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Taunting Berzerkers
Manufacturer Stern introduces the innovative shooter Berzerk, which features the most recognizable voice synthesizer module of the early arcade era: "Get the humanoid!" "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!" "The humanoid must not escape!" "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" Inexplicably, players seem to enjoy being mocked and taunted by a machine and continue to feed it money. The market for Microsoft operating systems is born.
Pac-Man Descends
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Sound clips: Pac-Man
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The most popular video game of all time (in terms of pure pop-culture consciousness) makes its debut, with more than 100,000 units shipped to the US alone. The game boasts many memorable sound and music elements. The opening ditty is one of just a few video game melodies to seriously penetrate the pop-culture superconscious. Consider Pac-Man's voracious, insatiable eating of dots--is this the sound of consumerism run amok? Also consider the sound of Pac-Man dying (blinking out), which has become a universally accepted "defeat" sound.
Pac-Man Fever
Sound clips: Pac-Man Fever
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Video game music hits the pop charts: Atlanta musicians Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia spoof Ted Nugent's song "Cat Scratch Fever" with "Pac-Man Fever." Sample lyric: "I've gotta callus on my finger/And my shoulder's hurtin' too/I'm gonna eat 'em all up/Just as soon as they turn blue." The song goes to number nine on the US singles charts. A follow-up album features additional songs dedicated to Frogger, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Defender, Mousetrap, and Berzerk. Buckner and Garcia rerelease the Pac-Man Fever soundtrack on CD in 1999.
Defender Arrives
Sound clips: Defender
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A side-scrolling space shoot-'em-up from Williams, Defender rivals Pac-Man for the most popular arcade game of its time, with more than 55,000 units sold worldwide. Despite being limited by the standard single-channel mono amp, Defender features a busy, chaotic sound design. The game's constant thrusting and shooting, with subsequent exploding aliens, creates a wall-of-noise effect that adds greatly to the game's dynamic intensity.
Donkey Kong Ditty
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Nintendo's blockbuster arcade game features another winning sound design. Shigeru Miyamoto created the music himself on a small electronic keyboard.
Tempest: Sound and Fury
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Sound clips: Tempest
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Atari's first color vector game, Tempest, hits arcades, and true to its name, the relentless sound schematic rivals Defender for sheer wall-of-noise power. Tempest was one of the first machines to use Atari's POKEY chip, the primary function of which is to generate sound. The chip has four separate channels, and the pitch, volume, and distortion values of each can be controlled individually. Tempest uses two chips, for a total of eight "voices" arranged in endless combinations. Atari releases a separate soundtrack for the game, identified by the online video game museum I.C. When (www.icwhen.com) as the first stand-alone audio soundtrack in the video game industry.
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