Calling All Classic Video Game Fans

Pac-Man, released in 1980, only included one maze, but the Ms. Pac-Man game, which debuted two years later, featured four. The ghosts and fruit also behaved differently in Ms. Pac-Man than in the original Pac-Man game.

In Frogger, released in 1981, it was your goal to get the frog safely through traffic and rivers full of snakes and alligators within the time allotted.

In 1981’s Donkey Kong, the first game to allow its characters to jump, Mario had to move through a construction site to rescue Lady (a.k.a. Pauline), who had been kidnapped by the titular video game gorilla. Mario, who was a carpenter in Donkey Kong, got his own game, a twin brother (Luigi) and a new trade (plumbing) in 1983’s Mario Bros.

Many hit games in the ’80s and ’90s originated in Japan or the U.S., but not Tetris. It was created by a Russian software engineer named Alexey Pajitnov, who shared it with his coworkers, who spread it around Moscow and eventually the world via floppy disks. What happened after is the subject of the new movie “Tetris,” streaming on Apple TV+.

In the days before auxiliary inputs or HDMI ports, TVs received audiovisual input through radio frequency signals. So before you picked up your joystick to play Space Invaders, you had to turn your TV to channel 3 (or 4 in some cases), which was usually free of interference from broadcast TV stations.