Asteroids In the years after Star Wars, anything involving outer space, speedy interstellar craft and dangerous battles was considered golden. Into this arena of sci-fi fantasy came Atari’s Asteroids, one of the most enduring hits in video game history. Atari’s recipe for addiction consisted of the following: one screen, five buttons, one ship, a few UFO’s, and several ship-smashing asteroids. Smack dab in the center of the action was your triangle-shaped spacecraft, adrift in a sea of space rocks. The Blasting large, slow-moving asteroids turned them into two medium-sized, speedier asteroids. Another blast at the medium asteroids split them into small, fast-moving asteroids, which could be vaporized with one more shot. Thus, if you started firing wildly into fields of big asteroids, you would likely end up in an even bigger mess than you started with, facing a swarm of tiny, zippy asteroids. The controls allow you to rotate left and right, thrust, warp into hyperspace, and most importantly, to fire your blaster at the rocky menaces. For a generation of video game addicts, Asteroids will always mean simple graphics, stressful and addictive gameplay, and dreams of high-scoring glory.
Duck Hunt Released in 1984 by Nintendo, Duck Hunt was one of the first games on the NES platform to use the 'light gun'. The basic idea of this game is pretty simple - you're a duck hunter armed with a pistol and your trusty dog. You have three shots to shoot one or two ducks each round. After ten rounds of duck hunting (you'll probably be rather bored of shooting duck at this point), you go to the shooting range and shoot at clay pigeons for another ten rounds - although the dog is absent. The game is rather fun and satisfying initially but gets old quickly. The sound effects are pretty much what you'd expect for a game from the early 1980s - that is, awful by todays standards - gameplay and graphics are simple - but it remains a classic and is fun to play every once in a while.
Donkey Kong This classic game first appeared at the arcades in 1981, and was the first to introduce such characters as Mario, Donkey Kong and Peach. Donkey Kong was the product of a Nintendo artist named Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto did the entire game himself (even the music), the only help he got was with the name. He and a manager decided they'd call it "Donkey Kong" because "kong" would imply a gorilla was involved, and "donkey" was used because their Japanese-to-English dictionary said it meant "stubborn, wily, and goofy." The story : Donkey Kong has stolen Mario's girlfriend and taken her to the top of a steel structure. You move Mario over girders and up ladders, leap over tumbling barrels, dodge lethal fireballs and jump onto fast-moving elevators, trying to rescue Mario's girlfriend from Donkey Kong
Frogger Strangely addictive game that I remember playing on my old Amstrad PC back in the day when Windows and MS-DOS was still in its embryotic stages. You are the frog and your task is to make it across the road without being hit by traffic, and finally make it across the river by skilfully hitching a ride on the floating logs. Sounds simple enough, but it's the end pockets which are the hardest - and watch out for those pesky crocodiles!
Pacman If you haven't played this all time classic game it must be because you've been hiding out in a shack on top of a mountain in Montana for the last 20+ years. The object of the game is to move around the small yellow blob (Pacman) and chomp up the white dots. Oh, and watch out for Blinky, Pinky, Inkey, and Clyde (the spooky ghosts).
Pong Pong, while not the first videogame, was the first coin-op arcade game and the first mainstream videogame that was available to almost everyone. The origins of Pong lie with an abstract tennis game created with an old oscilloscope and some vacuum tubes by Willy Higinbotham way back in 1958. What eventually became "Pong" was a pretty simple game with simple rules - hit the ball across the playing field and try your best to hit it past your opponents paddle on the other side.
