Arcadia

Imagine Software was one of the loudest British publishers of the early eighties, and Arcadia, from 1982, was among its first titles. It is a vertical shooter in the spirit of contemporary arcades: you steer a ship along the bottom of the screen, fire upwards, and face waves of enemies that move in fixed patterns.

The value of a game like this lies in its tempo rather than its content. Eight-bit machines could not manage anything complicated, so everything came down to how fast the next wave arrived and whether its movement pattern could be read. Arcadia had a reputation for pressing the player from the first second and never granting a breather, which was a decent selling point in the market of the day.

The publisher's story adds historical interest. Imagine became famous for aggressive marketing, expensive advertising and finally a spectacular collapse in 1984 that turned into one of the most-retold episodes of the early British games industry. Arcadia comes from the successful phase, when the company was still shipping the short, fast arcade games the market wanted.

Today it is a few minutes of play. One player, two degrees of freedom in the controls, and a single goal: push the score higher. On OldGame.cz you can play it straight in the browser, so there is nothing to configure and no disk image to track down. As a way of seeing what a home version of an arcade cabinet looked like in the early eighties, it is about the quickest route available.