Gee Bee

Gee Bee holds a genuinely important place in gaming history as Namco's very first internally developed video game, released in arcades in 1978. It was designed by Toru Iwatani, who would go on to create Pac-Man two years later, making this an intriguing early glimpse at one of the industry's most influential designers finding his footing.

The game itself is a clever hybrid that combines the block-breaking action of Breakout with elements of pinball, sending a ball bouncing around a playfield studded with targets, bumpers and scoring zones rather than the simple brick wall of its inspiration. It was a modest commercial performer, but it established Namco as a developer rather than just a distributor of other companies' machines. Viewed today it is more of a historical artifact than a game people return to for fun, yet its lineage, both to Pac-Man and to Namco's rise as an arcade powerhouse, makes it a fascinating piece of the medium's early story.