720° is a skateboarding game from Atari Games whose name refers to a double aerial spin. The 1986 date in the record belongs to the original arcade machine; the NES version under which the title is filed came several years later as a home adaptation of the successful original.

The 720° arcade cabinet was remarkable twice over. First, its subject - skateboarding was only just settling into games, and Atari gave it the form of an open town from which the player drops into individual parks for scored runs. Second, its treatment of time: the player is perpetually driven to earn points and tickets, or the run simply ends.

That freely traversable hub connecting separate events was unusual in the mid-eighties, and the game is still cited as an early ancestor of the later skateboarding series that built an empire on the same principle.

The NES home version carried the concept onto much weaker hardware, which meant simplified visuals but the same fundamental loop: practise tricks, gather points and qualify for tougher competitions. Unforgettable is the way the game enforces tempo: dawdle without earning your park tickets and the machine dispatches a swarm of killer bees from which there is no escape. That absurd insurance against loitering became one of the most quoted ideas of its era, still traded in arcade anecdotes.

The game's card - basic details, developer credit and screenshots - is open for viewing on OldGame.cz, where you can compare how the arcade novelty of 1986 translated into console form.