Solitaire

Solitaire games, also known as Patience in Britain, are card games for a single player. There is no specific information regarding the origins of Solitaire games; but it is believed that they originated at the same time card decks did.

Napoleon, the French Emperor, is said to have spent much of his free time playing against a deck of cards. Moreover, some of the most famous Solitaire games are said to have been invented by him.

Frogger

Frogger is an arcade game introduced in 1981. It was licensed for worldwide distribution by Sega/Gremlin, and developed by Konami. The game is regarded as a classic and was noted for its novel gameplay and theme.

The object of the game is to guide frogs to their homes one by one. To do this, each frog must avoid cars while crossing a busy road and navigate a river full of hazards. The skillful player may obtain bonuses along the way.

Sudoku

Sudoku is a logic-based number placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 boxes (also called blocks or regions) contains the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid.

The modern puzzle was invented by an American, Howard Garns, in 1979 and published by Dell Magazines under the name “Number Place”. It became popular in Japan in 1986, after it was published by Nikoli and given the name Sudoku, meaning single number. It became an international hit in 2005.

Bubbles

Bubbles is an arcade game from 1982 by Williams Electronics. The objective of the game is to collect objects in a sink so that your player (which resembles a bubble) expands in size, whereas gains you points and exceeds you to the next level.

Duck Hunt

Duck Hunt is a video game for the Nintentdo Entertainment System (NES) game console system in which players use the NES Zapper to shoot ducks on screen for points. The game was developed and published by Nintendo, and was released in 1984 in Japan. The ducks appear one or two at a time, and the player is given three shots to shoot them down.

Pong!

PONG is a video game released originally as an arcade coin-op by Atari, Inc.  on November 29, 1972. PONG is based on the sport of table tennis, and named after the sound generated by the circuitry when the ball is hit. Atari’s PONG is spelled in capital letters and is a registered trademark of Atari Interactive, while the spelling Pong is used to describe the entire genre of “bat and ball” video games. Although PONG is often regarded as the world’s first video arcade game, Computer Space had been launched a year earlier in 1971. PONG was the first video game to achieve widespread popularity in both arcade and home console versions, and launched the initial boom in the video game industry.

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong was created when Shigeru Miyamoto was assigned by Nintendo to convert Radar Scope, a game that had been released to test audiences with poor results, into a game that would appeal more to North Americans. The result was a major breakthrough for Nintendo and for the videogame industry. Sales of the machine were brisk, with the game becoming one of the best-selling arcade machines of the early 1980s. The gameplay itself was a large improvement over other games of its time, and with the growing base of arcades to sell to, it was able to gain huge distribution.

Asteroids

Asteroids was inspired, in a roundabout way, by the seminal Spacewar!, the first computer-based video game. In the early 1980s a stand-up arcade game version was produced as Space Wars, which included a number of optional versions and added a floating asteroid as a visual device. Asteroids is essentially a one-player version of Spacewar!, featuring the “wedge” ship from the original and promoting the asteroids to be the main opponent.

Tetris

Tetris was a very popular falling blocks puzzle game, released on a large spectrum of platforms. Alexey Pajitnov originally designed and programmed the game in June of 1985, while working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. Pajitnov has cited pentominoes as a source of inspiration for the game. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix “tetra-” meaning four, as all of the pieces contain four segments.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man is an arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the USA by Midway, first released in Japan in 1979. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is universally considered as one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired an animated television series and a Top 40 pop single.