Mini-golf, go-karts, pizza, and of course, a handful of tokens to spend on your favorite arcade games. These were the staples of grade-school birthday parties and family get-togethers.
With an understanding of the impact of arcades and the games they housed on our culture, it’s time to look back at the best arcade games of all time.
We couldn’t let the Pac family take up two spots, but both games deserve to be mentioned. The Pac-Man series is one of the most iconic in gaming history.
The original Donkey Kong, sometimes referred to as Donkey Kong Classic, featured a proto-Mario character facing off against a giant gorilla to rescue a trapped princess.
Fans will most likely remember the gameplay from this arcade hit due to its presence in Super Mario Brothers 3 – where players could battle and steal each other’s cards.
You can play as either Marge, Homer, Bart, or Lisa as you try to fight off Mr. Burn’s goons and rescue the Simpson’s baby, Maggie.
The 1992 side-scrolling classic X-Men was great because you could choose between 6 characters and play with a bunch of your friends, as long as you all had quarters to spare.
Frogger was featured in pop culture in the show Seinfeld, where George had to use his Frogger skills to get a vintage arcade cabinet across a busy street in real life.
As a light gun shooter, this game used gun-shaped controllers to allow players to aim and fire at targets on the screen.
Space invaders is a shooting game. Players operate a fixed cannon and shoot at the invaders coming from above.
Although it’s also a fixed shooter, the better graphics and the varied enemy formations made it more fun and challenging than its predecessors.
This offered a new layer of difficulty to the concept of shooting games. Players could thrust forward to dodge asteroids, change direction, and shoot anything in their path.