Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.
An amusement arcade, also known as a video arcade, amusements, arcade, or penny arcade, is a venue where people play arcade games, including arcade video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, merchandisers, or coin-operated billiards or air hockey tables. In some countries, some types of arcades are also legally permitted to provide gambling machines such as slot machines or pachinko machines. Games are usually housed in cabinets.
Snake is a genre of action video games where the player maneuvers the end of a growing line, often themed as a snake.
Track & Field, also known as Hyper Olympic in Japan and Europe, is an Olympic-themed sports video game developed by Konami and released as an arcade video game in 1983. The Japanese release sported an official license for the 1984 Summer Olympics. In Europe, the game was initially released under the Japanese title Hyper Olympic in 1983, before re-releasing under the US title Track & Field in early 1984.
Donkey Kong Jr. is a 1982 arcade platform game that was released by Nintendo. It is the sequel to Donkey Kong, but with the roles reversed compared to its predecessor: Mario is now the villain and Donkey Kong Jr. is trying to save his kidnapped father. It first released in arcades and, over the course of the decade, was released for a variety of home platforms. The game's title is written out as Donkey Kong Junior in the North American arcade version and various conversions to non-Nintendo systems.
The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The release of Space Invaders in 1978 led to a wave of shoot-'em-up games such as Galaxian and the vector graphics-based Asteroids in 1979, made possible by new computing technology that had greater power and lower costs. Arcade video games switched from black-and-white to color, with titles such as Frogger and Centipede taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes.
Donkey Kong is a 1981 arcade video game developed and published by Nintendo. As Mario, the player runs and jumps on platforms and climbs ladders to ascend a construction site and rescue Pauline from a giant gorilla, Donkey Kong. It is the first game in the Donkey Kong series and Mario's first appearance in a video game.
Tron is a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in 1982. The game consists of four subgames inspired by the events of the Walt Disney Productions motion picture Tron released earlier in the summer. The lead programmer was Bill Adams. The music programmer was Earl Vickers.
Twin Galaxies is a social media platform and video game database. Twin Galaxies is the official supplier of video game records to Guinness World Records.
In games, score refers to an abstract quantity associated with a player or team. Score is usually measured in the abstract unit of points, and events in the game can raise or lower the score of different parties. Most games with score use it as a quantitative indicator of success in the game, and in competitive games, a goal is often made of attaining a better score than one's opponents in order to win.
Nibbler is an arcade snake maze video game released in 1982 by Chicago-based developer Rock-Ola. The player navigates a snake through an enclosed maze, consuming objects, and the length of the snake increases with each object consumed. The game was the first to include nine scoring digits, allowing players to surpass one billion points.
Fantastic Fest is an annual film festival in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 2005 by Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse, Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, and Tim McCanlies, writer of The Iron Giant and Secondhand Lions.
Walter Aldro Day Jr. is an American businessman and the founder of Twin Galaxies, an organization that tracks world records for video games and conducts a program of electronic-gaming promotions.
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a 2007 American documentary film about competitive arcade gaming directed by Seth Gordon. It follows Steve Wiebe in his attempts to take the high score record for the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong from Billy Mitchell. The film premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was released in U.S. theaters in August 2007. It received positive reviews.
Steven J. Wiebe is an American two-time world champion of the video game Donkey Kong, most recently holding the title from September 20, 2010, to January 10, 2011, with a high score of 1,064,500. Wiebe was the first person to achieve over a million points on Donkey Kong, with 1,006,600 on July 4, 2004. He is one of the primary subjects of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Like his Donkey Kong rival Billy Mitchell, Wiebe was put in a Topps Allen & Ginter baseball set, which is featured in the 2009 edition of the baseball product.
William James Mitchell Jr. is an American video game player. He achieved fame throughout the 1980s and 1990s by claiming numerous records on classic video games, including a perfect score on Pac-Man. Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records recognized Mitchell as the holder of several records earned playing classic video games, and he has appeared in several documentaries on competitive gaming and retrogaming. However, in 2017, the legitimacy of a number of his records was called into question, leading to Twin Galaxies stripping Mitchell of his records.
The Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show is an annual pinball and arcade game festival held in Tacoma, Washington, United States.
Pixels is a 2015 science fiction comedy film directed by Chris Columbus and written by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling, based on a story penned by Herlihy. Loosely adapted from the 2010 short film of the same name by Patrick Jean, the film stars Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad and Brian Cox. Combining animated video game characters and visual effects, the film involves an alien race misinterpreting video feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war, to which they respond by attacking Earth with technological replicas of characters from the games. The President of the United States assembles a team of former arcade champions to lead the planet's defense.
Players have competed for the highest score for the video game Donkey Kong since its release in 1981. The competition became more prominent after it was covered in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong.
Star Worlds Arcade is an amusement arcade located in DeKalb, Illinois. The arcade held its grand opening on January 11, 1985, in Maple Park, Illinois, US, with only 18 arcade games. Today, with hundreds of games rotated regularly throughout its game rooms, Star Worlds can be found in DeKalb, Illinois, having moved in 2004 when owner and manager Patrick O'Malley and partner Glenn Thomas needed more space and more customers. Although it is predominantly a video game arcade with a couple of rooms dedicated solely to the Golden Age of Video Arcade Games, it is also a small museum exhibiting a wide variety of collectibles associated with arcade game iconography, home video game consoles and 1980s pop culture in general. Star Worlds was inducted into the Twin Galaxies International Registry of Historic Video Game Arcades by gaming celebrity Walter Day for being one of the last remaining neighborhood arcades still in operation since the 1980s.
