Centipede

1980

Defender

1979

Asteroids

1979

Stargate

1981

Missile Command

Missile Command is a 1980 shoot ’em up video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. Sega released the game outside North America. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari’s vector graphics game Tempest from the same year. The game was released during the Cold War, and the player uses a trackball to defend six cities from intercontinental ballistic missiles by launching anti-ballistic missiles from three bases.

Atari brought the game to its home systems beginning with the 1981 Atari VCS conversion by Rob Fulop. Numerous contemporaneous clones and modern remakes followed. Atari’s 1981 port to the Atari 8-bit computers was reused for the Atari 5200 (1982) and built into the Atari XEGS (1987). It is considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time.

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Gravitar

Gravitar is a color vector graphics, multidirectional shooter arcade video game released by Atari, Inc. in 1982. Using the same “rotate-and-thrust” controls as Asteroids and Space Duel, the game was known for its high level of difficulty. It was the first of over twenty games (including the 1983 Star Wars) that Mike Hally designed and produced for Atari. The main programmer was Rich Adam and the cabinet art was designed by Brad Chaboya. 5,427 cabinets were produced.An Atari 2600 version by Dan Hitchens was published by Atari in 1983.

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Asteroids Deluxe

Asteroids Deluxe is a multidirectional shooter arcade video game with monochrome vector graphics released in April 1981 by Atari, Inc. It is the sequel to Asteroids and was designed to combat the saucer-hunting strategy of the original allowing experts to play for extended periods. These modifications made it significantly more difficult and less accessible to players.

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Tempest

Tempest is a 1981 arcade video game by Atari, Inc., designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. It takes place on a three-dimensional surface divided into lanes, sometimes as a closed tube, and viewed from one end. The player controls a claw-shaped “blaster” that sits on the edge of the surface, snapping from segment to segment as a rotary knob is turned, and can fire blaster shots to destroy enemies and obstacles by pressing a button.

Tempest was one of the first games to use Atari’s Color-QuadraScan vector display technology. It was also the first to let players choose their starting level (a system Atari called “SkillStep”). This feature increases the preferred starting level, which could also be used to let the player continue the previous game if they wished. Tempest was one of the first video games that had a progressive level design where the levels themselves varied rather than giving the player the same layout with increasing difficulty.

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