What is the best Video Arcade Game prior to 1985.
1.Lets Leave Pac-man and his kind out of this. We all know he will dominate any way.
2.The Game HAS to have been an Arcade Coin-op Cabinet.
3.(Obviously) the game has to have been made BEFORE 1985. (12/31/84 or older).
Galaga
Frogger! and Crystal Castle and Tapper (the beer glasses one).
What is the best Video Arcade Game prior to 1985.
1.Lets Leave Pac-man and his kind out of this. We all know he will dominate any way.
2.The Game HAS to have been an Arcade Coin-op Cabinet.
3.(Obviously) the game has to have been made BEFORE 1985. (12/31/84 or older). ((Much to my surprise Arkanoid wouldn’t work))
Galaga
Defender was a huge game, though I could never play it.
Beserk
Dragon’s Lair
One of my favs was this, up to, four player football game with xs and os and these track balls that you used to move your guy around.
One of my absolute favorites, and one that got the bulk of my tokens when I was at Showbiz Pizza Place, was Arabian.
Second for Robotron.
Asteroids
Gauntlet (I think I may still have the PC version of this on a 5.25" disk, but it started out as an arcade game.)
Omega Race
Some of my favorites included Battlezone, Joust, Qix.
This site has on-line versions of many old arcade titles.
I too am a Galaga fiend, however just to be different I will nominate “Joust”. Gotta love an arcade game where you joust people from on top of large birds over pools of lava. :>
Re: Galaga, I’ve always had a special fondness for games that had bugs that made them really beatable.
There was another game, Digger, that has a fond memory in my heart. Not for great play, but because you could take a taped quarter and trigger multiple games with it. Another fave was Carnival, which actually allowed you to rub your feet on the carpet and shock the machine into giving you free games. 
My favorite, or which was actually The Best?
My favorite was probably Spy Hunter. I was in the video game parlor the day it arrived, I remember the delivery guys taking it off the truck. I followed them to it’s spot, watched them plug it in, and put in the first quarter. Wow, was it cool, the theme song thumping out of the speakers, the buttons all fitting snugly in my hands…
But the Best Game Ever was, without a doubt, Pong. Dumb as it looks now, Pong changed everything in a very fundamental way. There has never been, nor will there ever be again, a game that has as much impact as Pong.
I bought one of those Atari emulator joysticks you plug directly into your TV the other day, and you know what? Pong is actually still pretty fun. It isn’t Halo, but hey, it’s less than a meg! Less than *half * a meg! Halo has graphics of TREES that are bigger than that!
I’m pretty sure that’s way more than the game needed. After all, the Atari VCS (2600) had a whopping 128 bytes of RAM.
Asteroids gave my life a goal, gave my future a purpose, and gave me a career to shoot for at the tender age of 10.
Sue me, I don’t have the specs in front of me and am too lazy to look them up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a few k, frankly. I’m sure I’ve written documents that were bigger than Pong.
The OP excludes Pac Man on the grounds that he would crush all… but I’ll hold up Pong against Pac Man any day of the week. All that is good about Pac Man was learned from Pong.
WARLORDS! Not even Pac-Man can stand up to this almight Atari classic.
The original Mario Bros.
Er. If you leave him “and his kind” out of it, who is left? Why are you leaving any out? Surely the point of a poll is to discover who “will dominate”.
What was that one with the mother ship? Phoenix? That was good.
Cyrus was ok.