For me it was Street Fighter 2 on SNES. I played the shit out of that game at the mall and when it came out for the SNES I was mind blown. It looked and played just like the arcade. It was the first game that I felt actually saved me money because we pretty much stopped goin to the arcade permanently the day that came out.
Super Mario Bros is a close second here.
Phoenix for the Atari 2600 emulated the game closely enough and lacked the weird graphics glitching and shoddy hit detection of the arcade version to the point that I prefer it. It doesn’t have the pre-hatched eggs in levels 3 and 4, the mother ship shoots at you in level 5 instead of birds, and it lacks the music and some of the more nuanced graphics, but it’s still a better version than the arcade game.
The first games that I perceived to be EXACTLY like the arcade versions were Hang-On and Out Run for the Sega Master System. Sega did make all of the above, so they could make the ports as faithful as they wanted to. Which they did.
Nowadays you can get virtually any arcade game in perfect fidelity with the existence of MAME, but 30 years ago the arcade was where it was at. Home versions were poor imitations, typically very poor at that.
The original Donkey Kong as included in Donkey Kong 64. Before that, there were always differences.
Oh, wait. Pitfall may have been exactly the same on the Atari, as the arcade version seemed to run on an arcade console. But I’m not sure that the Atari version didn’t come first. It’s just that I bought the arcade game in 2000. And, yes, it was retail: the local Alco was going out of business, and apparently found it back in its stock room or something.
Zaxxon for my Colecovision was the first true ‘arcade-like’ experience I can remember at home.
Not counting the Playchoice 10/Vs. Nintendo games (which were essentially an advertising vehicle for the NES) or the Neo Geo (a system designed jointly for arcade and home)…I would say the Street Fighter Alpha series for Playstation. This was pretty much the only fighting game port for that system that didn’t suffer some kind of crippling setback (do not get me started on X Men vs. Street Fighter).
The first system that consistently produced quality arcade ports was the Dreamcast. Hydro Thunder, Gauntlet Legends, Street Fighter 3 W Impact, Dead or Alive 2, Crazy Taxi, Giga Wing, all great titles.
Killer Instinct. The arcade machine was the first one I ever stood and watched when I didn’t have any money just because it was sooooo frigging cool - and then I got the SNES game and it was virtually identical (minus the pre-rendered backgrounds).
It wasn’t until I got a PSP with a disk of Namco games that I thought, “This is just like the arcade version!” It included Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Mappy, Galaga, Dig-Dug, and Bosconian, among others that I didn’t play in the 1980s.
It wasn’t true, but Super Mario Bros. for the NES was remarkably close to the arcade version for an 8-bit console released in 1985.
Agreed. Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct were the next ones.
Almost every single game on MAME :D.
ETA: They had Super Mario Bros. for arcade? I remember Mario Bros. in the arcade (the single-room, pipes dropping monsters one which was reused in SMB3).
Definitely Street Fighter 2. Well, maybe. I remember Kung Fu Master on my C64 being very faithful…
Joe
Out Run is an excellent point.
Joe
I’ll second for Super Mario Bros. The arcade version was slightly different, but it was damn close enough for the times!
And yes, there were plenty of SMB arcade cabinets! It was one of the most popular ones for the time. I saw a survivor SMB cabinet in a laundromat just last year!
For me it was Gauntlet - but I have to qualify this, since were it not for the qualification, I would agree with you.
I didn’t go to arcades all that much - so when I bought Gauntlet for the NES (I think), I remember thinking it was EXACTLY like the game I had played months earlier in the arcade. A year (give or take) later, I went back to the arcade and saw it. It seemed to be much better (graphic wise) then what I had at home.
Now, I was roughly around 10-12, so my memory is very foggy and for all I know the gauntlet that I saw at the arcade (a year after my NES gauntlet) was a completely different gauntlet. This would have been around 1990, FTR.
I never played Zaxxon in the arcade, but I had it for the ColecoVision. The first for me was Donkey Kong Jr. for ColecoVision. It was essentially identical to the arcade version from what I remember. That old ColecoVision was awesome.
Pong.
What? It was.
If that’s “Vs. Super Mario Bros.” then the NES/Famicom came out first, and:
Thanks for the find!
Mine was Konami’s “Knightmare” on the MSX. Not a conversion of an actual arcade game, but an arcade-like game programmed by an arcade game company especially for a home computer. The look and feel was just like a proper coin-op. Konami went on to do even better games for the MSX of course (Salamander, Antarctic Adventure) but that was the first game I could zone in to the screen and feel like I was in an arcade.