A few years ago I was given an Atari Flashback unit for my birthday. It was a cute little device that resembled an Atari 7800. I enjoyed it, but how many of us actually had an Atari 7800 in the 80’s? By the time the 7800 was released, everyone had already moved on either to the Commodore 64 platform or Apple IIC or Atari Home Computers. The AF1 however was a hit in sales however, selling over 500,000 units.
Overall, Atari fans were not happy, the console was overly tiny, used poor 7800 styled sticks, and used an “NES-on-a-chip” for the actual hardware with the original 2600 games ported over. The games suffered, and were hard pressed to truly represent the original 2600 experience let alone the 7800.
Atari Flashback 1
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Gaplus
Released by: Namco
Year: 1984
Style: Classic Shoot ‘em up
Space invaders kind of bored me, didn’t do much for me at all. Asteroids was ok, but after a while I was like, “is that it?”
Galaga was the first shooter game to really hook me and to this day can still garners my quarters. It’s one of my few Wii VC old school downloads and I play it at least once a week. The gameplay, challenge stages and variety made this game a winner.
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Throughout the history of gaming, there have always been games that reshape the landscape. I would like to point them out with a weekly column touching upon these games and sharing their success to the new gaming community. We should always know where we came from, if we expect to have an idea of where we are going.
Everyone is into these 3rd person shooters these days, (I’m not) but wouldn’t it be curious to see how the genre started? What were the early games that began this (annoying) phenomena? Well I would like to introduce G. I. Joe Cobra Strike!
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Arcades have been around in various forms since the 1920’s. They evolved from Coney Island amusement parks featuring shooting galleries to ball tossing. Through the 20th century they took on alternate forms with pinball and fortune telling machines taking the lead. In 1972, Atari was formed and created the infamous “pong” coin op game.
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