Nerd Nostalgia: 7 Classic Video Games to Know

Created by Japanese designer Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man debuted on May 22, 1980. Unlike other popular games of that time, Pac-Man is not a space shooter game. Instead, players guide a character through a maze to eat all the “pac-dots” while simultaneously evading four “ghosts” that continually give chase. The title character has appeared in over 30 licensed spin-offs and is an icon in the genre. The game went on to become one of the highest-grossing video games in history, generating billions of dollars in quarters alone by the mid-90s.

Despite initial doubts about how American audiences would react to a game with a giant barrel-tossing monkey, Donkey Kong dominated the video game market from its release in 1981 until the late 1990s. The game was developed by a first-time video game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, and introduced the character of Mario (originally called “Jumpman”), who would go on to appear in over 200 video games. Donkey Kong was so popular that it even spawned a critically acclaimed documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007), chronicling the competition between two men to hold the all-time high score for the game.

Space Invaders (1978) was one of the earliest shooting-based video games and helped popularize the genre with audiences. Players move a laser cannon horizontally across the bottom of the screen to shoot at descending lines of aliens. The farther the player progresses in the game, the faster the aliens fall from the top of the screen, with the game’s music speeding up as well. The pixelated enemy aliens have become a recognizable pop-culture phenomenon, and Space Invaders has been parodied and referenced in multiple TV shows and on film.

A popular shooting-based game, Galaga was released in 1981 as a sequel to Galaxian. Players control a spacecraft at the bottom of the screen and attempt to shoot down squadrons of enemy ships as they encroach from the top of the screen singly or in multiple formations. The game offered an additional twist on the formula popularized by Space Invaders by allowing the enemy to capture the player’s spacecraft. The Avengers film pays homage to Galaga’s popularity when a member of the Hellicarrier’s bridge crew is caught playing the game by Tony Stark.

The premise of Frogger is simple: get your frogs home safely. This means avoiding a series of hazards, including busy roads and dangerous rivers. Players have to avoid being run over by various vehicles, eaten by predators, and even drowning (despite being a frog). Frogger earned a reputation as “the game with the most ways to die,” according to Softline, but that reputation did nothing to damage the game’s popularity. The home version of Frogger generated dozens of iterations, and the character has a cameo in the animated video game movie Wreck-It Ralph.

Unlike many games of its time, Joust features the option of two-player cooperative-play mechanics. Players control knights riding flying ostriches and attempt to defeat groups of enemy knights riding buzzards while navigating floating rock platforms and pools of lava. Players either cooperate or attack each other while trying to knock enemy knights off their buzzards. Occasionally a pterodactyl appears and hunts the players.

Arguably one of the most-popular video games of the 1980s, Centipede pits players against an oncoming swarm of centipedes, spiders, scorpions, and fleas. By using a trackball, players move the character at the bottom of the screen to shoot lasers at a centipede winding its way down from the top of the screen though a field of mushrooms. The complexity and speed of the game made it a challenging fan favorite at arcades.