Feature
Ascertaining the badness behind five inexcusable console cousins of some retro arcade hits.
By Jess Ragan
These days, game systems can handle pretty much anything that’s thrown at them, but in that prehistoric age known as the 1980s, there was only one place to get the complete gaming experience: the local arcade. The home consoles of the time didn’t have the muscle to faithfully re-create arcade games running on dedicated and costly hardware, although it didn’t stop them from trying.
Publishers released hundreds of arcade conversions for all the major systems, and even a few of the minor ones. Atari’s dismal adaptation of Pac-Man for their 2600 system was the most infamous of the bunch, hated by players for making a mockery of Namco’s smash hit and cited by historians as one of the Atari dogs instrumental in the industry crash of 1984. It was every bit as bad as its reputation would suggest, but it was hardly the only crash-and-burn conversion out there. Here are five more games players wished had never left arcades (in the images, the originals are on the left, the console games on the right).
