Golden Classic Video Game

Centipede is a 1981 fixed shooter video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. Designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, it was one of the most commercially successful games from the golden age of arcade video games and one of the first with a significant female player base. The primary objective is to shoot all the segments of a centipede that winds down the playing field. An arcade sequel, Millipede, followed in 1982.

Defender is a 1981 horizontally scrolling shooter video game developed by Williams Electronics for arcades. The game is set on either an unnamed planet or city (depending on the platform), where the player must defeat waves of invading aliens while protecting astronauts. Development was led by Eugene Jarvis, a pinball programmer at Williams; Defender was Jarvis’s first video game project and drew inspiration from Space Invaders and Asteroids. Defender was demonstrated in late 1980 and was released in March 1981. 

Asteroids is a multidirectional shooter video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. It was designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers while not colliding with either or being hit by the saucers’ counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.

Stargate is a horizontally scrolling shooter released as an arcade video game in 1981 by Williams Electronics. Created by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, it is a sequel to Defender which was released earlier in the year. It was the first of only three productions from Vid Kidz, an independent development house formed by Jarvis and DeMar. Some home ports of Stargate were renamed to Defender II for legal reasons.

The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The release of Space Invaders in 1978 led to a wave of shoot-’em-up games such as Galaxian and the vector graphics-based Asteroids in 1979, made possible by new computing technology with greater power and lower costs. Arcade video games switched from black-and-white to color, with titles such as Frogger and Centipede taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes.

Video game arcades became a part of popular culture and a primary channel for new games. Video game genres were still being established but included space-themed shooter games such as Defender and Galaga, maze chase games that followed the design established by Pac-Man, driving and racing games that more frequently used 3D perspectives such as Turbo and Pole Position, character action games such as Pac-Man and Frogger, and the beginning of what would later be called platform games touched off by Donkey Kong. Games began starring named player characters, such as Pac-Man, Mario, and Q*bert, and some of these characters crossed over into other media, including songs, cartoons, and movies. The 1982 film Tron was closely tied to an arcade game of the same name.

The golden age of arcade games began to wane in 1983 due to a plethora of clones of popular titles that saturated arcades and the rise of home video game consoles, both coupled with a moral panic on the influence of arcades and video games on children. This fall occurred during the same time as the video game crash of 1983 but for different reasons, though both marred revenues within the North American video game industry for several years. The arcade game sector was revitalized later during the early 1990s, particularly with the mainstream success of fighting games.

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