Best Home Video Game Poll 1.0 Nomination Thread: 1970 to 1980

Gonna take this on as a poll if y'all want to do it but I'd like to gauge interest and also compile a list.
Let's hear them; anything available in EU or USA should be fair game but include the system please.

Low hanging fruit:
Hunt the Wumpus - 1980 (TI 99)
Pong - 1977 (Atari 2600)
Breakout - 1978 (Atari 2600)
Nightdriver - 1978 (Atari 2600)
Zork - 1980 (TRS 80)
Combat - 1977 (Atari 2600)

Oregon Trail (1971) - PC
Star Trek (1971) - PC
Space Invaders (1978) - Arcade
Asteroids (1979) - Arcade
Lemonade Stand (1973) - PC
Rogue (1980) - PC
Pac-Man (1980) - Arcade

i'm sorry i'm terrible at systems, also i don't know if Arcade games are within the scope of this poll

Let's not do arcade games here, it's a whole other world.
And for PC, let's do legit releases not early releases? Oregon Trail's first standalone paid copy is 1985 if I'm not mistaken.

Eliza - written in the 60's, ported to BASIC in the mid-70's - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Probably opening a whole can of worms by including pan-system text games but god I was fascinated by that program

interest kinda low for this, eh?

I'm vaguely aware of games from that time period, but I haven't actually played any of the legit nominations. Once we get to the 2600 era on, I'm sure I'll have plenty to contribute..

...wasn't the discussion that decades is a really weird way to do this?

i was planning on chopping up the 80s a bit more as it's completely impossible to do a "best video game of the 80's" ... you can't compare pac man and river city ransom.
but an OG poll with the first era of games seemed reasonable. Unless the prevailing suggestion was to break it down by system?

The problem is there aren't so many games that fit the poll criteria - you could easily run the whole thing as a conventional poll thread

I think there's at least twenty games or more that are universally known that were built for home systems up to the 80's but this may be a lol u old thing
dunno. an atari 2600 poll is probably the earliest gen home system out there... and the games are readily available to play.

when i was doing my series of best video of games of x year polls i remember deciding that 1980 was really the first year that was worth polling.

Wow 1980! Ms. Pac-Man is too recent to be included!

I came out of the previous discussion thinking decades made more sense than generations, and that doing it by console in turn would probably be less fun, and artificially separate games that are closely linked in people's minds. This is just a very tough one to start on, I imagine. My gut says remove the arcade/home separation... seems like it's going to be a recurrent issue, and it may drive down turnout a bit? But it's not my poll.

I can't imagine there being too many ILXors who've actually played these? Or at least their original versions, instead of Nth generation remakes. IIRC the majority of folks here are in their 30s or younger, so the Commodore 64 era is probably the first one where loads of people have actually played the original games.

I dunno about that, at least for the 2600 games - I'm 33 and I know those quite well. These things stick around in a household. Of course, Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand, I know from their 1980s incarnations, and Zork only in it split-apart commercial releases (I, II, III). But it is weird to realize I have never actually played a real Pong machine. Finally experienced actual cabinet Asteroids recently and it blew my mind.

well, okeydoke: let's include arcade cabinets and see if we get some nominations? If not, let's try 1980 to 1984. That's a ridiculously fertile period.

One of the overlooked minor attractions at Disney World is the slew of arcade cabinets and pinball machines from all eras that they have at DisneyQuest (all free to play ad infinitum with admission). I don't remember if they had Pong, but they definitely had Asteroids and a bunch of other ancient stuff.

It's funny to go back and play Space Invaders (get the Taito collections, they ruled the arcades) and realize games might look and sound worlds apart, but they haven't really evolved past cover-based shooting mechanics.

Ha, OTM.

Looking at the listings out there, surprised to realize my mental timeline of these things is off quite a bit, and almost all of the arcade 'greats' I think of debuted in the early 80s, not the late 70s as I'd thought. Nonetheless, two major 1980 games for consideration:

Centipede (1980, arcade)
Missile Command (1980, arcade)

Will there be a separate 'voting' thread or is this the appropriate place to start rambling about how amazing Missile Command is?

ramble baby ramble

Missile Command is so amazing. It belongs much more with the other golden age, pre-crash cabinets that don't quite line up with the decades - especially Robotron and Tempest - for demonstrating just how radical and strange this new medium could be, how bizarre the freaked-out, searing day-glo universe trapped in the thickness of a TV screen's glass could actually be. The stuff at the bottom of the screen is generically figurative, but up above it's an aerial hellscape of diseased rainbows cycling rapidly through the course of the explosions, accompanied by fizzling static. It's so fucking bleak, this apocalypse: black background, defense guns, some vague outcroppings which could be earthly cities or lunar outposts - and the descent of glowing projectiles.

For all this abstraction, though, it's the first political video game, not merely in representing a real-world situation but in using the mechanics and emotional investment of the medium to make its point. If Space Invaders demonstrated the rising tension - rising, rising, rising oh no oh no oh NO DAMMIT NO! - that came from the inevitable forward march of attackers and ultimate, inescapable destruction of the user, Missile Command makes something of it: three years before WarGames and two years before Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, it invites players to a delightful game of Global Thermonuclear War and lets them discover through their own adrenaline and shell-shock that the only way to win is not to play. That the controls are fluid enough for it to actually be a compelling play experience is what makes it a classic game as opposed to a fascinating artifact or art piece, but it would be those other things even if it had been kind of a clunky mess that nobody played.

Space Panic - 1980

how can you not love whaling on monsters with a spade?

If mainframe/Unix games count as "home", or if we are no longer doing "home":

- Colossal Cave aka "Adventure" (1977 for the Crowther and Woods version, earlier for Crowther's)
- Battlestar (David Riggle, 1979)
- Space War (PDP-1) is from 1962! (lots of ports some of which date from the 70s)

Mordy's got Rogue and Star Trek already. Didn't realise Oregon Trail was so old!

If we're doing arcade games:
- Galaxian (1979) - always felt more fun than Space Invaders to me, nowhere to hide, picking things off one by one until one of them peels off and comes screaming down at you with a hail of bullets (I admit I am more familiar with AFAIK unofficial 1982 Spectrum version Galaxians than the original but I also have sweet memories of a Galaxian arcade table)

Probably some more, gonna think about it and check dates

oh wow this seems really interesting. i'd love to follow this, and i'd send in a ballot, but the bulk of my knowledge starts around the early 80s.

I see Combat, I see Adventure :) good good

maybe i'm crazy, but what if the cut-off was july 14, 1983 instead of dec 31 1979?

i had a ti-99 home system as a kid so i played a few of these -- hunt the wumpus definitely sticks out in my mind. only ever played oregon trail at school. i think 1970-80 is a good spectrum for a poll: this era is really weird and interesting to me.

you're looking for the introduction of mario as the end of the first first gen, eh?

1981 or 1982 kind of makes sense to me, think things widen out a bit in 1983 (possibly only after 14 July tho) and a lot in 84-85 -- but then I grew up with a computer whose boot prompt was "1982 Sinclair Research Ltd" which is probably 98% of the reason it's a year zero in my head

of course 80 is probably as good as any

I was pondering earlier how one could begin to do this by 'eras' rather than decades, consoles or generations. It seems basically impossible to have an airtight arrangement but in my unverified morning speculations I was imagining there would be dates that kind of chunk together the golden ages of basically equivalent systems - Atari/Intellivison/'classic' arcade, Apple II/C64/Famicom, SNES/second arcade golden age/386-486 PC, etc. Obviously it would never work out perfectly like that, but maybe wouldn/t have to... might still give a strong sense that the games competing with each other have some shared world in common. Basically thinking Ms. Pac-Man has more in common with Asteroids than with, idk, Ultima VI or whatever other 1990 game.

But decades might still have a lot to recommend them, and we accept these kinds of boundaries for music and film polls even though they may produce similar conditions.

i'm unsure whether minesweeper is pre-1980.

Doctor Casino otm; my first video gaming was on a Pong machine when it was still current, but it's just hard to think of much else that I played at the time, or that was worth going back to afterward. but add 2600 years & now we're talking. & surely 2600 years don't entail only 2600 games placing since many of those sucked, & I envied friends with TIs e.g.

some time in 1983 is a good break point; Dragon's Lair felt like a whole new thing, for instance. I lived in arcades in the early 80s, and things done changed when you had to pay 50 cents for some machines.

I just played some of these on MAME yesterday. Hadn't really fooled with the CRT filters, highly recommend this method:

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/447311-Mame-HLSL-Effects-The-way-Arcade-games-used-to-look!

I saw a video one youtube of one that had faked the dark scanline slowly scrolling up the screen like it was an old display. So cool. It is funny to see these distortions add a layer of authenticity to an emulation that you don't get with 1:1 pixel emulation.

Computerspace (1971)
Hockey (1976)
Atari Video Pinball (1978)

i've never played these but they happened to get discussed during a recent class lecture so i'm contributing.