Galaga is the game I head for when I find myself in an old arcade. I can play for a good half hour on one quarter while the kids blow $20 on Skee-ball.
Bump N’ Jump. Loved it. Also loved it when I found out that if you manage to not destroy a single other car in that level, you got a 10,000 point bonus.
I think it was still quarters back then. This would have been in the summer of '83. The games were table-top versions, not arcade games.
Galaxian was my favorite. I do not think any videogame machines accepted dimes. Quarters only.
I loved Arkanoid for some reason. Also there was a Nintendo sidescroller with weird music and a spiky yoyo thing that I adored.
Galaga and Tempest are both good memories.
This one’s a little later - mid to late 80s - but my favorite had to be the one where you played Godzilla or King Kong or maybe one other monster, and climbed buildings pulling out the screaming people and eating them. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of that one. I’m sure someone will be along shortly to remind me though!
There was an old SNL skit about kids being addicted to video games. One rather sick bit was about a girl turning tricks, and how one night she earned $x, “one quarter at a time.” That would have been around 1982.
It was Breakout with freakin’ lasers. What’s not to love?
Pacman and Woman and Space Invaders.
Rampage. The arcade versions (two or three) are available on Midway (IIRC) games collections for the Gamecube, probably the other two systems as well. Those ported over pretty well (and you can plunk in another quarter by just hitting the Start button 
).
Sorry, it was a bit of a joke. I would ask my parents for quarters to play Ms Pac Man and my sister would ask for dimes.
No problem.
When I was younger, some games cost a nickel. I remember bugging grandpa for change because there was this cool game where you could pretend to drive a car.
Battlezone. Set a high score on a machine in Brewster, NY, once.
I guess it depends on your definition of “major”, but there were significant differences.
- Four different mazes
- Ghost behavior was less predictable, so you couldn’t just use patterns like you did in Pac-Man. Each ghost still had certain “personalities” as in the original Pac-Man, but these behaviors were interspersed with random movement phases. (By “personalities,” I mean that each of the ghosts has an algorithm which determines their movement. For example, Blinky (the red ghost), targets your tile, while Pinky (the pink ghost), tries to target four tiles ahead of your current location), etc.
- Two sets of warp tunnels in three of the mazes (the orange maze only had one)
- Fruit bonuses bounced around the maze
I’ve always been quite impressed by the clever and simple way the ghost AI was programmed in the original Pac-Man. It’s very straightforward, yet makes for a challenging and playable game. (There’s actually a bug in the original AI for the pink ghost, which makes its movement different than what was intended when Pac-Man is pointed up, due to an overflow oversight.) Info here.
Frogger!
All great mentions so far. My faves were :
Donkey Kong,
Turbo (the ice track always killed me!)
Zaxxon
Joust
Tron
Galaga
and last but not least ; Sinistar!
Ah, how could I forget that one!
Also, Punch Out.
Has anyone ever played Starcastle? That game was pretty fun too.
Is that like Breakout? I loved it when the ball would get stuck between walls and knock out a bunch of bricks rapid-fire.
Dig Dug and Super Cobra for me.
Punch-Out was the classic boxing game. It was pretty awesome.