Vanguard

Vanguard is a 1981 arcade shooter programmed by Tose for SNK; the version hosted here is the Atari 2600 port that Atari published a year later. At a time when most shooters scrolled in exactly one direction, Vanguard felt like a small revolution: you fly through a winding tunnel that runs horizontally for a while, breaks into a diagonal, then plunges straight down, with the scrolling smoothly changing direction as you go.

Its other novelty is four-way firing. Enemies attack from ahead, behind, above and below, so you cannot just hold one button and drift — the whole screen needs watching. On top of that your fuel constantly drains, acting as a strict time limit that punishes cautious play. Here and there the tunnel offers an energy pod; grab it and your ship becomes briefly invulnerable, letting you ram enemies head-on while the screen flashes. At the end of the run a fortress waits, guarded by a boss called Gond.

The Atari 2600 version was one of the more ambitious ports of its day. It kept the changing scroll directions, the distinct zones and the final showdown, which was no small feat on such modest hardware. The graphics are naturally cruder and the four-way shooting had to be bent around a single fire button, but the arcade rhythm survived the trip.

Today Vanguard reads like the missing link between Scramble and the bigger shooters that followed. It lacks their depth, the difficulty is uneven and some zones repeat, yet you can still feel why players queued for it in 1981 — the sensation of racing through a tunnel that keeps turning is fresh even now. Call it an hour of enjoyable genre archaeology.

You can play Vanguard on oldgame.cz directly in your browser, no installation needed.