10. Road Blasters
Year: 1987

What’s so 80s about it? – Midway’s botched interpretation of supply-side economics resulted in about 9 billion Road Blasters arcade machines being put into circulation by 1989.
Why it’s #10 on the list: Roadblasters is interesting, because it’s probably the only game in history to embrace the philosophy of supply-side economics, which was one of the better-known economic policies of the Reagan administration. How does supply-side economics work? Well, the theory kind of goes like this. Let’s say there’s this company, who for this example, we’ll call “Midway”. And they make a product, which we’ll call “Roadblasters”. And let’s say that there isn’t a lot of demand for this product because “it’s not very good”. With me so far? Great.
Now, the idea is to increase the demand by increasing the supply. When talking about economic policy, this works by lowering taxes on manufacturers, who use that extra money to make more of their product. The supply goes up, which drives the price down, which makes more people want to buy it. Midway took a slightly more simplified approach to this by simply releasing a whole bunch of Roadblasters machines into the world.

During the last few years on the decade, Roadblasters was inescapable. It was at the arcade. It was at the bowling alley. It was at the movie theater. It was at the ice cream place, the pizzeria, the convenience store, and at the local bar. Hell, the Roadblasters arcade machine was even in the lobby of Ames, right next to those machines that would give you plastic football helmets for a quarter. By 1989, you could run a few errands and have the opportunity to play Roadblasters 17 times without ever going out of your way to do so – it was everywhere.
The strange thing is, Roadblasters was really terrible – even by late 80s standards. For a game that was everywhere, it was pretty hard to find a person who actually enjoyed playing it. There has never been a game so completely unlikable with such vast distribution (with the possible exception of Cruisin’ USA), but regardless of how horrible the game was, it is pretty hard to remember things from back then without a Roadblasters machine ending up in the background of some of those memories.
Legacy: If you need a reason for why the coin-op business is struggling these days, you can probably trace the problem back to Roadblasters. It’s overwhelming presence meant that almost everyone in America was exposed to it, and more than a few of those people probably had little or no previous experience playing arcade games. Its horrendous gameplay is sure to have turned more than a few first-timers off games for the rest of their lives, and probably shook the resolve of those who only had a slight interest in playing games. You might one day meet a person who hasn’t played an arcade game since the late eighties, and they probably won’t remember what the name of the very last game they ever played was. But you’ll know. It was Roadblasters.
9. California Games
Year: 1988

What’s so 80s about it? This is a game that lets you don some neon green spandex and roller skate down the streets of Venice Beach.
Why it’s #9 on the list: Ever since 1849, when they started the fad of finding free gold, California has defined what is “cool” in America. So if you want to see what was cool in the 1980s, you need only check out what was going on in Cali during that time. In California Games, you get to surf, BMX, roller skate and play hackey-sack while being sponsored by “hip” real-life companies such as Santa Cruz skateboards and Ocean Pacific apparel. This game is packed jam full of everything that was cool on the West Coast during the late 1980s.
Interestingly, this game isn’t as 80s as you might think. When you first play it, you’ll be hit with enough neon to make your eyes bleed, slang that nobody has used in 20 years, and a heavily synthesized soundtrack that only Gary Newman could love. Dig a little deeper though, and you’ll find that times haven’t changed as much as you might like. Ditch the goofy sponsors, change the character’s clothes, add some punk tunes to the soundtrack and you’ve essentially created a title based on the X-Games. I wouldn’t be surprised if that actually was how Sony made 2Xtreme.

Legacy: Roller skating has become roller blading, but over than that many of the events in California Games (dirt bikes, surfing, etc.) are still popular today. The only difference is that today the game would be have the words ULTIMATE or EXTREME in the title and the characters would have more tattoos. The team sponsors in the game didn’t quite fare so well, however. All of them were legitimate companies that were trendy brands in the 80s (well, except for Milton Bradley, who published this game), and now most of them are out of business. I guess when your whole business depends on people thinking that you’re cool, being in a game like this might not be such a great idea.