So, at the time of writing this piece for Medium it is the year 2024. Nostalgia is leaving the magical 80s (yes, this is sarcastic. The 80s were anything but magical, especially for an undiagnosed autistic misfit kid) behind, but there are some things that stick out as very bright, very positive signposts, and very little says 1980-something like an arcade (especially if that arcade was at the mall next to the Orange Julius). I loved going to arcades. Loved them. A pocketful of quarters and a ride were an almost (depending on if the mean kids were there) automatic guarantee of a great afternoon. The games I’m going to look at here were not the biggest or most popular (with one exception), but they were really fun and helped push the developing arcade game industry ahead by leaps and bounds
Moon Patrol created by Irem and licensed to Williams, was a side-scrolling joy of a game from 1982. This was the first game to include parallax scrolling, a technique where the background scrolled at a slower pace than the foreground which, convincingly, created the illusion of depth for the player. You played the little moon buggy, a 6-wheeled pinkish-purplish buggy that shot in front and above and jumped over craters while navigating through checkpoints across the hostile Moon landscape. Moon Patrol was a fun game to play
Rally-X Namco/Midway was a maze chase game from 1980 where you played as a car being chased by other cars while navigating through a maze, trying to avoid being crashed into. So, I was eleven or twelve, and my local arcade gave away…
