Favorite 1970s games?

[Spacejack]

Just thought I'd garner a little thinkin' on favorite games from the 70s...  MAMEd or not!  I guess other than Pac-Man and Galaxian.  And pinball would turn into the phone book... but anything else goes! 

And thoughts on collecting these older cabs would be welcome as well, I've never really seen them being traded much and certainly not in person.  I know they've gotta be pretty much entirely in the hands of collectors by now and getting one would be a nightmare, but that's about ALL I know on that front...

Anyway, as for me, I've pretty much got MAME and shaky memories of Shakee's pizza to go on here (well, that and Dawn of the Dead), but my personal list would be:

AVALANCHE.  Unsung, but I think it's better than Breakout.  Became Kaboom! on the 2600, kind of.

SHERIFF/BANDIDO.  It looks like it's going to be another Boot Hill ripoff, but it's actually a quite fun little Space-Invaders-in-the-round.

RIPOFF.  Cinematronics madness!  Encountered this one for real in a hotel game room full of obseletes sometime around 1984.  Probably the most creative of the Asteroids/SpaceWar bunch.

ATARI FOOTBALL.  I never played it, I never understood it, but it just BELONGS.  And I hate football!

and lastly, although I'm not sure it's quite old enough:

KING AND BALLOON!  The original escort mission.  This game is still pretty fantastic.  Protect your king against the beseiging gasbags!  Why they want him is unclear... where are they going?? They're balloons!  They kidnapped the king!  MY MIND!  Anyway, who cares why?  Ours is but to be drafted into service and die... as many times as necessary... the only thing that matters is his majesty!

God bless those hotel and airport gamerooms that never changed until they died!  I'd never have seen these things otherwise.  And thanks go out to my folks for letting me hang around those places.  It still means something to me that I played a real Sundance machine.  Screwed-up priorities?  Maybe, but I didn't get quite as much out of the Mona Lisa and that's a fact.

Let's hear about some prehistoric gaming experiences!

[DrBunsen]

I'll chime in by saying what grabbed my quarters back in the day:
1) Stargate
2) Robotron
3) Tron
4) Galaga
5) Berzerk

There were lots of others, but these 5 probably did the most serious damage to my excretionary income (the money I could just s**t away).


Bunsen

[Fozzy The Bear]

Sherrif is not 1970's..... It's Nintendo 1980.
Rip Off Is not 1970's.... It's Cinematronics 1980.
King and Baloon is not 1970's.... It's Namco 1981.

So none of those fall into the quite old enough catagory..... Although they're all great games.

However have a look on the Projects forum at  the Tank 2 thread if you really want 1970's... great machine.

1) Stargate
2) Robotron
3) Tron
4) Galaga
5) Berzerk

These are ALL 1980's Bunsen.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[DrBunsen]

Well duh...  Yeah, the ol' brain was definitely in the wrong gear.

I wasn't quite as active a player in the 70's, but none-the-less these games snagged a good number of my quarters:

1) Asteroids
2) Space Invaders
3) Lunar Lander
4) Stunt Cycle
5) Tank 8
6) Depth Charge


Bunsen

[The edit was to put Stunt Cycle into the list.  Couldn't remember the name during original post.]

[danny_galaga]

i think id have to say galaxians.
although i didnt play it until the early eighties.
and asteroids  is great too.
i have a soft spot for space invaders too (re-awakened lately by my VERY slowly progressing SI cab repro). SI was the second computer game i had ever played.
the first was (i think, i was pretty young) an atari sprint in changi international airport (or maybe schipol). i remember both mum and i being extremely dissapointed in how quickly it was over! first of many of lifes downers...

[TelcoLou]

Ghost town, and several others like it, got me hooked on the arcade experience back when I was a wee lad of 4 or 5 .. I remember having to stand on milk crates to reach the guns. 

[Spacejack]

Whoop, I guess I should have checked those dates more carefully.  Oh well, if they were out in '80 then Sheriff and Ripoff would have been DEVELOPED in the seventies... yeah that's my fallback position...  okay fine, i screwed up.

I'd like to get some playtimes on EM shooting games like ghost town, I wonder how many of those are left.  Only ever had one encounter with such games...

[wp34]

My all-time favorite game is Asteroids (1979). 

Atari Football was awesome.  No question about it.  A little tought to play with rollerskates on.     I just wish you could play 1-player.   First game I will try when my trackball arrives later this week!

Lunar Lander was great in a dedicated cab.  The throttle was really cool.

[pmc]

Games I remember playing alot in the late 70s included Space Invaders, Head-On, Lunar Lander, Tank, and Gun Fight.

I played Gun Fight (1975) at FunSpot with my 9-year old a few weeks ago and she enjoyed it more than any of the modern games.

-pmc

[cw]

Boot Hill

Shoot Out

Starship 1

X's O's

[Fozzy The Bear]

Boot Hill

Boot Hill..... now there's a game that chewed a lot of my and my brothers pocket money. 

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)

[WaRpEd]

1. Star warsAsteroids
2. Space invaders
3. Asteroids
4. Sea Wolf (loved that one)
5  Night driver or night driving not sure of the title
6. Sprint 1 and 2
7. Warrior (When it was working)

[Havok]

Computer Space
Pong
Asteroids

[fixedpigs]

Ghost town, and several others like it, got me hooked on the arcade experience back when I was a wee lad of 4 or 5 .. I remember having to stand on milk crates to reach the guns. 

ghost town was made in 1991...

maybe you're thinking of haunted house(1972)...?

[Singapura]

In the 70's I played mostly with Lego and Playmobile 

[Yarb]

Asteroids

Man it ate the quarters off me as a kid, then one day I played for 6 hours on one quarter and suddenly I decided I was done and walked away (with a row and a half of ships on the screen making some little kids wathcing happy as clams)

I have not plyaed it since, until 2 days ago I finished a new CP and had to give er a whirl. I can only seem to get about 40,000 points and it looks like I may need to get a couple leaf switches for proper rapid fire. 

[NoOne=NBA=]

My three favorite games of the pre-Space Invader era are Sprint 4, Sprint 8 and 4-player Atari Football.
They only had them at the really big arcades.
I always looked forward to those games because of that.
I could play Sprint 1 & 2, and 2-player Atari Football, at several other places, but the big ones were a treat.

[clok]

Deathrace and the PC version Demolition Derby ( not sure on name of remakem but instead of people and crosses, it was car wrecks and cars). I know i put more coin in Deathrace then almost any other game (guantlet and tron both kept me from becomeing a complete drunk in collage becuase so much money was spent in them).

Clok

[Bluedeath]

i don' t remember the name but i do remember of a game with a "3d" backgroud made of corrugated plastic that reproduced some submarine landscape  behind a glass that reflected a black and white crt display where hou have to shoot with a speargun sharks and other fishes .

[Nailz]

I was just 8 and 9 at the end of the 70's but I loved:

Asteroids
Galaxian
Football
Space Invaders
Sprint 2
Night Driver

[ringram]

Not sure if it was a 70's game, but I liked battlezone.

[pmc]

Battlezone was 1980.

I also played alot of Sea Wolf (1976) but not until the early 80s. For some reason, I always think the name of that game is "Sub Hunt" but it's obviously not.

Anyone remember Fire Truck? That one was unique but fun to play with 2 people.

We also used to play alot of those 4-player auto racing games where the B&W monitor was horizontal (like a coctail table) and the players stood two per side and you raced around various tracks. There was an excellent smash-'em up derby game where parts flew all over the place when you whacked another car. I played lots of these games, but not until 1982-1984 or so.

-pmc

[Zobeid]

No mention of Pong?

I remember the impression that Pong made on me when I first saw it.  I never saw a coin-op Pong game, I didn't go into arcades, but I remember seeing a TV Pong game at a hardware store (Western Auto!) and being floored by it.

I loved TV, I'd been watching TV all my life.  I watched our four, snowy, static-filled channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS.  I watched whatever they showed whenever they showed it.  There was no cable, there was no VCR.  So when I saw that Pong game and grabbed the dial and actually moved the paddle on the screen with it, I was flabbergasted.  I had to have one.

I feel like the next roughly dozen-plus years of the whole "golden age" of videogames was basically just exploring all the permutations and possibilities that were opened up in that moment.

[councilface]

Lunar rescue is an awesome game. I prefer it to lunar lander.

Boothill - the guy who programmed this is now a chick.

Glaxians - nuff said

The sprint series was great (not so great in mame).

Asteroids.

Whack-a-mole and skeeball ;o)

[Zobeid]

As long as we're on this subject, I should add:   The oldest coin-op arcade game that I can remember playing and enjoying in an actual arcade is probably. . .   Blasto, which was released in 1978.   It stuck in my mind because it was a clever and rather fun concept, and I've never seen any other game like it.  I even programmed a similar game years later in Atari BASIC.  I didn't remember the Blasto name, it wasn't until recently that I looked it up and figured out what it actually was.

Some others I remember from those early days would be. . .    Rip Off (1979).  Tail Gunner (1979).  Lunar Lander (1979).  Asteroids (1979).   Hmmm. . .   Do I sense a pattern here?  I guess you can tell about when I first wandered into an arcade.

The sit-down Tail Gunner machine I remember was quite impressive.

[pmc]

Boothill - the guy who programmed this is now a chick.

Too much information.

Boot Hill. I called it "Gun Fight" above but I think that was a clone of Boot Hill. It was Boot Hill that we used to play. They had one at a local Pizza Hut that was great to play while waiting for a table.

Speaking of Lunar Lander, I'd love to build a custom analog throttle control for my cab. That throttle control was the thing that made that game great. it's just not the same playing it with a little ole microswitched arcade button for throttle.

-pmc

[Chunce DeLeone]

Boot Hill, Gun Fight, was playing my machine the other day with my cousin and we were hopping from game to game and tried Gun Fight, Dude we played that sucker for like a half hour and it was the most fun I have had on my machine ever.  We were really into it,  its so simple and yet so perfect, and the head to head gameplay is awsome, i think this game is an example of why we do this, why we aren't happy with just an XBOX 360 or PS3, 

[wp34]

Lunar rescue is an awesome game. I prefer it to lunar lander.

Good call. I forgot that was from 1979.  I still play that in Mame.

Speaking of Lunar Lander, I'd love to build a custom analog throttle control for my cab. That throttle control was the thing that made that game great. it's just not the same playing it with a little ole microswitched arcade button for throttle.

-pmc

That would be awesome.  I agree that Lunar Lander is not the same with a button.  Has anyone tried configuring it with an analog controller?  That might help  I must say I do like that you can add as much fuel as you like by hitting the "5" key.   

[AgentX]

Galaxian (by a large margin)
Stunt Cycle
Robot Bowl (at my Dad's bowling alley)
Sea Wolf

[DrBunsen]

STUNT CYCLE!  W00t!  Thanks for the reminder!  I played that a lot at the local 7-11, but couldn't remember the name when I did my post.

[NoOne=NBA=]

I remember the impression that Pong made on me when I first saw it.  I never saw a coin-op Pong game, I didn't go into arcades, but I remember seeing a TV Pong game at a hardware store (Western Auto!) and being floored by it.

The first game that I saw that was an absolute must-have was the Atari Video Pinball console.
It played pinball and Breakout on the same console.
My grandparents had a Pong machine in their garage, so Pong didn't have the draw it might have otherwise.

[pmc]

Speaking of Lunar Lander, I'd love to build a custom analog throttle control for my cab. That throttle control was the thing that made that game great. it's just not the same playing it with a little ole microswitched arcade button for throttle.

-pmc

That would be awesome.  I agree that Lunar Lander is not the same with a button.  Has anyone tried configuring it with an analog controller?  That might help  I must say I do like that you can add as much fuel as you like by hitting the "5" key.   

My pedals (for driving games) are analog. I wonder how hard it would be to hack an accelerator lever into a Lunar Lander throttle. Hmmm...

-pmc

[pmc]

Boot Hill, Gun Fight, was playing my machine the other day with my cousin and we were hopping from game to game and tried Gun Fight, Dude we played that sucker for like a half hour and it was the most fun I have had on my machine ever.  We were really into it,  its so simple and yet so perfect, and the head to head gameplay is awsome, i think this game is an example of why we do this, why we aren't happy with just an XBOX 360 or PS3, 

Yup. Completely agree. What's your controller setup for this? The original had two sticks per player -- one to move your cowboy, and the other one to aim and fire your gun. The "gun" stick was shaped like a pistol hilt and had a trigger button on it. I'm not sure what MAME does for default mapping... I've never tried to play it on MAME because I only have one stick per player and assumed this was one game that I couldn't play properly.

-pmc

[FrizzleFried]

Asteroids (of course)
Space Invaders
Lunar Rescue*
Balloon Bomber*
Space Laser*
Atari Football

* I was exposed to these games via the Space Invaders Multikit...

[Spacejack]

Re: Lunar Lander

Those who are searching for analog thrust, don't forget you can use your trackball.  Set it up right and you can constrict the range to not have to roll the ball further than you can go in one "finger" (not take your finger off the ball)... it's not a springloaded pot, but you can get much better control than using buttons.

[RayB]

The only 70's games I played a lot would be Space Invaders and Sprint 2

[Loafmeister]

Dang Spacejak, I'm gonna have to try that out.  I guess one could also use a spinner, though the brain would find it weird .