Some 80s gaming nostalgia

A few people I know on Steemit have been posting great stories of their youth. See @slobberchops and @steemonkey. I don't have much in the way of stories, but I thought I'd share some memories.As a child of the mid-60s I was a teenager in the 80s. This was when video games really kicked off. I remember my family having a basic console that did lots of variations on Pong. If you wanted something better you had to head to the arcades. In my home town of Bedford there were a couple of arcades in Midland Road. I'd spend a lot of time there playing various games. Space Invaders was one of the first, but then there were a flood of them.

One of my favourites was Star Wars. There was a sit-in unit exactly like this that I spent a lot of time in. Not that I ever got that good at it. I think most games were 10p, but are probably £1 these days.

Star Wars used vector graphics where the images were literally drawn on the screen, as is done with lasers at discos. That gave much finer lines, but you didn't get blocks of colour. Another game using this was Tempest that was a sort of 3d space invaders.

There were various experiments with 3D. I Robot was an interesting take on this.

Others got around the graphical limitations by mixing real video from a 'laserdisc' with the computer images. Firefox was based on a Clint Eastwood movie. I know I played this one a lot.

Dragon's Lair just used animation from a laserdisc. You had to move the joystick at just the right moment to get past obstacles. I wasn't so keen on it, but it could be fun to watch others play.

There were some multi-player games. Gauntlet allowed up to four players.

Some pubs would have 'table' machines like this. Often you could have a person on each side that allowed for both to play at once or it would flip the screen for alternate play. I don't remember Asteroids in this form.

Part of me would like one of these old machines and you can buy them, but it's not too hard to build an emulator that could offer lots of the games. People do this with a Raspberry Pi. I don't play games much these days, but I could happily relive some memories with the classics.

What was your favourite arcade game?

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