1985 Video Game Poll

My butthurt list of missing games:

Alien 8

er... that's about it

Yeah Tetris may be one of the great of all time but I'm voting starquake.

Super Mario Bros, come on.

it's hard to beat tetris

Good year for edutainment there (Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiengo) and SMB is pretty up there, but I don't think any of these have a real stand against Tetris.

it's hard to beat tetris

― Jordan, Thursday, October 23, 2008 11:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya, the final boss is impossible

This is SMB vs. Tetris for me. going with SMB.

gauntlet would have been better if it didnt suck

Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?: nostalgia factor

Super Mario Bros.: as I said in the big ILX poll, this was obviously GREAT but I completely stopped playing it once SMB3 came out. (I would add to that, though, that in recent years I'm much more likely to pull this one out for casual play - SMB3 is like a full afternoon's commitment!)

Gauntlet: A great IDEA for a game, surprisingly well-executed the first time out but still too frustrating to fully love - from the music to the difficulty level this is a game best summarized by the word "maddening"

The Oregon Trail: more nostalgia, much richer than Carmen Sandiego - several different types of gameplay, although compared to something like Pirates! you do an awful lot of nothing.

King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne: the worst of these that I played - a thin copy of the original game, adding a lot more empty screens, stair-climbing, and unguessable puzzles. These get a lot better with III, which has all of these problems but a much more interesting story and greater level of detail.

Master of Magic: not sure what this is but it reminds me of the fabulous Civ-esque game from around ten years later...man!

Tetris wins, easy. It was addictive and fun on the Nintendo back then, in the Windows Entertainment Pack in the mid-90s, on cell-phones and Flash pages today. I think it's a testament to how magnificent it is as a game that in previous attempts to praise it, I hadn't even considered the fact that it overnight a mega-genre whose descendants and subcategories proliferate even today.

Super Mario Bros.

SMB, also it's the only one I owned. (Owned as in the opposite of software piracy, I was never stellar at it)

Gauntlet = the first proper multiplayer game, where you would put money in knowing you were probably going to get PKed by your friends = definitely the winner.

Mario was a hero to millions but the slippery little fuck never meant shit to me.

What's bizarre is that some of these (like Autodual and Master of Magic) seem incredibly complex by today's standards.

I only included the stuff I've played (or heard of).

Huh? So we're basically voting on Mordy's favourite game of 1985 then? Pretty pointless. Once again, none of the games I played in 1985 are on this list.

yeah i thought that too

citadel Citadel CITadel CITADEL! My butthurtedness at this awesome game being overlooked presents... Citadel...

Citadel...

I know I keep going on about this game, and that anyone under the age of 25 and/or outside of the UK has probably never even heard of it, but it's the one game from 1985 that I still play.

that looks bonkers hard but great; I love the death 'sprite'

also why do they pronounce citadel like that?

Well it looks hard because the person playing it is a bit rubbish! That's actually one of the easiest sections of the game, it gets a lot harder than that! "Death sprite" is actually a Death Monk. Citadel is pronounced "seet-ah-delllll" 'cause it's mid 80's speech synth technology.

any tips on how to get it running on mac os x?

I use the BeebEm emulator on a PC, Mac version is here:
http://www.g7jjf.com/beebemmac.htm
...don't know how it'll work though.
And links for software to run on the emulator:
http://www.mikebuk.dsl.pipex.com/beebem/software.html

awesome, thanks dude

I was thinking, wow, that Master of Magic looks pretty advanced for 1985! But then I realized that video's the Microprose PC game from 1995, not the one from this poll.

this was apparently 1984, but i loved montezuma's revenge (ha). so hard.

Tetris for me was always the game I played when I didn't have the opportunity to play something better, i.e. I was trying to write a paper for school on my computer, or I was at the mall with my parents, or etc. There are probably 15 games in this poll I'd be more excited to play than Tetris. Tetris is a fantastic game, and seems like a classic in the sense that chess is a classic, but it isn't very exciting to me.

the 1985 Master of Magic is a C64 game evidently, not the CLASSIC game from the early 90s linked to above.

given that, I voted for SMB

i'd sooner sit down to play tetris for 10 minutes than anything else on this poll

this was apparently 1984, but i loved montezuma's revenge (ha). so hard.

me too!!!

Huh? So we're basically voting on Mordy's favourite game of 1985 then? Pretty pointless. Once again, none of the games I played in 1985 are on this list.

Don't be a tool. Why don't you actually list the games that you played in 1985 that I didn't include?

people be gettin' WELL serious about 1985 up in this bitch

i for one was too busy sucking titty to play video games in '85!

I remember playing Montezuma's Revenge and loving the colored-keys idea (doesn't seem so great now, due to doom, etc.), but getting absolutely nowhere.

Some other 1985 games:

Roller Coaster
Tau Ceti
Wishbringer
Elevator Action
Déjà Vu
Friday the 13th (C64/ZX Spectrum)

re: Tau Ceti, + Friday the 13th...

I didn't realize anyone ever owned a ZX Spectrum!

masters of magic looks dope

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/Deja_vu_screenshot_nes.png

I didn't realize Déjà Vu was 1985. I got it for a christmas gift in 1990 for NES. For those of you who never played it, it's the type of game where once you learn which room to go to first, which conversation options to pick, what order to do things, etc, you can beat it every time. Once you know how to beat it, "playing" it is more akin to reading a storybook where you know the ending, but you end up reading through it over and over again anyhow. I loved it.

I can also credit Déjà Vu with giving me an earlier education in the feeling of waking up from a stupor.

The Master of Magic from 1993, featured in a youtube above in this thread, is dope as fuck. It's still really fun to play.

The Master of Magic from 1985, in this poll, is a C64/Apple II game, that I'd never heard of. It might be fun! It looks like this:

http://homepages.tesco.net/~parsonsp/assets/images/MasterofMagic1.jpg
http://homepages.tesco.net/~parsonsp/assets/images/MasterofMagic2.jpg

ghosts 'n goblins is a really terrible game.

I always wondered what Ghosts 'n Goblins is like after the first level. I've tried many times to find out, unsuccessfully.

haha i only beat it on a ROM using save states. that and ninja gaiden are the only two NES games ive needed to cheat to beat. and ninja gaiden had the advantage of actually being fun.

If you play all the Youtube videos in this thread at the same time, it sounds like a home arcade!

I remember daydreaming about autoduel in like 4th grade.

I didn't realize anyone ever owned a ZX Spectrum!

is this the tipping/racist bottle opener of ILG?

Probably more like ageism. It was released 2 years before I was born.

I mean look at this thing!

<img>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ZXSpectrum48k.jpg<;/img>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ZXSpectrum48k.jpg

Oh well. Fails.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Gauntlet 2
Commando 1
The Bard's Tale 1
Autoduel 1
Starquake 1
Ghosts 'n Goblins 1
Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego? 1

You dudes are weird.

totally

how anything other than tetris or SMB got votes mystifies me

I guess it's ambiguity in the original post. It's not explicit whether votes are meant to be for the best game that came out in 1985, or the best game that you played in 1985, or your favourite game which came out in 1985, or your favourite game which you played in 1985. Sure, tetris is one of the best games ever, but not many people played it before the gameboy version in 1989.

I played the hell out of it, but it is just... tetris, you know? It's no Gauntlet.