Nostalgic games

Nostalgia has a geography. In America it starts with a quarter balanced on the edge of an arcade cabinet; in Tokyo it starts at a cafe table with Space Invaders built into it; in Seoul it is the coin machines lined up in front of the stationery shop. This collection gathers what those memories share — the arcade and console icons from the late seventies to the nineties. Our childhood games page keeps the DOS-era PC canon; this shelf belongs to the cabinets and the cartridges.

The arcade line begins with Space Invaders (1978), the game that turned a shooting gallery into a worldwide habit, and runs through Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Frogger and BurgerTime to the era when a crowd around a cabinet meant Street Fighter II. The brawlers stand next to it: Double Dragon, Ghosts N Goblins and its sequel Ghouls n Ghosts, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, the Capcom dinosaur beat-em-up that half of Asia remembers by the arcade hall rather than by its title.

The console side carries the living-room half of the memory. Super Mario Bros. defined an entire generation of afternoons, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Streets of Rage 2 carried the Mega Drive years, and Castlevania: Bloodlines brought the whip to 16-bit. The licensed icons are here too — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, DuckTales and Aladdin, the games attached to the cartoons of the same shelf of memory — along with Earthworm Jim, Paperboy and OutRun.

A few cabinet legends are included as catalogue entries rather than play buttons: Galaga, Circus Charlie, Snow Bros, Battle City, Excitebike and the early Nintendo line of Ice Climber and Dr. Mario. Their pages hold screenshots and details, so the memory can at least be checked against the real thing.

Titles marked as playable start directly in the browser through an emulator, with no installation and no registration. Most of them were built for two buttons and a stick, so a keyboard is all they ask for — the in-game key list is on every game page.