Best games of my childhood: 1942

Just for clarification, the game is called 1942, my childhood, however was not in 1942:P

I might be older than you but I was more than -30 years old in that year.

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1942 was a very early shooter game and is largely considered to be one of the best arcade games of the 80's. While it was ported to several systems at the time including the original Nintendo, they were all garbage compared to the arcade (which was the case with almost all games at the time) and it wasn't until many years later on PS1 and Sega Saturn that there was an accurate facsimile of the original awesome arcade game.

It was designed made in 1984 and I want you to understand exactly how limited we were in our gaming options at the time and how amazing this game was as a consequence. We, at that time, had been limited in most of our gaming exposure to simple, single screen games like Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Asteroids, and the like. We had never, for the most part, experienced a "scrolling" game of this magnitude.

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The game takes place mostly at sea and perhaps that is why the game was able to function so fluidly despite it being a very early stage in gaming. The game is meant to take place in the Pacific during World War 2 so I find it a bit odd that a British Spitfire fighter plane is featured on the side of the game cabinet.

You are in a Lockheed twin engine airplane which is not British so I don't understand what is going on there. Anyway, like you would expect in a shooter, the action is fast and furious and a lot of it borders on being what many would consider "bullet hell" at the time.

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You face tons of enemy airplanes, boats, and land based anti-aircraft weaponry and while this is not unusual now, it certainly was at the time. This game went from being in a few arcades, to all of them, in a very short span of time. In Japan it was considered the most successful game of the year.

The overall objective of the game is to make your way to Tokyo, Japan and bomb the shit out of it and therefore disable their entire air fleet. This is quite ironic when you consider the fact that the game was designed and originally distributed exclusively in Japan - who I would have though would be a bit sensitive about this sort of subject matter.

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Technology has come a long way since the year this arcade was released and these days you can play 1942 with much better graphics than the original on a device that fits into your pocket. If you were to go back in time and try to tell the makers of this and other video games at the time that this would be possible in the future they probably wouldn't believe you.

1942 is one of those games that you could continue endlessly if you were willing to spend the quarters and well, that was kind of the entire idea behind its increasing level of difficulty. There are a few airbenders our there that can make it through the entire game with one "life" but those people are not me. I never actually did defeat this game in the arcades and if you were one of the few that could pull that off it would take you over an hour to do so. Very few people had the time, patience, and money to pull this sort of thing off back in the day

Credit to World of Longplays for the above video. That is an amazing Youtube site for gaming fans and the amount of playthrough videos they have is just astounding. They deserve more than the 1 million or so subscribers that they currently have.

1942 would usher in a great many more similar shooters and while I have no proof of this, I believe it was a pioneer in defining the top-down scrolling shooters that oh so many were made that were very similar to this.

It would be become one of my favorite style of games for many years to come and is still a type of game that I enjoy today.