Star Wars Arcade Game
You are Luke Skywalker, you pilots an X-wing fighter and you destroy the Death Star! Every kids dream! Well okay, maybe not every kids dream, but possibly the dream of some kids who were born in the seventies!
The Star Wars arcade game by Atari gave you the chance to (kid of) live that dream.
Released in 1983 the game was a first person space simulator, based around Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope), specifically the final act of the movie: the attack on the Death Star.
In the first phase of the game, you engage in a dog fight with Darth Vader and enemy TIE fighters.
In the second phase you reach the Death Star's surface as laser turrets on towers rise in front of you, evade them for long enough and you enter the next phase.
In the final scenario, you find himself speeding through the trench of the Death Star, avoiding obstacles and blasting gun turrets until, finally firing a proton torpedo at the correct time for a direct hit on the exhaust port target, then sit backand watch the Death Star explode in a multitude of different colours. Then it is on to do battle again with more Tie fighters, more turrets etc...
If you managed to do complete the final phase without firing at anything but the exhaust port, he will receive a sizeable bonus score for "Using The Force!"
One of the reasons why this game is so memorable is that it used 3D color vector graphics and it featured several digitized samples of voices from the movie, including Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, Harrison Ford as Han Solo.
The game was available as a standard upright but it was always best played in the sit-down cockpit version, where you could really pretend that you really were "Red Five" and the fate of the Rebel Alliance was in your hands. Although that illusion never lasted long as a selection of pimply-faced youths usually poked their heads in through the side openings to watch your screen.