Midway Games games

Midway is an American company from Chicago and one of the last big coin-op manufacturers to survive well past the golden age. Its style is easy to summarise: loud, fast and unembarrassed. Where Japanese makers polished precision, Midway bet on games you could see and hear from the other end of the arcade.

The most famous of them is Mortal Kombat, from 1992. Its characters were not drawn but digitised from filmed actors, fights ended in brutal finishing moves, and the game caused enough of an uproar to contribute to the creation of today's age-rating system. Whatever you make of the content, the history of the industry would look different without it.

Midway was never only about blood, though. NBA Jam took basketball and threw the rulebook away — two on two, dunks from the halfway line, a ball that catches fire and a commentator every player of the era can still quote. Ms. Pac-Man, Rampage and Spy Hunter were cabinets the whole of America knew in the eighties, and the nineties brought a run of fast racing and shooting machines.

The Chicago school has a signature you can still recognise years later. The sound is exaggerated, the voice samples repeat until you know them by heart, and the difficulty is tuned to let you get slightly further than you deserve before killing you. It was designed for rooms where every attempt cost money, and that logic survived into the home conversions.

What makes Midway interesting for us is how well the games hold up. These are titles built for an immediate hit, for two people standing side by side, with no preamble whatsoever. There is nothing to read — you just press start.

What we have from them

In the browser you can play Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat 3, Ms. Pac-Man, the arcade Spy Hunter II and the light-gun shooter Area 51; from the console side there is also NBA Jam.