S1 E16 Thursday Night Throwdown – Greatest Video Games 1979-1986!

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The Thursday Night Throwdown crew tackles the topic on every retro 80’s fan’s mind: What Was The Arcade Greatest Video Game! Featuring the 1981 top 10 hit “Pac Man Fever” plus a rundown of every arcade game made before they went out of style in 1986 and got supplanted by home video games. From Classic Arcade Gaming:

So based on this interesting revelation, a list has been put together of the Top 100 games for the years 1978-1986.

Compiled mostly by Pat Laffaye, various sources were used so as to minimize possible subjectivity through any personal biases.  Additional input and consultation was obtained from Robert Mruczek and Mark Alpiger, both game historians and extremely knowledgeable people for putting together such a list.

Methodology:  The three individuals aforementioned looked at all video games from the period 1971 (Computer Space) to 1989 (Klax) while the poll voting was taking place.  Relatively quickly it was determined that there were two problems with scores prior to 1978: first, so few machines were made before the video game boom that those few that are left either are a) destroyed or b) in private collectors hands. Secondly because of the rarity of these early titles, there are no scores or very few scores, so a strong basis for score comparisons is pretty much eliminated.

Thus we all decided to focus on the years 1978-1986, while still considering over 150 popular games.  We weren’t so much concerned about specifically Top 80, 100 or 120, but that we had a comprehensive list of the BEST video games from the era.

• 1980   Armor Attack
• 1980   Battle Zone
• 1980   Berzerk
• 1980   Centipede
• 1980   Crazy Climber
• 1980   Defender
• 1980   Missile Command
• 1980   Moon Cresta
• 1980   Pac-Man
• 1980   Phoenix
• 1980   Rally X
• 1980   Star Castle
• 1980   Tempest
• 1980   Warlords
• 1980   Wizard of Wor

This is an EXCELLENT resource, check out their whole history of Arcade Games!

Thursday Night Throwdown