took off in America when Midway released it.

Concept: You’re Pacman and you have become hungry. You discover a maze filled with ‘dots’ and zip around eating them. Unfortunately there’s some ghosts who aren’t too happy about this and they will chase you and eat you – but hey, there’s some really big dots that provide you the power to banish the ghosts back again to their central cage. The maze is complex, filling the complete screen, but there are no dead ends – there’s also a passage way between each side of the screen. In the center, is the cage that holds the ghosts – occasionally bonus fruit appear next to the cage. You essentially need to eat all the dots as a way to progress.

Game play: It is a simple concept, but with pretty decent graphics and an addictive tune it became a huge success. There exists a lot of strategy to the game – each ghost follows a collection pattern (although eventually they’ll forget this and follow you) – in fact you can find books dedicated on the best route to preventing the ghosts. The game gets harder as you go, with the ghosts speeding up and getting smarter.

Nostalgia: there’s something concerning the music in this game that’s just so catching -even when i write it I can hear it in my own mind. It’s among the first games that I could remember using music as a major selling point. I wasted many hours playing this game, and even though I was never great I always had fun attempting to devise new routes. Additionally it is probably my most successful programming achievement – I designed a version of the for the Acorn Atom and I actually sold a number of hundred copies (again in Germany) – I’m proud that as a twelve year old, I was able to use logic and programming skills and make some money doing it.

1. Asteroids

Origin: It’s truly amazing to believe that this game was first released in 1979 – I’ve been playing it for 30 years now! Developed by Atari and created by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, the overall game cleverly used vector graphics and real inertia physics to convert a simple concept right into a classic game.

Concept: Your little space ship has strayed into an asteroid belt. With the use of thrusters, a trusty laser cannon and a hyperspace unit, you need to move your spaceship everywhere over the screen and avoid the asteroids. You can go anywhere on the screen and even going off the edge is OK – it just happens to be a wrap around universe. The asteroids come at you from all angles. Initially they’re large, and are fairly slow. Once hit they split into smaller asteroids, and these smaller asteroids split again – small the asteroid the faster it goes. Occasionally an awful alien ship will appear and begin firing at you – he’ll occasionally hit the asteroids and split them. holywin88 of the game is simple – destroy all the asteroids without colliding into them or getting shot by an alien.

Game play: Wow so what can I say. To essentially succeed as of this game you have to use strategy – firing at all asteroids will fill the screen with plenty of small fast moving asteroids, rendering it difficult in order to avoid collisions. Which means game required that you pick off one asteroid at a time, and then cope with the smaller asteroids. While achieving holywin88 , you also had to maneuver gingerly; with real inertia, you often found yourself drifting without realizing it and suddenly you would be in the center of 4 or 5 asteroids.