Egg (Nintendo Game & Watch, 1981)
Egg was the first Game & Watch I got – it was one of the earlier titles.
I remember pestering my parents to get a Game & Watch and we schlepped to Paddy’s Markets and I stood in front of a glass topped counter and got one. In all truth, Egg wasn’t very exciting – you controlled a wolf (!) with four buttons who used his hat to collect eggs laid by hens in the four corners of the screen. As the game progressed the eggs were laid more rapidly, no doubt due to secret genetic engineering experiments taking place whilst you played the game. If you missed an egg it would break on the ground and a chick would, quite disturbingly run off screen.
As a young kid I did wonder why when we ate eggs at home there weren’t chickens inside them. I found out later that the egg companies didn’t let them be fertilised and screen them with lights to avoid ‘consumer surprises’.
Egg was re-released as Mickey Mouse under a license from Disney and the original version disappeared. Despite the licensed character it didn’t make the game any more fun.
Seb Chan
Star Wars (Atari, 1983)
I was in London in 1984 and there was a seedy little arcade in Soho which had, near the door, a lovely sit down version of Star Wars. I’d plead with my parents to let me pop in for a few games after a meal in nearby Chinatown. Back then the vector graphics were out of this world – and the speed of the gameplay blitzed the far more slow moving Battlezone (Atari, 1980).
Playing on Easy mode, it made for a good ten minutes of pretending to be Luke Skywalker. First using the yoke controls to manoeuvre your X-Wing in pursuit of Tie Fighters (including an indestructible Vader!), and then plunging into the notorious Death Star trench dodging fireballs from turrets and waiting for a shot at the Exhaust Port and the gritty, tinny voice synthesis of “You’re all clear kid!”. Blow the Death Star and it was onto the next more difficult round featuring the additional stage flying low across the surface of the Death Star shooting deflector towers and then dodging increasingly complex horizontal catwalks in the Trench.
I never made it through the hardest stage, the barrage of fireballs quickly got too much as the game becomes one of targeting the fireballs as they are launched and trying to squeeze out a shot at the Tie Fighter or Turrets in between.
The vector graphics still make this an exciting game to play if you can track down a machine. I spent a good 45 minutes reliving 1984 when an original sit down cabinet toured as part of the Game On exhibition in Melbourne last year. Certainly compared to other games of 1983 none have aged as well graphically as Star Wars.
In 1985 the obvious sequel, The Empire Strikes Back was released. It used the same hardware and was available as a conversion kit. The sequel had four stages but even the stage on the surface of Hoth flying a Snowspeeder to entangle the huge Imperial Walkers didn’t quite capture the same level of excitement as the original.
Seb Chan
Gauntlet (Atari Systems, 1985)
When Gauntlet came out at Timezone in Sydney in 1985 I remember queues to play the game. Essentially a dungeon-crawl maze game – a direct descendent of Pac Man and Dungeons & Dragons, Gauntlet’s real claim to fame was the four player system which added a real sense of collaborative social play to the arcades – something that would bear out in the next two decades with social multiplayer arcade (and home) gaming coming to the fore.
I used to play with three school friends and we’d argue over who’d get to play the Elf – which for some reason we thought was the best character. In fact the Valkyrie was the best player. The game was pretty well balanced except perhaps for the Wizard who was just too weak to play with outside of a full compliment of four players.
The baleful cry of ‘Elf needs food’ would be heard shortly before death – usually in later levels by Death himself – a character that would glide effortlessly across the screen making a beeline for your player. As you progressed the waves of enemies emerging from spawning chambers, some made of bones like Baba Yaga’s Hut, massively increased and the mazes began to include teleporters, vanishing and invisible walls.
The game was ported to a lot of home computer systems – albeit poorly, as they missed the smoothness of the arcade multiplayer – and generated numerous sequels over the next two decades. Gauntlet II, released in 1986, expanded the original allowing players to choose any character allowing for four Valkyries of different colours to play together. It also introduced a bonus stage ‘treasure room’ where a certain number of chests had to be found before the time ran out.
Seb Chan
