A legend in mid-80s arcades, Gauntlet's four-player dungeon crawl action gave players expansive levels, a wide range of enemies and a full party of playable characters to choose from. The game's graphic style was sophisticated for its time, but its sound design is really what makes Gauntlet so memorable, with great sound effects and music as well as numerous spoken lines ("Your life force is running out," "Valkyrie needs food, badly!") that became catchphrases for players of a certain age. Our MAME overlay includes multiple screen sizes as well as curved and rectangular versions.

Don't shoot the food! One of the first 4-player arcade action game series and still a classic, Gauntlet was a staple of every mid-80s arcade. Gauntlet II was the amped-up sequel, which not only added many new gameplay elements to the mix, but also let any player choose any character, which makes it ideal for MAME cabinets. This overlay recreates the feel of the original cabinet, including the control panel and instructions, with two screen sizes (the Medium screen shown here is the most accurate to the original cabinet, but the overlay also includes a larger size that still fits with the look).

Gravitar expanded upon the basic concept of Lunar Lander while adding a series of increasingly devious level designs, ground-based turrets, alien attackers and boss-like reactor levels, in addition to color vector graphics. The control scheme and cabinet design are essentially the same as Asteroids and Space Duel, though Gravitar didn’t sell as well, at least partially because of its brutal level of difficulty. Black Widow was released as a conversion kit for Gravitar, and in fact used the same PCB with updated ROM chips.

A movie tie-in for the movie of the same name, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom features novel multi-stage gameplay and complex graphics for its time, and included speech generation and stereo sound. Armed with a whip and a cool hat, you are tasked with a variety of very Indy tasks – freeing kidnapped children from Thuggee guards, recovering stolen relics and defeating cult leader Mola Ram. The game features three distinct stages and is relatively difficult in places, not least because you can't actually kill anyone (you only have a whip, after all). Check out the rest of the Atari System 1 games on the theme pack page.

Conceived as a sequel to Missile Command, Liberator flipped the concept to put players in charge of a squadron of space fighters assigned to protect the denizens of a series of planets from the occupying Malaglon Army. From the planet’s surface, the enemy launches missiles that arc toward your ships much like the missiles in Missile Command, and you destroy them (and the bases they launch from, and other flying enemies) in much the same way. You can activate temporary shields around your ships, and you lose when all four ships are destroyed. The centerpiece of the visuals is a rotating planet that must have looked cool in 1982. Liberator struggled to find an audience, even with the help of the tie-in Atari Force comic book series from DC Comics, and ultimately faded into obscurity (but you can play it right now).

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Lunar Lander has the distinction of being Atari's first vector graphics arcade game, a simulation based on lunar landing games that had become popular in the nascent computer gaming scene. The concept is simple: pilot a ship (similar visually to the US lunar module) to the moon's surface, managing attitude, velocity and fuel to land on designated areas. Both the game's simple but precise graphics and its spaceship-like control scheme give it the feel of a hardcore physics simulation, and it's tougher than it might look. The look and concept paved the way for numerous Atari vector games to come, most notably the similarly-themed Gravitar.

Marble Madness was a novel game for its time, introducing the Atari System 1 hardware and featuring unique level designs and gameplay in addition to true stereo sound. Players roll a marble (using a trackball, perhaps the tightest connection between gameplay and control scheme ever conceived) through increasingly complex and perilous 3D landscapes, trying to get to the goal before the timer runs out. The game was a hit upon its release, and is probably the most memorable of the System 1 games. Though it works best with a trackball, it is playable with an 8-way joystick, albeit with somewhat less control, and you'll feel like you're missing the point (i.e. marbles). Check out the rest of the Atari System 1 games on the theme pack page.

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Millipede added lots of new legs (and bugs) to the Centipede formula, which significantly alter the gameplay while making it overall feel a bit more sophisticated (and amping up the difficulty). Similarly to the original, you try to stop the progress of a constantly advancing millipede through a field of mushrooms, while contending with a variety of other bugs getting in your business. For our (fake) quarters, there’s really no reason to go back to Centipede, as every aspect of the experience is improved. This overlay reproduces the cabinet pretty faithfully, including the black void that the screen floats in – the MAME version includes a preset with scratches to give it a bit more definition. The MAME version also includes interactive buttons (the famous Atari volcano buttons blink when inserting coins) and a larger screen size if you want to get really up close and personal with the bugs.

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It's easy to forget the cultural impact of the cold war, with nuclear annihilation being an actual fear rather than a just quaint notion, and Missile Command captures the threat of and response to a nuclear attack in a way that resonated particularly well when it was released in 1980. Though its game mechanics are simple, the combination of fast targeting of your defenses and delayed reaction of the missile destruction give the game a sense of tension that added to its addictiveness. Though considered one of Atari's greatest 80s classics, Missile Command never received a true arcade sequel, with Liberator being its closest cousin.

One of the earliest arcade racing games, Night Driver uses simple graphics to create a challenging racing experience. Though its visuals consist only of white rectangles moving around on the screen, it effectively creates the feeling of careening around the tight turns of a race track (the idea of setting the race at night, so the track is visible only by roadside reflectors, was a clever way around technical limitations). The Night Driver cabinet used fully-functional driving controls, with a realistic wheel and four-speed shifter, which we reproduced faithfully to bring you back to those mid-70s arcades you used to haunt (or your older brother did).