The 10 Most 80s-ish Games

Like music, movies, and books, video games can’t help but occasionally be a reflection of the time and culture during which they are made. This was as true 25 years ago as it is now. Therefore, in the same sense that there are “80s films”, and “80s bands”, there are also “80s videogames”. Which isn’t to say that every game released between 1980 and 1989 was a stereotypical “Eighties Game”, but much like movies and music videos, there were a few that you could see for just a few minutes and feel like you had stepped back in time 20 years.

So what makes something an 80s game worthy of this list? Well, simply being a popular game from the 80s isn’t as important as you might think.  This isn’t a list of the best games to come out in the 80s, it’s a list of games that came out during that decade that are clearly products of that time.  Atmosphere is important – things like mullets, synthesizer music, and 80s cars can add to a game’s rating. But it takes a lot more than that. After all, anyone can throw on a denim jacket, say “rad” a few thousand times, and go rock out to Def Leppard; but someone who really understands the decade does all that while trying to accumulate as much material wealth as humanly possible and talking up the advantages of supply-side economics.

What I’m trying to say is that a great 80s game doesn’t just reflect the style of the decade, but also the culture, values, and attitudes. If playing the game gives you some insight as to what issues were on people’s minds back then, and how people felt about different subjects, it does better on the list.

Starting on Monday, we’ll count down the list.

The 10 Most 80s-ish Games #9 & #10

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.

The 10 Most 80s-ish Games #7 & #8

8. Tetris

Year: 1989 (year of U.S. release)

What’s so 80s about it? - Though originally designed to help train Soviet cosmonauts to spread scary communism throughout the galaxy, Americans quickly fell in love with this Russian-made game.  After that, the end of the Cold War was kind of inevitable.

Why it’s #8: Although we spent almost the entire decade (as well as the three before it), fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union, it all came to an end in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. And as a gift to show their new found goodwill, the Soviets gave the world Tetris, that little gray cartridge that was “from Russia, with fun!” After decades of living under the threat of nuclear holocaust abd paratrooper invasions of Colorado, we finally had a reason to love the USSR. Some pseudo-intellectuals might get pretentious when discussing this game and say that the game’s universal appeal shows that Americans and Soviets had more in common than we thought, or that the gameplay itself is symbolic of tearing down The Wall. I’ll spare you that nonsense and just give you the short version: We didn’t like the Soviet Union. Then Tetris came out and we did.

Legacy: Tetris 2. Wordtris. Welltris. Bombtris. 3D Tetris. Tetrisphere and countless other Tetris rip-offs that haven’t been able to live up to the original. Which just proves one thing – the best puzzle games are always developed under brutal communist dictatorships.

7. Rush N’ Attack

Year: 1985

What’s so 80s about it? – A virtual reflection of what was showing in the movie theaters across the nation, this is a game about one man fighting the entire Soviet Army. With a knife.

Why it’s #7: How afraid were we of the USSR in 1985?  Take how afraid we are of terrorists right now and multiply it by about a billion.  While things did get better toward the end of the decade as I mentioned with Tetris, we still spent the majority of the 1980s thinking that World War III against the Soviets was right around the corner. And while they never say what country you are fighting against the game, it’s called “Rush N’ Attack”. That’s not exactly subtle.

In the game, you are a single soldier sent deep behind enemy lines to rescue POWs and single-handedly defeat the Red Army. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this plot was used in probably about half of the action movies that came out in the 80s. Better yet, the main character is armed only with a knife. Even Michael Bay would consider that implausible, but somehow, it didn’t seem at all strange back then..

Legacy: The opening of this game told you to rescue POWs and showed a clip of some guys tied to posts while guards ran back and forth in front of them, rifles in hand. Every time the guards crossed paths, it looked like they were bayoneting each other. As a result of the hilarity this caused, most programmers started simply showing the guards standing in place.

The Ten Most 80-ish Games #5 & #6

6. Ms. Pac-Man

Year: 1981

What’s so 80s about it? – A clear representation of the values and attitudes of the decade, Ms. Pac Man is a game about trying to get as rich as possible before being killed by an angry pack of ghosts.  Which is pretty much what all of us spent the decade doing.

Why its #6: Being the sequel to Pac-Man is probably enough to make a list like this on its own, but Ms. Pac-Man racks up a lot of bonus credit for her way of life.  In the era of greed, shopping sprees, and materialism, Ms. Pac-Man is the ultimate mall chick.  She lives a completely vacuous existence with no goals in life other than to consume as much as possible and meet a boy.  That’s really all there is to her.

With this in mind, it may seem kind of strange that Ms. Pac-Man became a symbol of girl power during the decade, but you have to put in it perspective.  Gender equality was nothing new by the 1980s, and by then women had already won most of the big battles, such as obtaining the rights to vote, drive, work, and attend college.  Even with all these achievements, women still wanted to prove that anything a man could do, they could do better, even if it was something completely insane or meaningless.  That’s how we ended up with female Voltron pilots, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and Ms. Pac-Man.  She was better than Pac-Man at running around in a maze and eating dots, and even that counted for something.

Legacy: Ms. Pac-Man was an inspiration to little girls everywhere… at least until it was revealed that she was really just Mr. Pac-Man in a dress.

5. NARC

Year: 1988

What’s so 80s about it? An 80s-era sports car, the War on Drugs, villains that look like they came straight from Robocop or a Miami Vice rerun, and the encouragement to use far more violence than necessary to solve society’s problems.

Why it’s #5: What makes NARC such a great 80s game is that just about all of its faulty logic is based on real misconceptions people had about the War on Drugs. In other words, if you see something in NARC that doesn’t make any damn sense, its not because the programmers were retarded, it was because when it came to drugs in the 80s, people tended to throw logic out the window and believe whatever insane government propaganda they were told. And we believed a lot of crazy things back then.

This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Remember that? Well NARC goes one step further by taking your brain on drugs and exploding it all over the sidewalk by shooting you at close range with a missile launcher. In NARC, you play as a DEA agent who finds drug dealers and either shoots them repeatedly or makes them explode, and if you think that’s a bit excessive, just wait until level three when you start running over hundreds of them with your car. That’s right – in the world of NARC, you can’t even drive down the street without hitting a few dozen drug dealers.

Apparently the laws of economics don’t apply to the world of NARC, because if they did, the millions of dealers in the game would be forced to sell their wares for next to nothing (remember that whole supply-side economics thing we discussed earlier?). And that probably wouldn’t make it a worthwhile profession, seeing as there is a pretty high risk of being mowed down by heavily armed DEA agents. Especially since the DEA agents of NARC don’t have to worry about pansy things like justifying their use of deadly force. This might explain why the dealers don’t even bother trying to sell anything, they just open fire on everybody. Every area of NARC contains an army of drug dealers shooting everything in sight while DEA agents kill them in spectacularly violent ways. Which is exactly what middle-class America thought every inner-city area was like back then.

Legacy: It probably wasn’t a good idea to put the ol’ “Winners don’t use drugs” message in the opening of the game. For one thing, NARC is an incredibly hard game where you fight drug dealers. Getting killed by an army of pushers over and over would seem to contradict that statement. Besides, you probably don’t want to be putting PSAs into a game this violent anyway. It’s like “Hey kids, don’t use drugs! And shoot people with a rocket launcher! And run them over with your car!”

The 10 Most 80s-ish Games #3 & #4

4. Final Fight

Year: 1989

What’s so 80s about it? You take the law into your own hands and go on a one-man crusade against crime, there’s a shirtless hero, a street gang full of punks, and a kidnapped daughter to rescue. And if that isn’t enough 80s movie clichés for you, there is also a bad guy who looks like Andre the Giant.

Why it’s #4: This game takes the one-man versus an army theme that was so popular during that time period, and turns it into a conflict against the only thing that people in the 1980s hated as much as communists – street gangs. The Mad Gear gang is exactly what you would expect from an 80s street gang, too. Everyone in it looks like either a punk rocker in florescent colors or a reject from a Michael Jackson video. Everyone, that is, except for the guy named “Andore” who looks like Andre the Giant. That isn’t the only reference to 80s celebrities, either. Axl and Slash make appearances as well.

The 80s-ness doesn’t end right there, either. This wasn’t just a time of street gangs, it was also a time when big businesses was perceived as being even more ruthless and greedy than usual. Therefore the leader of Mad Gear is, of course, the CEO of a large, evil corporation. Only in the 1980s could be even remotely plausible that a huge corporation would run a street gang. They never mention it, but I’m sure that he was plotting on buying up a bunch of homes belonging to sweet old ladies or tearing down a Youth Center to build a strip mall. Of course, he’ll never get that far if you’re successful in taking back the streets with your bare hands. This game would have been a cinch for #1 if it just had a robot or a guy in a hockey mask.

Legacy: The factory level. In the fifth level, your character inexplicably fights members of Mad Gear inside an incredibly dangerous, non-OSCA compliant factory, where it seems like the only thing they manufacture is fire. I can’t remember if this was the first game like this to have a “completely unsafe factory” level in it, but if Final Fight wasn’t the game that invented it, it is the game that made it popular. Now every beat-em-up has to have a industrial level full of conveyer belts, stamping machines, and obese foremen that want to fight you.

3. Bad Dudes

Year: 1986

What’s so 80s about it? The opening line of the arcade version of this game is “President Ronnie has been kidnapped by the ninjas”. If you’re reading this and can think of a sentence that has more 80s-ness to it than that, then all I can say is that I’m honored that you’re reading this, Dave, and I always thought you were the better singer for Van Halen.

Why its #3: There was only one president in the 80s. I mean, I know that technically there were 3, but really, there was only one: President Ronnie. And in Bad Dudes, he’s been kidnapped by the ninjas. This is another game where one guy takes on an entire army, but you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. President Ronnie wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Ninjas were the perfect enemies for this game. Oh sure, they might have been #3 on the list of stereotypical villains during the decade, but Soviets kidnapping the president would have been too realistic and a gang of street punks wouldn’t have been insane enough. I have no idea why the ninjas would kidnap President Ronnie, but it’s about the most fucking rad idea ever. Bonus points for having one boss with Freddy Krueger claws, and another one that looks like a wrestler from Legion of Doom. But the thing that really got this game into the top 3 was your character yelling “I’m bad!” after defeating a boss. How awesome is that?

Legacy: Sadly, the government has failed to take this game’s advice and create a U.S. Department of Bad Dudes.  Which means our presidents are still in danger even as we speak.

The Ten Most 80s-ish Games #1 & #2

2. Ikari Warriors

Year: 1986

What’s so 80s about it? Two Rambo look-a-likes storm into what looks like a Central American country in order to overthrow its communist dictator.

Why it’s #2: On the surface, this might appear to be pretty much the same idea as Rush N’ Attack – one guy versus an army of communists. But the one thing that really puts Ikari Warriors so much closer to #1 is its setting and some world history. You see, we never invaded Russia. But Ikari Warriors looks like it could be set in Panama, or Guatemala, or Nicaragua – countries in which we actively battled their communist government either through military force, use of the CIA, or by funding rebels. Ikari Warriors is almost as much a piece of pro-Reagan Doctrine propaganda as it is a quarter cruncher.

The second reason this game rates very high is the painfully blatant ripping off of Rambo. Your character is a shirtless, ripped dude with a red headband and a machine gun who fights an entire army of look-alike communist soldiers that can’t aim. You have a limited supply of ammo, but that limit is something like 600 million bullets and 50 grenades.

Legacy: Sadly, much like the movie that it so blatantly ripped off, Ikari Warriors may have been too much of a product of it’s time. There were some sequels, and a few clones, but ultimately, once the threat of communism in the Western Hemisphere faded, there wasn’t much that Ikari Warriors could pass on to later generations. Today’s super-soldiers are a bunch of tactical, squad-based pansies that are as limited in courage as they are in the number of clips they can carry at once. They would prefer to rely on stealth or teamwork, rather than solving the world’s problems with a seemingly endless supply of grenades and the occasional tank hijacking.

1. Double Dragon

Year: 1987

What’s so 80s about it? A Trans Am, Mr. T look-alikes, Jeri curls, karate experts, denim jackets, headbands, mullets and so much more. This is the “We Are the World” of arcade games.

Why its #1: You can tell this an 80s game just by looking at the arcade cabinet and seeing the two main characters sporting their Karate Kid-esque headbands and pretty-boy mullets. The artwork on the arcade machine can’t truly do them justice, however, because in the actual game they look almost exactly like the singers from Tears for Fears. If you haven’t guessed already, they are on a mission to clean up the streets, which have been overrun by a gang. That’s how 80s games work – if you’re in the military, you fight the Soviets, and if you know a martial art, you fight a street gang – unless you know karate AND work for the government – then you fight ninjas.

80s fashion rears its ugly head all throughout the adventure. The second guy you fight in the entire game has a Jeri curl and a denim jacket. You remember the gang fight in the “Beat It” video? Well, this game is where those gangs ended up after Michael Jackson united them into an unstoppable criminal alliance (What?  That’s what REALLY happens in the video). The end boss of level one is an obvious Mr. T rip-off, and the chicks all have big hair and stretch pants. The two main characters even have a Trans Am that basically looks like a red version of KITT.

But it’s more than just the look of the game that earns it #1 status. Double Dragon is so many 80s clichés all rolled into one game. It’s obsessed with martial arts, uses of a street gang as the bad guys, has a kidnapped girlfriend to rescue, a booby trapped evil temple is the final level, and even has the “one-man takes on an entire city of crime” storyline. It’s Karate Kid, Robocop, and Temple of Doom all rolled into one. Or else it’s just Final Fight, but with enough mullets added it move it up to #1 from #4.

Legacy: The whip woman. After Double Dragon’s nod to dominatrixes, every fighting game had to have at least one woman that carried a whip. Except the girls in Final Fight – they had handcuffs.