Radar Scope, released in 1980, is one of the most instructive commercial failures in Nintendo's history and arguably the reason Donkey Kong exists. Developed by the internal Nintendo Research and Development 1 group, it is a fixed-screen shooter in which the player's craft sits at the bottom of the playfield fending off formations of attackers.

Its technical hook was that the playfield was not flat. A perspective-skewed field created an impression of depth, with enemies appearing to close from a distance, and the result read as more spatial than competing cabinets that stuck to a strictly two-dimensional layout. At the time that was a visible, marketable difference.

The game performed acceptably in Japan and failed badly in North America. Nintendo had manufactured a large run of cabinets for that market, and they sat unsold in a warehouse. The solution was to convert the existing hardware to run something else, and that something was Donkey Kong. The first wave of Donkey Kong machines in America was built out of unsold Radar Scope cabinets, which means Nintendo's Western breakthrough was salvaged directly from this game's failure.

Played on its own terms today it is a representative product of the turn of the eighties: a short loop, escalating pace, no narrative framing and no progression beyond score. Its interest lies mostly in the perspective trick and in what happened afterwards. The catalogue records the year, the developer, the publisher and a side-view perspective. No browser-playable version is attached to this entry.