Asteroids is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
The Atari 7800 ProSystem, or simply the Atari 7800, is a home video game console officially released by Atari Corporation in 1986 as the successor to both the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. It can run almost all Atari 2600 cartridges, making it one of the first consoles with backward compatibility. It shipped with a different model of joystick from the 2600-standard CX40 and Pole Position II as the pack-in game. Most of the announced titles at launch were ports of 1981–1983 arcade video games.
The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984, Mattel sold its video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors, eventually becoming INTV Corporation. Game development ran from 1978 to 1990, when the Intellivision was discontinued. From 1980 to 1983, more than 3.75 million consoles were sold. As per Intellivision Entertainment the final tally through 1990 is somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million consoles sold.
The Nintendo 64 (N64) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo. It was released on June 23, 1996, in Japan; on September 29, 1996, in North America; and on March 1, 1997, in Europe and Australia. The successor to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, it was the last major home console to use cartridges as its primary storage format until the Nintendo Switch in 2017. As a fifth-generation console, the Nintendo 64 primarily competed with the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn.
The Magnavox Odyssey 2, also known as Philips Odyssey 2, is a second generation home video game console that was released in 1978. It was sold in Europe as the Philips Videopac G7000, in Brazil and Peru as the Philips Odyssey and in Japan as Odyssey2. The Odyssey 2 was one of the five major home consoles prior to the 1983 video game market crash, along with Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision and ColecoVision.
The history of video games began in the 1950s and 1960s as computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations on minicomputers and mainframes. Spacewar! was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student hobbyists in 1962 as one of the first such games on a video display. The first consumer video game hardware was released in the early 1970s. The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first arcade video games were Computer Space and Pong. After its home console conversions, numerous companies sprang up to capture Pong's success in both the arcade and the home by cloning the game, causing a series of boom and bust cycles due to oversaturation and lack of innovation.
Area 51 is a light gun arcade game released by Atari Games in 1995. It takes its name from the military facility. The plot of the game involves the player taking part in a Strategic Tactical Advanced Alien Response (STAAR) military incursion to prevent aliens, known as the Kronn, and alien-created zombies from taking over the Area 51 military facility.
Joust is an action game developed by Williams Electronics and released in arcades in 1982. While not the first two-player cooperative video game, Joust's success and polished implementation popularized the concept. Players assume the role of knights armed with lances and mounted on large birds, who must fly around the screen and defeat enemy knights riding buzzards.
Racing games are a video game genre in which the player participates in a racing competition. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to fantastical settings. They are distributed along a spectrum between more realistic racing simulations and more fantastical arcade-style racing games. Kart racing games emerged in the 1990s as a popular sub-genre of the latter. Racing games may also fall under the category of sports video games.
Q*bert is an arcade video game developed and published for the North American market by Gottlieb in 1982. It is a 2D action game with puzzle elements that uses isometric graphics to create a pseudo-3D effect. The objective of each level in the game is to change every cube in a pyramid to a target color by making Q*bert, the on-screen character, hop on top of the cube while avoiding obstacles and enemies. Players use a joystick to control the character.
Full-motion video (FMV) is a video game narration technique that relies upon pre-recorded video files to display action in the game. While many games feature FMVs as a way to present information during cutscenes, games that are primarily presented through FMVs are referred to as full-motion video games or interactive movies.
A ROM image, or ROM file, is a computer file which contains a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip, often from a video game cartridge, or used to contain a computer's firmware, or from an arcade game's main board. The term is frequently used in the context of emulation, whereby older games or firmware are copied to ROM files on modern computers and can, using a piece of software known as an emulator, be run on a different device than which they were designed for. ROM burners are used to copy ROM images to hardware, such as ROM cartridges, or ROM chips, for debugging and QA testing.
Exidy, Inc. was a developer and manufacturer of coin-operated electro-mechanical and video games which operated from 1973 to 1999. They manufactured many notable titles including Death Race (1976), Circus (1978), Star Fire (1978), Venture (1981), Mouse Trap (1981), Crossbow (1983), and Chiller (1986). They were also the creators of the Exidy Sorcerer (1978) home computer platform.
Nightmare Ned is a 1997 computer game for Microsoft Windows that was developed alongside the animated series of the same name. The game was based on a concept by Sue and Terry Shakespeare. It was released on October 7, 1997.
Saturday Supercade is an American animated television series produced for Saturday mornings by Ruby-Spears Productions. It ran for two seasons on CBS.
Jump Raven was the second game released by Cyberflix, in 1994. The game's technology is similar to that of Lunicus, released by Cyberflix one year prior, but this time employs a more detailed storyline and environment. In an opening sequence of the game, we see future New York City, which has fallen into horrible disrepair in the aftermath of global warming and rising sea levels and a bankrupt federal government. The premise of the story is that gangsters, neo-nazis, and various other thugs have acquired large stores of weapons and have ransacked New York's store of cryogenically-frozen DNA of endangered species. The player's job as a bounty hunter is to retrieve them.
Isometric video game graphics are graphics employed in video games and pixel art that use a parallel projection, but which angle the viewpoint to reveal facets of the environment that would otherwise not be visible from a top-down perspective or side view, thereby producing a three-dimensional (3D) effect. Despite the name, isometric computer graphics are not necessarily truly isometric—i.e., the x, y, and z axes are not necessarily oriented 120° to each other. Instead, a variety of angles are used, with dimetric projection and a 2:1 pixel ratio being the most common. The terms "3/4 perspective", "3/4 view", "2.5D", and "pseudo 3D" are also sometimes used, although these terms can bear slightly different meanings in other contexts.
Mad Planets is a multidirectional shooter released as an arcade video game in 1983 by Gottlieb. The player controls a spaceship, which can be moved and rotated independently, to fend off angry planets and moons attacking from all sides. It was designed and programmed by Kan Yabumoto with art by Jeff Lee and sound by David D. Thiel. Lee and Thiel previously worked on Q*bert for Gottlieb, a game that was inspired by a pattern of hexagons implemented by Yabumoto. Kan Yabumoto died in 2017 of a degenerative lung disease.
Q*bert is a remake of the 1982 arcade game of the same name with 3D graphics. It was developed by Artech Studios and released by Hasbro Interactive on the PlayStation and Microsoft Windows in 1999, on the Dreamcast in 2000, and on Mac OS in 2001.
