The Best 80s Arcade Games

Ten machines that took a generation's allowance one quarter at a time and gave nothing back but memories.

Entries
10
Category
Games
Updated
  1. A burning apartment hallway with four colored bandanas hung on a sewer pipe and a pizza box on the floor.

    10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

    Konami · 1989

    A four-player beat-'em-up that let a whole group of friends pick a turtle and fight through a burning apartment building together. The defining cabinet of the late 80s arcade. Someone always had to be the purple one, and that someone always complained.

  2. A smashed arcade cabinet lying in a busy street in front of a truck, lily pads and logs on a river behind.

    09. Frogger

    Konami · 1981

    A frog crosses a highway and a river and occasionally makes it. Seinfeld gave it a 1998 episode in which George tries to move a cabinet holding his 860,630 high score across a real street, and it ends exactly how the game does.

  3. A stone dungeon with a treasure chest, a roasted turkey leg and a key on the floor, four corridors leading away.

    08. Gauntlet

    Atari · 1985

    Four players on one cabinet as a warrior, valkyrie, wizard and elf, hacking through endless mazes while a gravelly narrator announces that one of you is about to die. Health drains constantly, so coins kept going in. A dungeon designed as a vending machine.

  4. A glowing vector tube receding into darkness, a rotary knob at its near end and jagged shapes crawling up the walls.

    07. Tempest

    Atari · 1981

    Dave Theurer said it came from a nightmare about monsters crawling out of a hole in the ground. So he wrapped Space Invaders into a tube, drew it in color vectors and gave it a spinning knob. A literal bad dream, sold as a quarter-a-try good time.

  5. A small spaceship skimming over jagged mountains under a radar strip, an arcade panel with five buttons below.

    06. Defender

    Williams · 1981

    Eugene Jarvis's side-scrolling shooter used a joystick and five buttons, plus a radar of the whole planet at the top. It earned a fortune and a reputation as the hardest machine in the arcade. Your job was to protect the humans. You did not protect the humans.

  6. Two arcade joysticks on a control panel facing a swarm of boxy robots across a black floor.

    05. Robotron: 2084

    Williams · 1982

    Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar gave you two joysticks, one to move and one to shoot in any direction, and hundreds of robots to stop from reaching the last human family. Every twin-stick shooter since descends from it. It does not feel easy, nor was it meant to.

  7. A beam of light pulling a small fighter ship upward toward a swarm of insect-shaped alien craft in a starfield.

    04. Galaga

    Namco · 1981

    The sequel to Galaxian added a tractor beam that captures your fighter, which you can win back to fly two ships side by side at double the firepower. It was the game most bars kept long after everything else left. Deliberately losing a life, as strategy.

  8. A red bow lying on a pink-walled maze dotted with cherries and pellets.

    03. Ms. Pac-Man

    Midway / General Computer Corporation · 1982

    It began as Crazy Otto, an unauthorized mod kit built by MIT dropouts, which Midway bought and made official. Better mazes, smarter ghosts, 125,000 cabinets sold. The rare sequel that started as a bootleg and ended as the better game.

  9. Red steel girders slanted like ramps up a construction site, wooden barrels rolling down them and a hammer on a beam.

    02. Donkey Kong

    Nintendo · 1981

    Shigeru Miyamoto's first big game introduced a carpenter called Jumpman, later Mario. Universal sued, claiming it copied King Kong, and lost. Nintendo's lawyer John Kirby later had a pink puffball named after him. Best legal fee ever paid.

  10. A dark maze of glowing blue walls lined with white dots, a pizza with one slice missing on the side.

    01. Pac-Man

    Namco · 1980

    Toru Iwatani wanted a game that wasn't about shooting and that women would play. Released in Japan as Puck Man, it was renamed for America because someone would scratch the P into another letter. Four ghosts, each with its own chase pattern. Still undefeated.

Honorable mentions

  • A castle drawbridge over a moat, a broken sword on the stones and a stack of shiny laserdiscs by the gate.

    Dragon's Lair

    Cinematronics · 1983

    A laserdisc game with hand-drawn animation by former Disney animator Don Bluth, at an unheard-of 50 cents a play. You do not control the knight so much as guess the exact split second to push a direction. Beautiful, and an expensive way to watch a cartoon.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A plain black arcade cabinet alone in a dim room, its screen swirling with hypnotic shapes, a dark sedan outside the window.

    Polybius

    1981

    The urban legend of a 1981 Portland cabinet that caused amnesia and nightmares and was monitored by men in black. No evidence it ever existed, and the story spread online around 2000. The only arcade game on this list that never took a single quarter.

Every list.
On tap.

No newsletter. Point your AI at our public MCP server, or follow the RSS feed. New lists show up in both.

Get the MCP RSS