Star Control: Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict, Volume IV is an action-strategy video game developed by Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. It was originally released for MS-DOS and Amiga in 1990, followed by ports for the Sega Genesis and additional platforms in 1991. The story is set during an interstellar war between two space alien factions, with humanity joining the Alliance of Free Stars to defeat the invading Ur-Quan Hierarchy. Players can choose to play as either faction, each with seven different alien starships which are used during the game's combat and strategy sections.
Castle Wolfenstein is a 1981 action-adventure game that was developed by Muse Software for the Apple II home computer. It is one of the earliest games to be based on stealth mechanics. An Atari 8-bit family version was released in 1982 and was followed by versions for Commodore 64 (1983) and MS-DOS (1984).
Lode Runner is a 2D puzzle-platform game, developed by Doug Smith and published by Broderbund in 1983. Its gameplay mechanics are similar to Space Panic from 1980. The player controls a character who must collect all the gold pieces in a level and get to the end while being chased by a number of enemies. It is one of the first games to include a level editor.
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, known as Zoom 909 in Japan, is a pseudo-3D rail shooter released as an arcade video game by Sega in 1982. The player controls a spaceship in a third-person perspective, adapting the three-dimensional perspective of Sega's earlier racing game Turbo (1981) for the space shoot 'em up genre. It used the Buck Rogers license, referencing the space battles, though Buck himself is never seen.
Paperboy is an arcade action game developed and published by Atari Games, and released in 1985. The player takes the role of a paperboy who delivers a fictional newspaper called The Daily Sun along a street on his bicycle. The arcade version of the game featured bike handlebars as the controller.
Moon Patrol is a 1982 arcade video game developed and released by Irem. It was licensed to Williams for distribution in North America. The player controls a Moon buggy which can jump over and shoot obstacles on a horizontally scrolling landscape as well as shoot aerial attackers. Designed by Takashi Nishiyama, Moon Patrol is often credited with the introduction of full parallax scrolling in side-scrolling games. Cabinet art for the Williams version was done by Larry Day. Most of the home ports were from Atari, Inc., sometimes under the Atarisoft label.
Sword of Fargoal is a dungeon exploration video game developed by Jeff McCord and published by Epyx for the VIC-20 in 1982. It was later published for the Commodore 64 in 1983. The game was originally released on cassette tape and 5¼" floppy disk formats.
Wizard's Crown is a 1986 top-down role-playing video game published by Strategic Simulations. It was released for the Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, IBM PC compatibles, Apple II, and Commodore 64. A sequel, The Eternal Dagger, was released in 1987.
Beyond Castle Wolfenstein is a 1984 World War II stealth game. A direct sequel to Castle Wolfenstein, it is the second game in the Wolfenstein series, and the last installment to be released by original developer Muse Software before the name was revived for a first-person shooter in 1991. Castle Wolfenstein was written solely by Silas Warner for the Apple II, while the sequel was developed simultaneously for the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Warner, Eric Ace, and Frank Svoboda III. It was quickly ported to the Atari 8-bit family and MS-DOS.
Utopia is a 1982 strategy video game by Don Daglow released for the Intellivision and Mattel Aquarius. It is often regarded as among the first city building games, and credited as "arguably the earliest ancestor of the real-time strategy genre." In July 2010, the game was re-released on Microsoft's Game Room service for its Xbox 360 console and for Games for Windows Live.
River Raid is a video game developed by Carol Shaw for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls a fighter jet over the River of No Return in a raid behind enemy lines. The goal is to navigate the flight by destroying enemy tankers, helicopters, fuel depots and bridges without running out of fuel or crashing.
Pac-Man is a 1982 maze video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. under official license by Namco, and an adaptation of the 1980 hit arcade game of the same name. The player controls the title character, who attempts to consume all of the wafers in a maze while avoiding four ghosts that pursue him. Eating flashing wafers at the corners of the screen causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue and flee, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Once eaten, a ghost is reduced to a pair of eyes, which return to the center of the maze to be restored.
Heavyweight Champ is a series of boxing video games from Sega. The original arcade video game was released in 1976. The game uses black-and-white graphics and critics have since identified it as the first video game to feature hand-to-hand fighting. It was a commercial success in Japan, where it was the third highest-grossing arcade video game of 1976. However, it is now considered a lost video game.
Gemstone Warrior is a video game written by Canadian developer Paradigm Creators for the Apple II and published by Strategic Simulations in 1984. It is a 2D action-adventure game where the player controls an armored figure searching for treasure and the pieces of the stolen Gemstone. Gemstone Warrior was SSI's first game to sell over 50,000 copies in North America.
Telengard is a 1982 role-playing dungeon crawler video game developed by Daniel Lawrence and published by Avalon Hill. The player explores a dungeon, fights monsters with magic, and avoids traps in real-time without any set mission other than surviving. Lawrence first wrote the game as DND, a 1976 version of Dungeons & Dragons for the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer. He continued to develop DND at Purdue University as a hobby, rewrote the game for the Commodore PET 2001 after 1978, and ported it to Apple II+, TRS-80, and Atari 800 platforms before Avalon Hill found the game at a convention and licensed it for distribution. Its Commodore 64 release was the most popular. Reviewers noted Telengard's similarity to Dungeons and Dragons. RPG historian Shannon Appelcline noted the game as one of the first professionally produced computer role-playing games, and Gamasutra's Barton considered Telengard consequential in what he deemed "The Silver Age" of computer role-playing games preceding the golden age of the late 1980s. Some of the game's dungeon features, such as altars, fountains, teleportation cubes, and thrones, were adopted by later games such as Tunnels of Doom (1982).
Beach Head II: The Dictator Strikes Back is a 1985 video game for the Commodore 64, a sequel to Beach Head, developed and published by Access Software. It was designed by Bruce Carver and his brother, Roger, and was released for the Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum.
G. I. Joe: A Real American Hero is a 1985 action shoot 'em up video game. It was developed and published by Epyx for the Apple II and Commodore 64.
Necromancer is an action game created by Bill Williams for the Atari 8-bit family and published by Synapse Software in 1982. A port to the Commodore 64 followed in 1983. The game was rereleased by Atari Corporation on cartridge in the style of the Atari XEGS in 1987.
Basketball is an arcade video game released in May 1979 by Atari, Inc. It was the first basketball video game with a trackball for player movement and the first to use the angled side view which became a commonly used perspective in the basketball video games that followed.
