The ten greatest years in videogame history

1982

Arcades were blazing with innovation in 1982, but home systems were starting to come into their own as well. You could satiate your cravings for arcade action with future classics like BurgerTime (would you believe "Mr. Egg" was a copyrighted name?). You could mine for dragons and killer balloons in Dig Dug, stab armored knights off of ostriches in Joust, or shoot the hell out of the mechanized sensory overload that was Robotron: 2084. Isometric shooter Zaxxon amazed people with its graphics, and Tron taught us to fear spiders - though we dreaded Sinistar's roaring, "I hunger!" even more. 

In the living room, the Atari 2600 VCS, was at its peak. There was the jungle adventure Pitfall!, gorgeous Space Invaders knock-off Demon Attack (also on Intellivision), the tense, robots-in-a-maze shooter Berzerk, the "Heart of Darkness"-style vertical shooter River Raid. If those weren't weird enough, Megamania found you blasting away at hamburgers and spare tires, and the uncanny Yars' Revenge actually made being a cyborg fly in outer space seem cool. Dot-muncher Ms. Pac-man made up for the mess that was the 2600 version of Pac-man, Finally, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial may have sucked so badly it became legendary, but many of us played the crap out of it anyhow.

The Mattel Intellivision had made its living showing off its sports games, but Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gave fantasy gamers a reason to rejoice. The experimental Vectrex, with its self-contained screen and line-based vector graphics, did its best with decent arcade ports of Berzerk, Rip Off, and Scramble, and the Colecovision arrived on the scene with nearly perfect versions of arcade hits Donkey Kong and Venture. Atari's 5200 system released some strong arcade ports as well.

Personal computers even snuck in a few hits, with the Commodore 64 donning the graphical adventure The Mask of the Sun - sorry, Raoul - and feeling the vengeance of Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress.