1980Welcome to the 80s! As the Arcades Machines continued to rule, 1980 is mostly famous for the Arcade releases like Pac-Man, Berzerk and Missile Command, but some of us remember Centipede and Warlords (which is my personal favourite) as well! We also saw the release of Nintendo’s infamous first handheld system – Game & Watch.

This was the year when Atari 2600 finally got going with the port of Space Invaders and for some reason, suddenly everybody wanted to have it (and their other games) at home! Mattel had a proper release for their home console – Intellivision (which they partly released already previous year – for the test markets). These were definitely steps closer to the Arcade Coin-Op Machines – but not yet ready to take over!

Home computers continued to improve too. Radio Shack released a new home computer with colors – nicknamed CoCo (TRS-80 Color Computer). We saw the release of the ZX80 and Atom home computers for the UK market, but the biggest steps came from the software developers! Infocom released their first text adventure game – Zork I. And influential RPG game Rogue was released (which in fact created a new genre – rogue-like games). Graphical adventure games became the most popular genre for the home computers for almost entire decade.

In my next posts I will first take a closer look at the Game & Watch handheld systems and its games. Then I will take you to the best games released for the home consoles, home computers and the Arcades in the end!

Lets continue the journey!