What are your favourites from Namco's Golden Age?...there's quite a lot of big ones here, aren't there? Don't get too many of those to the pound. Have a shout about it in the comments, and thanks for watching. :)

@six_is_dead9492

2 ай бұрын

One of my earliest memories playing an arcade game was Galaxian. I was waiting with my dad in a pizza parlour and the owner was emptying the coins out of the machine in the corner. He looked over at me and put a bunch of the coins back through the machine and told me to play for free. As a result, I'll always have a soft spot for it. One of the very few times my dad would actually play a computer game with me (other than World Cup Italia '90 on the C64 of all things)!

@markjones5647

2 ай бұрын

OH HELL YEAH thanks Kim always a pleasure Elvis from your twitch channel and I most apologise been working nights so missed alot of streams I will catch up and see u all next time best wishes Mark in Lincoln

@RetroRulzMyTown

2 ай бұрын

Ooh, where do I begin? Namco's like the BIG one for me, to the point where I admittedly love all of them in their own way for how unique they are in aesthetic and gameplay. First off, know that I'm ALSO a massive fan of New Rally-X, and never got why it's so underrated. But as for my other favorites, there's Bosconian, Pole Position, Motos, Baraduke, Metro Cross, Libble Rabble & Pac-Land. I even love Grobda and Phozon for what I stated previously. I'd also say that Jr. Pac-Man is my favorite of the maze games, but I also know that's cheating. Also the thing about Xevious' bombing being Scramble-like, that might also explain the game's massive success in Japan as it was created to BE a 3D Scramble.

@MeanderBot

2 ай бұрын

Definitely Galaga. The only arcade classic I've managed to register a six digit score on.

@TheOneTrueSpLiT

2 ай бұрын

Great video, as always Kim. I can just recall playing "Galaxian" in the children's room of a pub in Kent when I was 10 or 11 (so 1979 or 1980) and it remains one of my all-time favourite coin-ops and I play it regularly in MAME. I'm also a big fan of Galaga, Gaplus, Dig Dug, Xevious and Bosconian, all of which I also still regularly play using MAME, but I don't recall playing any newer Namco games from about 1985 onwards as exams took over my life. The last physical coin-up I played was Bubble Bobble, my number one favourite arcade game, at "Clouseau's" wine bar in Tunbridge Wells in 1986 - needless to say I play that weekly in MAME 😉

I’m 52 and can still remember the first time I saw or even heard most of these Namco US releases. I heard Galaxian and PAC MAN long before I could see it (older kids could be bastards-something I never did, I’d let the younger ones up with me because I knew how it felt).

"Honey, I'll do it later, there's a new Kim Justice video!"

I remember playing Xevious in the Eightlands Well pub in Dewsbury when I was at college there on a course in the mid 80s. Nothing special about that fact, except that the Eightlands pub subsequently became the offices of Runecraft, who (briefly) employed one Matthew Smith.

I think the lack of interest in Xevious outside of Japan can be summed up by some of those JAKKS Pacific Plug and Play units. They included a version of Xevious on some of them, but favoured having 4-way joysticks, making the game near unplayable. Obviously 4-way made more sense for the Pac-Man games, but including Xevious on them, with no way to move diagnoally (even if the software did support it) and knowing nobody would really care is quite the statement, especially as Namco greenlit them.

@mamehaze

2 ай бұрын

Libble Rabble is also important for Namco as it was their first game with a 16-bit 68000 processor. Atari did beat them by a year, using a 68000 on Food Fight in 82, but considering how widely the 68000 ended up being used it's still significant. Universal did use was technically a 16-bit processor in 1979, the TMS9900 on Get A Way, but those weren't really on the same level.

@mamehaze

2 ай бұрын

Phozen is an odd one, because the Sidam release, for Italy, complete with Italian translation, was licensed by Namco. However, it didn't get an official English language version to our knowledge.

Aw yeah, it's Namco Time! This channel will have gone 0 days without making a Xevious reference!

@Kim_Justice

2 ай бұрын

I think this might be the first time I've actually covered Xevious after referencing it roughly 600 times

@LegendaryWizball

2 ай бұрын

@@Kim_JusticeI don’t care for the game but the sound effects and music are so nostalgic. I’m instantly transported back to Wizards Arcade in Christchurch, New Zealand around ‘83 to ‘85.

Tower of Druaga almost becomes normally playable once you get one of the early upgrades that basically doubles your movement speed. It's a difficult game. I don't quite love it, but I don't hate it either. It's fascinating.

This is a very well-done video. Thanks for the mention! I had an opportunity to play Baby Pac-Man and it's an interesting idea. But rather than having either an excellent pinball game or an excellent arcade video game, it's both a mediocre pinball game and mediocre arcade video game combined into one.

@ebenpacheco6902

Ай бұрын

The jr pacman guy is here( I know he made other videos about other franchises but jr pacman is the first to come to mind).

HUGELY appreciate these A-Z videos. Sterling effort as always !

you've just made my Friday night Kim, look forward to watching it

Gonna delve into this one over the weekend. I don't catch your livestreams much no more, life has got very busy, but I still watch all of your documentaries and visit your library of work to keep me company when I have a moment to myself. Thank you for the continued quality work, Kim, you have us spoilt! OverTheHorizonRadar

Namco does own Ms. Pac-man and Jr. Pac-Man. At Games only bought the royalty agreement and that only really applies to the arcade. Namco has been depreciating the character in a bit of spite at At Games. It should be noted Namco had already made the game absent in the Pac-Man/Namco compilation arcade cabs. Ms. Pac-Man is only playable on those cabs in free play mode. These cabs were released after Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga reunion cabs that were pretty much everywhere at one point. A former GCC member noticed the arcade and wondered why he was not receiving royalties for those cabs. Which is why Namco got very stingy with the game even before At Games stupidly bought the royalties contract from GCC. They believed it would let them make a mini cab of Ms. Pac-Man along the lines of Arcade 1-Up mini cabs. It did not and Namco retains ownership of Ms. Pac-Man.

@angelriverasantana7755

Ай бұрын

In other words, Namco literally shot itself in the foot

Golden age Namco, this is the big one I've been waiting for.

Can't understate the effects of the NA video game crash of 83 enough. Growing up then I can remember seeing Namco games like Pac Man, Galaga, Pole Position & Dig Dug everywhere in the early 80s. They were in standalone arcades, gas stations, restaurants, roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, you name it! But I don't remember ever seeing ANY of the Namco games in this video after Xevious in an arcade back then. Basically, the arcade operators in the part of the Midwest US where I grew up mostly stopped buying new arcade machines in 1983. They coasted on what they had until around 1986 after the introduction of the NES which gave the video game business in the US a huge shot in the arm. So a lot of arcade games released in late 83-85 are even harder to find now unless it was a game that did extremely well somehow.

There are video game documentaries, and then there are Kim Justice video game documentaries....!! I'm an 80's kid, I remember spending way to much of my pocket money.... and my mates.... down the minicab office (remember those...like a physical Uber of the time) on Splatter House, OutRun, Street fighter and Chase HQ to name a few

Amazing videos, Kim. Thank you very much for creating such epic content!

@Kim_Justice

Ай бұрын

Holy. SHIT. Thank you so bloody much Ian!!!! That is just wild and massively appreciated!!!!

Dragon Buster was an influence on Wonder Boy in Monster Land, there's that

Man, I cannot stop watching these vids. Thanks for this!

Lol Kim, I have a Retrobat drive with all my old 'favs' on it, ready to play at the click of a button. I'm pretty sure I have every single game you've mentioned here on that drive. Funny how my 'favs' drive starts to look like the entire library...

55:10 Dig Dug DS is kind of cool because it is kind of mix between Dig Dug 2 and Dig Dug 1

Mark SMITH from Retro Core channel, tells how to pronunciation to word of "Galaga":) also he compared and reviewed hundreds games all ports of existence in "Battle of ports" section.. Excellent channel like yours:) Strongly recommended to everyone. peace..

I used to love playing Rally X while waiting for Ridge Racer to load on the PSP 😊😊😊

Great as always thanks Kim.

Brilliant as always ❤

Wow. Galaga 3 looks intense! Like a forerunner to bullet hell shooters!

Absolutely loved this. Some real blasts from the past. I think the next instalment will be my fav though as its when i virtually lived in the arcade....... ah the good old days

Excellent video. Loved Rally-X in the arcades. The tune has often buzzed around my brain over the decades since first playing it. Pole Position was the business. Was such a step up in quality at the time. Assault was excellent too. Would say that there's some evidence that Dig-Dug was heavily influenced by The Pit by Andy Walker (of Super Pipeline fame). I'm not sure quite how innovative Namco were most of the time, even with Pac-Man. They definitely had a knack of getting relatively simple games feeling, looking and sounding just right. A proper art form in itself.

Absolutely loved this video! So many classic I've played in Namco compilations!

Love these videos Kim, please do not stop creating them! A video looking at laserdisc games, like MadDog McCree and Crime patrol etc, that would be 👍

Great video 😊

Excellent work! ❤❤

Yayyy! A new video! Kim you are the best!!!

Growing up where i did, i saw nearly all of namcos 80s arcade games and got to play most of them.

Great vid as always. I want part 2 yesterday.

My first exposure to Pac-Man was in a kid's barber shop, of all places. The place had a cabinet set up on free play so you could play it while waiting for your turn. Quite a wonderful little treat to a youngun.

Another fantastic doc/vid from KJ.

Amazing effort as are all of your retro vids. Thanks Kim, much appreciated 👍☺

thx for remindin' me of all the pac-man follow-ups, I kinda lost track and u r right about Ms Pac-Man.

Love your channel kim its just great to chill and watch with some toast and a cuppa

The best retro video gaming channel on KZread. Love your work 👍

Fantastic Video 👍💪

I’m still baffled of the lack of Namco ports to home computers in the 80’s and 90’s. Lots of great stuff we missed out on. And yes. I too wished Mappy had done better in the West because it’s great.

@Kim_Justice

2 ай бұрын

Damn straight, Mappy is the best. Namco ports to the micros is an odd one, yeah -- it amazes me that there's no official Galaga on the Speccy, C64 etc. It's that bloody Sord M5's fault, quite frankly.

@SweetStevieAaron

2 ай бұрын

@@Kim_Justice I’d like to see a fan port of Mappy. That’d be great. I’m guessing you’re familiar with Crime Busters (Players). I may have mentioned it to you before. Single screen Mappy style game for the Speccy with some of its own great ideas too (like player two being an enemy). Lots of fun.

Noticing a theme with retro gaming channels lately...hmmmm. And I'm enjoying it....

Thanks Kim this was great! There were quite a few games I've never even heard of before including Pac and Pal - but strangely enough I recognize the music ditty from somewhere! Also I remember trying Baby Pac Man exactly once as a kid for a grand total of about 40 seconds lol. Brutal. :)

Another great vid Kim. Thanks ants....Thants.

Another Friday evening and you've delivered yet again, Kim! Gonna dive in a bit later. Have a smashing weekend. 😊

I can't ever look at Dig Dug again without thinking about what they did to it on Sonic For Hire.. another great vid Thanks

Great Work kim😊😊

Thankfully many of these are now available on the Arcade Archives series of releases.

Cheers Kim

Oh, you can go up the sides in Navarone! That might be what you're missing. It's honestly a lovely game.

Thanks!

Great video, I can't wait for the next part. Namco is one of those companies I feel doesn't get talked about as much these days as they deserve. A juggernaut in the arcades.

I absolutely loved Galaxian and Pole Position on the arcade I discovered Dig Dug on the 2600 which was a great game Thank you for another great video 🙏

Pac Land is one of my favourite arcade games of all time :)

Mappy is my all-time favorite game :) It's so much fun! I agree with you, Mappy definitely needs more love and recognition. Mappy is a really great game, but unfortunately it suffered through obscurity outside of Japan due to debuting in the video game crash in 1983 and the game not getting marketed here enough, thus lot of gamers back in the 80's not give Mappy a proper chance sadly enough.

Already my memory's proving fallible, I could have sworn Midway released King & Balloon in the U.S. but admittedly I was 7 years old (also learned from this video Pac-Man got its US release on my 8th birthday, I never knew that!) so I probably wasn't paying close attention and assumed that because it was so similar to Galaxian. I don't think I've even heard the name "Game Plan" until watching this video!

I had no idea! That there were so many Pacman games!! I was living in ignorance!!

Kim finally tackling the greatness that is Namco all is right with the world

Warp & Warp slightly reminds of the great Wizard of Wor

Pac-Land is an amazing game, my favourite on this list

That thank you sample on balloon and kin is used on some grabber machines when you put coins in.

Pole position was amazing at the time. The only thing before that were games like Night Driver. I feel privilaged to have grown up when pong came out and seen the arcade evolution.

With all the Namco museum compiliations, you'd think they'd put some of these lesser known titles on one of them.

have you ever considered putting sources for your information in the description of these videos? obviously fitting in the whole history of ms. pac-man is not really feasible for a video like this, but providing an easy way for someone to see the rest of it, like the excellent (and funny) gdc talk by steve golson of gcc would help fill in the gaps for readers. on the opposite end, a while ago i tried to find sources outside of fan wikis on how pac-man & chom chomp was distributed (the closest i could get was confirming boards were released in europe due to stickers present on them but nothing on how many and nothing on whether there was a us location test) so having that info available to view would be very helpful as well.

It's possible to play baby Pacman on your PC - firstly in Visual Pinmame, and secondly there is a very nice homebrew port of it for the Atari 7800.

Funny that I put on pac man socks minutes before seeing this in my feed

Pac-Man... The continuing corporate quest for complete currency collection.

Galaga on NES a.k.a. the only game I could get my mother to play with me. Good ol' times indeed.

Always loved pac man and Mrs pac man and galaga. Never got far on them even being 43 years old. Lol. They were definitely challenging but so much fun. I loved pole position 1 and 2 and galaxian as well. Galaga was so much better though

Xevious was massive in Australia.

Navarone, you can move your shooter up the sides, not just shoot from the bottom, thats what youre missing. Big up Kim

I once set up an emulation system for my brother, configuring all the emulators and such, by using pacman/mspacman/pacland/pacmania. Nearly every single system you could want to emulate has a pacman game.

Dear Kim, what are your thoughts about The Maestro? I felt the Devil's Chord is almost on par with a "Heaven Sent" in its moments of pure poetic cinematography The Maestro... amazing character, goes with somne of my faves like Pennywise in "IT" TV series, Ursula in the cartoon Little Mermaid and Divine in Pink Flamingos, Kathy Najimi in Sister Act, Bette Midler... poise and charisma, gravitas!!! "What a them!"-Tim Curry

Give us moaaaarrr!

I've heard of Namco and Pack Man before aren't they the guys that Silly Bitchell put on the map in 1999 when he did the world's first perfect Pack Man and was crowned God emperor of videogames by Mr Namco?

What is that song you used at the end of the Video? It sounds like Opportunity from Skies of Arcadia. EDIT: It's the Valkyrie no Densetsu theme... I feel like a jackass now. God I love that game.

I wish Jr. Pac-Man would get more love. You'd think if Arcade 1Up could get the license for Ms. Pac-Man, they could get the license for Jr. Pac-Man since Jr. Pac-Man is part of the Ms. Pac-Man license anyway. But, as usual, Arcade 1Up is allergic to money.

PacMan was so culturally relevant worldwide, it was even used for political campaigns at the time. Also, i had fond memories of both playing it in arcades and playing the Namco Museum games on ps1.

Super Pac-Man is the second best Pac-Man next to the original. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't discovered the awesomeness of Super Pac-Man.

DIG-DUG rules!!! DIG-DUG rules!!!

great video, but i cannot stress the immense importance of mentioning that taizo hori and toby masuyo are divorced (i'm not kidding)

R.I.P. Ms. Pac-Man. I've heard that Namco abandoned her completely. Unless those were fake news, that is. After all, this is the internet. lol

I Wonder why Namco didn't attempt a home console before Nintendo. They could have cornered the market in Japan at least.

Oo ooo oo oo. What about the thing about galaxians meaning girl action?

Give me Galaga every day/any day. Desert island/death bed. Galaga all the way

Pole position is more advanced than Outrun really

If video games had any influence on people we'd all be running around in darkened rooms munching pills listening to repetitive music.................An oldie but a goodie!

👍👍👍👍🕹🕹

It’s being annoying me and can’t find the answer. What is Kim Justin intro music from. I think a tv show publish company but can’t find it. Hheellpp

@Kim_Justice

Ай бұрын

Bbc video from the 80's

@Compdiff

Ай бұрын

@@Kim_Justice omg. Thank you so much. I’m an Aussie and they would have been from my faulty towers and young ones videos! Legend.

That's not 100% correct. Namco does own Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man, GCC just gets royalities for every time the Midway games are used in a coin-op machine or as downloadable content. GCC sold their royalty claims to Atgame, so now for Namco to use the Midway characters, Namco has to pay royalties to Atgames, and since Namco has bad blood with Atgames, they've decided they'd rather just not use the Midway characters or games than pay a cent to Atgames.

Question for Kim Justice: Why do you speak exactly like James Acaster?

As if the recent Amiga Europlatformer streams couldn't be any more to my taste, now we're covering Namco Arcade Games? Hell yes. I've also had the "privilege" to play Baby Pac-Man in the flesh and oh my god the ghost AI. If you go in expecting the ghosts to follow ANY of the rules they do in the other games, you're in for a rude awakening. The video game portion feels like a bad amateur clone of Pac-Man rather than a successful recreation outright. If I remember correctly, AtGames doesn't have the standard rights to Ms. Pac-Man, they have the ROYALTY rights. They wanted to make Ms. Pac-Man merch without Bandai Namco but were stopped sharply. Basically, Bandai Namco still have the rights, they would just have to pay AtGames royalties, which given the bad blood between the companies (remember the AtGames Pac-Man BLAST fiasco?) is not something they're keen on doing.

I think this era isn't really the golden age of arcade gaming. Yes many coins went into certain machines because arcade gaming was new with not so many good games to begin with and people fed those machines like crazy. So yeah Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac Man etc. were a huge success. But again there werent so many good games. The real golden age started with Gradius, Hang-On and Space Harrier were gaming got serious/sophisticated due to technical evolution and innovation in gameplay. 1985 until the end of the 90s was the true golden age in my book were tons and tons of excellent games were released. Just look at sega hits alone that were released in that era. Now take Taito, Capcom, Konami, Namco, SNK, Data East, Jaleco etc. into cosideration as well. This always mentioned golden age can't hold any candle to that in terms of everything. Sega's whole Model2 and 3 affair alone generated Sega over 4billion in revenue!

Why did I think Galaxian was just a cheap knock off of Galaga? I feel shame for my ignorance. 🙂

I do not miss these videogames at all, I was a kid in the mid 80s, and I found them boring, I am glad games have evolved so much. Anyway, good piece of history my friend.

Another great, detailed video that takes me back. TY KJ 🫡👍🏻👊🏻