Page 20 - OSG Presents Classic Gamer Magazine #4

O Some larger games of the Atari 2600 (and keep
nce upon a time, many
years before Game Boy
were too big for small
in mind, this was at least a
year prior to the appear-
Color, MAME, and Namco
hands to hold onto,
Museum, there were low-
Colecovision), the Coleco
tended to sit in one's
end console games and there were and these games ance of the 5200 or the
battery-operated LED-display games. lap or on a nearby mini-arcades were *the*
Back then, it was roughly an equal surface - hence, ta- ticket. Coleco's Pac-Man
trade-off. Did you prefer blocky, bletop games. also featured a head-to-
clunky graphics that moved with Among the most head variation, and a
some semblance of fluidity, or more successful and game called "Eat and
colorful, elaborate graphics that didn't high-profile elec- Run."
really "move" at all? tronic games of the Oddly enough,
Handhelds and tabletop games early 1980s were Bally/Midway spread
had grown in popularity since the Coleco's half-dozen the Pac-Man license
70s, though most of them were mini-arcade games. around liberally in
based on sports. Mattel's multiple Sporting scaled-down the handheld
football, baseball, and basketball joysticks, buttons, and LED and portable
LED games ruled screens (along with scaled- market. Entex
the market, de- down replicas of the mar- produced a
spite their quees, side art, control handheld LCD
graphics con- panel art, and monitor unit called
sisting of glasses of their coin-op "Pacman 2," while
scarcely namesakes), Coleco's mini- Tomy produced a different
more than arcades tended to look more like Pac-Man tabletop in a bright yel-
glowing their quarter-gobbling counter- low, oval-shaped unit. Nelsonic
dashes or parts on the outside than on turned out a decent Pac-Man game
plusses (not their screens. watch, though the watch's maze
even as Coleco's flagship mini- more closely resembled something
elaborate as arcade machine was Pac- out of the Odyssey 2 game K.C.
the average Man. When this game was Munchkin than anything you'd ever
pocket cal- released in miniature see playing Pac-Man.
culator). form in 1981, it Close on the heels of the
Space Pac-Man mini-arcade was
Invaders another Bally/Midway li-
brought about cense from Namco, Gal-
a drastic axian. If Space Invaders
change in the em- was hard to pull off in
phasis of coin-op LED form, with its con-
video games. Arcade im- stantly-moving mass of
games were originally mediately invaders and laser blasts
variations on sports raised the bar traveling in both direc-
(basketball, football, racing games, for tabletops and tions, then Galaxian
etc.), but Space Invaders demon- handhelds. was quite an achieve-
strated the possibilities of simulating Coleco's mini- ment. The Coleco ta-
events that were beyond the average arcades each had a bletop featured the
arcade customer's experience. Com- "hood," which de- dive-bombing
panies such as Entex quickly flected annoying glare invaders, but it
pumped LED-display Space Invaders from the LED screen, and was some-
lookalikes into the toy market and they added a huge dose of times hard
met with some success. Other elec- arcade ambience by sporting to track
tronic games such as Simon and small-scale replicas of the their move-
Merlin (not to mention Mattel's un- games' original artwork. For ment or in-
ending stream of sports games) per- gamers who had grown tired of the coming fire. For
petuated the market for handhelds. decidedly lo-res flickering graphics over a year, this was
Classic Gamer Magazine Summer 2000 20