The Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Burlington VT had a Blockade game outside the restaurant area. I was totally fascinated by it

I'd totally forgotten that Zaxxon had a sequel!

I've always really liked Astro Blaster. It's quite challenging. Frustratingly so at times. I came across a lot of these games back then, especially at a local bowling alley. They used to get a lot of obscure titles.

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, I agree, great game. The homebrew Atari 7800 port is really good.

@mcorleonep

7 ай бұрын

I always thought of Activision’s Megamania as an ‘unofficial’ home port of Astro Blaster…

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

Yep, it very much is

@kenwheeler3637

7 ай бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair Absolutely. Bob is a programing genius. His library of games that he's created is epic.

Some of these are more influential than you might guess. For example, Blockade is noteworthy as the FIRST Snake/Tron type game. Atari's clone Surround would become more famous, but Blockade was the first. Astro Fighter and Astro Blaster were cloned on various home computer systems popular in the USA (like TRS-80 and Apple ][). These clones would become more famous, at least in the USA, than the original. Another interesting thing is how many of these titles were ported to the ColecoVision. A lot of them, like Space Fury, would be far more seen by people in their ColecoVision ports rather than the arcades.

Sad to see that certain games don't have the audio (due to their mechanical apparatus, I guess), such as Monaco GP. But there are real highlights here, for sure. Turbo and Zaxxon are real favorites of mine. I like Star Jacket too.

Oh, Digger at 7:40 is a clone of Heiankyo Alien, which is basically an overhead Space Panic (before Space Panic, though, so really Space Panic is a sideways Heiankyo Alien). So, you need to press the fire button multiple times to dig a hole big enough to trap an alien. If you just press the fire button once, it'll be a tiny start of a hole that can't capture anything. Here in the USA, the most known version/clone of this game would be Super Alien on the VIC-20 or C64.

Depth Charge is almost a meditation. Pengo with the Popcorn music is hard to find a video of.

@bubbythebear6891

7 ай бұрын

Is that a rare version? That's the only one I've ever known!

@IsaacKuo

6 ай бұрын

There's a recent ZX Spectrum game which is a Pengo clone with tiny 8x8 pixel sprites. It uses Popcorn, which I thought was a strange choice. I didn't know original Pengo used it!

Nice; hey can you include the game year? Really helps to put it in context, but great stuff, glad to see some rare games covered

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

I never thought to include the years, I don't know why, but they are shown on the titles screens for most games.

18:25 Star Jacker reminds me of The Guardian Legend for NES.

2:28 WOW so Tron existed as far back as 1976?

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

Blockade is the original Tron game!

@bubbythebear6891

7 ай бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair I think there was something on the Intellivision called Snafu that was pretty similar. I guess this is the originator!

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

Snafu on the Intellivision and Surround on the Atari 2600 are both clones of Blockade.

@bubbythebear6891

7 ай бұрын

@@TheLairdsLair I guess given the time it's only reasonable to expect similar concepts on such limited hardware. Think of the countless shoot em ups out there!

Who really held the rights to Frogger, though? Was it Sega/Gremlin or Konami?

@TheLairdsLair

7 ай бұрын

It was created by Konami, licensed to Sega and then after Sega/Gremlin was sold to Bally/Midway in 1983 the rights reverted back to Konami.