1985: The year the video game arcade reached its peak. Here’s just a few of the highlights.
But it wasn’t just in the arcade that 1985 made such an impact. As an impressionable 11-year-old, it had a number of world-changing moments:
Wrestling
1985 was the year I first got exposed to the colorful world of professional wrestling or more precisely British wrestling. Fit Finlay (with his manager and Red Indian headdress toting wife princess Paula), Rollerball Rocco, Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks. I loved it to the point that wrestling games became my favourite video game genre (more on that later).
Across the pond, and still under my radar at this point, WrestleMania was debuting at Madison Square Garden.
Other sporting moments
Well, who could forget the greatest World Snooker Final of all time: Dennis Taylor v Steve Davis, or Boris Becker’s first Wimbledon victory as a 17-year-old debutant (still a record today).
Sadly, 1985 will also be remembered for the Heysel Stadium disaster and the Bradford football stadium fire.
1985 in Music
Queen was making history at Live Aid and the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil. Dire Straits album Brothers In Arms was released, becoming the first compact disc to sell 1million copies. Also, who can forget:
- Take on Me – A-ha
- Heat Is On – Glenn Frey
- Like a Virgin – Madonna.
- Power of Love – Huey Lewis & The News.
1985 in Film
Some childhood favourites in here that I still love today: Rocky IV / Rambo, Back to the Future, Weird Science, etc.
1985: Also of note
The miner’s strike was in full swing, and Microsoft Corporation released the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0.
And so, to the Arcade Games of 1985
PaperBoy
Pure Americana. I loved 1985, the idea of the American Dream in full-swing. I’ve always dreamed about living the perfect American suburban lifestyle. The huge house, high-school, prom, the picture postcard town.
…. and of course a letterbox at the end of your drive with the paper thrown in by the …PaperBoy.
That’s right. PaperBoy let me live out my American Dream fantasies in whatever arcade I chose.
It was bright, cheery, and quirky (with the handlebar controls). But mostly it provided escapism and a bridge over to the more traditional home of the video game arcade back in the States.
Arcade fun at it’s purist. Who can forget avoiding the drunk!
Yie Ar Kung Fu
A move away from the dour Karate Champ and Way of the Exploding Fist on my Spectrum. Yie Are Kung Fu focused on fun and a bit of variety in your opponents, even giving them weapons: morning star, nunchucks, even a sword if I remember rightly.
Yie Ar Kung Fu was colorful, fun and humourous in it’s delivery of arcade violence, I loved it’s Punch Out! style progression system of making each opponent completely different and requiring a different strategy to beat.
Tehkan World Cup
This is it. My favourite video arcade game of all time. For so many reasons.
Tehkan World Cup was, for me, the perfect arcade game, from inserting your 10p right up until Game Over. The startup screen was perfect, enticing you in with a masterfully composed score and bold graphics. This was SEGA’s blue sky on the football pitch.
It just kept things really focussed and really simple. You didn’t get to choose your team or your opponents, in fact it didn’t even name them. Maybe red shirt and white shorts was England away? I loved how it held back information to add a bit of mystery.
And so, with hardly a pause for breath, the teams are displayed in group digitised ‘photos’, and the music mood changes again to anticipation. Then we’re on the pitch… Kick Off!
Suprisingly, I don’t like football, but Tehkan World Cup is the best football I’ve ever experienced in a video game, and that includes all your present-day FIFAs.
So what’s so special about it? Well, a large part of it has to do with the new top-down display, something not seen before and a perfect fit for putting together intricate Escape to Victory style passing plays, aided and abetted by the handy overview map/radar of the entire pitch clearly marking all player locations.
There are few gaming moments that can match the feeling of pulling off an intricate passing play, sending a winger out wide, then crossing and connecting with an overhead kick, volley, or diving header. Of course, the game celebrates with you, changing to an unforgettable victory fanfare while your players dance-off in celebration, arms aloft. Probably my favourite moment in gaming right there.
Tehkan World Cup is just so finely judged and expertly put together. The trackball replaces a joystick and makes you work for those runs. We have one action button that’s multi-function and focuses the mind on the best parts of the beautiful game, putting together flowing moves and acrobatics rarely seen in a real game.
Without Tehkan World Cup there would be no Kick Off, Sensible Soccer, PES or FIFA.
Exciting Hour (or Mat Mania)
Second in my all-time list is this, the best wrestling game ever made, and the perfect outlet for my obsession with the sport at the time. Exciting Hour pretty much defined my childhood years in the arcade. This is the game the last 10p bus-fare went into, meaning I had to walk home (a regular occurrence). This is the game I beat but kept on playing. This is the game I needed to get the high score on, in every arcade I found it.
So why the addiction? Well for one, the theme was bang on, so I was hooked straight away. But Technos went for its own wrestling universe with colourful combatants dubbed The ProWrestling Network which I was completely engrossed in.
The first piece of genius is Player One, or Dynamite Tommy, although it’s never mentioned in the game, and for good reason: Without a name, he’s a blank canvas. You became the hero, and Exciting Hour and my weekly TV wrestling fix became intertwined. I played out the TV matches in my head, then through this game. Player One had all the high-flying moves I’d seen on TV, and then some: body slams, suplexes, pile-drivers, elbows, back-drops, as well as a couple of top-post turnbuckle moves that made your stomach churn. Yup, this was my first real taste of arcade violence.
The real stars of the show though are your opponents. A rogues gallery of backgrounds and styles harking back to Punch-Out! but, well, this is far more interesting than just boxing.
Insane Warrior: The masked Hell’s angel thug with the leather pants is a nice easy one to start with, but it’s the details that make this game great as you realise each combatant has his very own set of unique moves. Here we have a not too elegant forearm to the back and a gorilla press for a cruel finisher.
Karate Fighter: Probably the least interesting character in the game, possessing some lightning chain punches and a flying kick which is impossible to defend. Easily beaten too, but up next..
Coco Savage: Is to Exciting Hour what Bald Bull was to Punch-Out! That expertly judged difficulty spike that kept you hooked. Just like Punch-Out!, nobody could beat Coco Savage in the arcade. This highly inappropriate barefoot leopard-skin leotard wearing foe spammed you with shoulder charges followed by coconuts (punches to the head whilst in a headlock), making you think, change tactics, until the euphoria of finally emerging victorious.
The Piranha: Is all about fighting dirty. Chokes, eye-gouges, you name it, but now you’re over the difficulty spike and can begin to enjoy the game again with probably its most outrageous character and a definite nod to the villains of British wrestling. At this point, it’s hard to lose to the Piranha unless you get trapped on the deck while he reins down elbow drops to your head! Ouch!
Blues Bloody: Or Hulk Hogan in other words. The Golden maned champion with the signature leg-drop finisher, a long-range drop-kick, and quite a few similar moves to Player One. Golden memory: Probably the only time my late Grandma ever visited the arcade with me. Whitley Bay, just over from the Playhouse, and this very game, unfortunately getting multiple leg-dropped out of contention. I’d love to know the name of this arcade as it’s escaped me. Drop me a comment below if you know?
So, similarly to Tehkan World Cup, this is the game that planted the seed to WrestleFest and just about every other wrestling game since.
Hang-On
Enter SEGA and the first of their truly astonishing gaming events. Yup, Hang-On was a full-size motorbike you sat on, with handle-bars and twist grips for the accelerator/gear and the usual brake levers.
You could almost forget about the actual game (although the score was rather good). This was all about the impact of the hydraulics and the gaming experience, something sadly missing these days. It made you actually feel like you were a motorcycle racer, and paved the way for more fireworks in the shape of SEGA’s legendary Space Harrier, Out-Run, and Afterburner.
Ghosts & Goblins
Worth a mention not just because it harks back to the day games were punishingly difficult, but because this and a lot of titles at the time oozed creativity, humour, and above all, love. Before the days of glitches, patches and gold passes, we had teams of talented, dedicated professionals knocking at complete works of art as a total package.
Ghosts & Goblins is a great example, a sort of 2D scrolling Dragon’s Lair with the hapless, helpless hero never seeming to make much progress but you still pumped in the 10p’s anyway because you admired it.
Gauntlet
And now for something completely different. A common occurrence in 1985 when innovation developed at pace. Unlike Hang-on, Gauntlet was no one-trick pony. Not only was it the first four-player game I had ever come across, but it also introduced something else into the world of the video game arcade, Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game style stats. Gauntlet was a revelation.
You got to play as Thor, a warrior; Merlin, a wizard; Thyra, a valkyrie; or Questor, an Elf, each with various advantages/disadvantages with regards to health, damage, range, speed, armour etc as you team up to clear each maze-like level of the increasing hordes of foes. It wasn’t particularly strategic or deep, but it was fresh, another angle and with four players, you were having so much fun you didn’t care.
Space Harrier
I should’ve loved this game. State of the art SEGA tech. A Sci-fi theme, lots of shooting, but Space Harrier didn’t really do anything for me. Did it lack humour and character? Had I already been so bowled over by Hang-On that this made less of an impact?
To me, Space Harrier was a very messy game, everything was thrown at you in one go and you sort of had to blast it away. It was also on-rails which is fine but it lacked those stand-out moments or storyline this style of game demands (Operation Wolf being a prime example of how it should be done).
No, Space Harrier seems like tech for tech’s sake, with SEGA, on this occasion at least, forgetting to include an actual game.
Welcome to the Fantasy Zone…GET READY!
King of Boxer
And, completely out of the blue comes this unassuming title, hidden away in the back of the arcade.
King Of Boxer doesn’t need hydraulics and a SEGA AM2 team. This is what games are all about: Pure, expertly judged, and pixel-perfect gameplay. For all of its technical wizardry and 3D graphics, Space Harrier was shallow compared to this. King of Boxer features full 360-degree movement around the ring, blocks, dodges, and various shots depending on you and your opponent’s position and movement.
This is a thinking man’s boxing game complete with tactics, rounds, and energy management as well as the usual flurries of action. King Of Boxer is a truly great game and probably my favourite boxing game of all time until the PS2 / PS3 boxing games (Rocky, Fight Night) emerged decades later.
I will never forget finding this on holiday in an arcade in Valkenburg (Netherlands) and showing the locals my spam tactic of backing off and then coming in with a swinging hook which sent a long string of my opponents spinning.
Gradius
Ok, even at the time this was pretty generic and not a patch on its 1986 follow-up: Salamander, but I can’t deny its importance and its inclusion.
What else can I say, it’s a horizontally scrolling space shoot-em-up and the forefather to the incomparable R-Type.
Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom
Well, I’d experienced the film at the now-demolished Monkseaton cinema, I had the pop-corn, loved it, and when I made it back to the arcade, there was the game. One 10p later and I was Indiana Jones, staving off witchdoctors with my whip and hurtling all over the screen in a minecart. What’s not to love there?
Sometimes games don’t need to be technically great or have fantastic gameplay. Sometimes all you need is the latest blockbuster theme. It’s shallow but it worked.
Green Beret
I was kind of gripped by this for a while. The almost Ghost & Goblins difficulty was tamed a little, but you did need to think long and hard about your next step. Result? That elusive perfectly judged difficulty curve that fed into that one-more-go spiral and kept you addicted.
But Green Beret also looked pretty even though the theme was cold-warfare. You really did want to see the next stage just for the eye candy.
Commando
Last but not least, a cast-iron overhead shooter classic. I was exposed to commando from three different angles. First the Arnie film we all know an love, next the actual arcade game, and finally, one of best Sinclair Spectrum conversions ever made. I’ll start with the latter.
I loved our school youth club. We had table-tennis, table football, and pool, just in one of the rooms. But with the arrival of home-computing came something really special, a TV and Commando on the Spectrum! The youth club and home entertainment, in general, were never the same again.
Moving onto the original arcade version, Commando never really puts a foot wrong and is a very difficult game not to love. It’s just non-stop action, and at the end of each level, all hell breaks loose as you’re surrounded by enemy troops with the only way out being to wipe them all out.
It’s not too shallow though, with enemies in bunkers, the only way to take them out is with grenades and there are also various vehicles, but to be honest I much preferred the later Ikari Warriors, which owes a lot to this original but takes things a few steps further.
So there you have it. 1985. In my opinion the Golden year of the Golden Age of the Video Game Arcade. I’d love to hear your thoughts, memories and favourite games I’ve missed out.
Thanks for reading!
