Arcade Bucket List

Four ghosts, a maze and 256 levels before the kill screen; the 1980 arcade icon.

Rows of aliens that speed up as you kill them; the game that caused a coin shortage in Japan.

Bomberman on the Amiga and DOS, and the four-player mode that ruined friendships in one afternoon.

Cut the playing field into pieces without letting the bouncing balls touch your line; four kilobytes of it.

Twelve tables, one soundtrack by Robert Prince, and a ball that behaves like a ball; the Android table is the one everyone remembers.

Dig for diamonds, keep the boulders above you where they are, and get out before the wall closes.

Dig down in a mining pod, sell ore, upgrade the drill, and go deeper than your fuel allows exactly once.

Ski down an endless slope until the yeti eats you, because the yeti always eats you.

Fifty-four levels of a motorbike on rubber suspension, collecting apples and touching the flower without landing on your head; one Hungarian programmer, and a time-attack scene still going.

Thirty-two hills and a World Cup, the whole flight steered with one mouse gesture; the DOS game every Polish computer ran through Malyszomania.

Bounce a character up a tower that has no top, chaining multi-floor combos while the floors scroll faster; Swedish freeware from 2001 that lived on school computers.

A cabinet with real buttons and a real stick, whether it holds an original board or a small computer running MAME.

Walls and uneven ground in the arenas, which the players disliked enough that Tekken 5 flattened them again.

Heihachi comes back and drops Kazuya into a volcano; the first Tekken people kept playing at home.

Ryu tours ten fighters in 1987, on a cabinet whose two pressure pads read how hard you hit them.

Three selectable fighting styles per character over a roster in the thirties; the last of the 2D Alphas.

One button per limb, eight fighters and eight sub-bosses; Namco answer Virtua Fighter in 1994.

Gymkhana in an empty Battersea Power Station, and the first in the series with the McRae name off the box.

The first made after McRae died in 2007; Codemasters dedicate the game to him and build a tournament in his name.

The series turns to polygons in 1997, with a weapon each fighter can draw, drop and lose.

A run button, dial-a-combo chains and no ninjas, which Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 put back the same year.

A launch title for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, with a career mode narrated by Troy Baker and Nolan North.

An open Paradise City with no menus between events, and a rival to take down at every junction.

Licensed road cars with Mario Kart weapons bolted on; Bizarre Creations firing mines out of a Ford Focus.