Old arcade games with surprising depth

The Game Room
1

Referring mainly to games from the 80s only here, especially early 80s:

Most 80s arcade games are simple and repetitive: Asteroids. Space Invaders. Pac Man. You get past one level and the next one is mostly the same just faster. Other games had a few basic levels, but even an intermediate player could get past them all and then you just went back to where you started, only with higher difficulty.

But some of them had surprising depth. Interesting level design, introducing new types of obstacles ,or gameplay mechanics that were way ahead of their time.

Such as Wizard of Wor, probably the earliest game where two people could play simultaneously. You even had the choice of playing cooperatively or try to kill each other. And the mazes were all different.

Or Punchout, with a decent number of opponents which got pretty brutal after the second one who all had their own fighting styles.

Amidar, a surprising little nugget from 1981 I believe, where you play a guerilla trying to paint a board, kinda like in Pacman, but the colors and structure of the maze kept changing.

Qbert, a game with tons of personality and a wide variety of enemies.

Crystal Castles, great level design and an extremely unique control scheme(track ball where you could control your bear’s speed as well as his direction in very subtle ways).

Gotta mention Dragons Lair/Space Ace/Cliffhanger too. Just incredible ideas and it’s a shame that type of game never really advanced. I hear it was because of the huge cost of production and the unreliability of the laser discs, but in 1984 or so these were just amazing pieces of technology.

Any other great old gems that you love to play that go beyond the simple, “kill all the enemies, next board same as the last but faster” template?

2

Qix was a classic. Move your cursor to make rectangles but avoid the Stix and the Sparx, move slower to get more points, split the Stix, lots of possibilities.

Marble Madness was just cool. Like all the trac ball games, it seemed to be a bit too much to maintain, dirty hands and all.

3

I remember Qix being popular in the arcades but I never played it. Looked a little complex to me, and I was 8 or 9 during the era of huge arcades so I tended to avoid games that looked abstract like that.

You did remind me of Defender though, a game with a way too complex control scheme, with like 7 buttons. Plus you had to save people while blowing away enemies. To this day my wife won’t play a shooter where she can’t just blast away at everything. Even if the game wants you to distinguish between innocents and perps, she’ll shoot the civilians too.

4

I remember playing a game called “Lode Runner” on an old Apple II, and there were different configurations for well over 100 screens…I think I’d gotten past 150, even, with no defined end or pattern in sight.

5

Gauntlet was a quarter eating machine but it really did have depth. The four characters had different strengths and weaknesses and didn’t play the same way at all.

6

Lode Runner was one of the first games where you could design your own levels, IIRC.

7

Black Tiger seemed to take the basic platformer and give it some great depth. A variety of enemies that took different approaches to kill, a money system, etc.
Golden Axe expanded on the basic side scrolling fighting game like Street Fighter and made it way more interesting. Spell casting, riding dragons, thieving gnomes.
Smash TV gave the basic Robotron a facelift. With some great graphic graphics, money grabs, bosses, various enemies, it was a total blast to play.

8

I think SmashTV came out in the 90s, but yeah, that game was great fun when it first came out. Total Carnage had the same playing mechanics but not nearly the charm.

9

The seven button control of Defender made it artificially and needlessly complex. Having a joystick control as they did in the Atari version and later home computer adaptations improve the flow the game considerably. (The same is true with Sinistar.)

10

Yeah, I never understood why you’d have buttons for directional movement rather than a joystick.

11

This may not be quite what the OP is looking for, but Missile Command made very interesting use of narrative mechanics. It’s strictly defensive gameplay, it’s impossible to win, and the player is forced to make tough choices (e.g. let a city go down to protect one of the bases). It was a stark presentation of the horror of a nuclear war, cut down to a conceivable scale (protecting a handful of cities in one region). All you can do is rage against the tide to buy a little more time for the civilians under your protection. You do your duty and protect the people as best as you can. But no matter what choices you make, everyone always dies. The End.

Plus, it had a trackball.

12

Heh. That’s social commentary that I totally missed as a kid. Was that actually what they were going for, or just how games were designed back then? I don’t think Pac Man was actually about the futility of trying to fight ghosts or Donkey Kong about how you’ll never actually save the girl. And if you do, she’ll just get kidnapped by a giant monkey again.

13

Extra Credits did a thing on it. I hadn’t picked up on the meaning until I watched that video, either. But I think they cited interviews with the developer where he said the commentary was on his mind while he was making it.

14

Is that the one where the last commander comes out of his underground command base to a blasted earth and cries, “I win!”?

15

Tron. I remember the awesome joystick and the spinner control, the four separate games to play, the awesome colors and lighting of the cabinet. Aww, good times.

16

Nah; Golden Axe owes nothing to Street Fighter, it’s just an iteration on Double Dragon.

Er? These games are basically the ultimate origin of the modern Quicktime Event. They were awful, even then.

I mean, they looked really pretty (Thanks Don Bluth!), but they were basically the game equivalent of a DVD that played one track if you pushed a button in time and played another if you didn’t. There was near zero depth here.

17

Exactly. I think it took me zero quarters to find that out - someone told me how lame it was, and I watched someone play and found your summation above was spot on. Asteroids was Shakespeare compared to that.

18

I believe that was Nuclear War. Game titles really didn’t show much depth back then.

19

Ah yes, Double Dragon was the one I meant to say. Street Fighter was more an update of Kung Fu.

20

“Wizard Needs Food Badly”