Arcade Style Games

An arcade game is an entertainment machine often installed in amusement arcades, pubs, restaurants, and other business premises. These entertainment machines have an extended history, dating back more than 45 years. One of the earliest arcade video games is Pong. It’s a simulated table tennis sports game featuring basic two-dimensional graphics. Pong was released in 1972 and produced by Atari.

Arcade games became extremely popular in the late 1970s helped by the release of arcade space shooters such as Space Invaders in 1978 and Asteroids the following year. While the late 1970s were a plenty with space shooters, Pac-Man, produced in 1980, widened the popularity base of the machines.

For anyone wanting to experience the excitement of blasting alien invaders from the sky, embarking on a monster hunt, or fighting a mortal enemy, the arcade had it all. Many of the classic arcade games have been reproduced by open source developers for PCs. There’s a huge range of open source games in this field. Arcade style games are a good fit for open source development, given that many of them were crafted when technical processing power was basic compared to today’s standards.

All of the games featured below have great gameplay, they’re immersive, fascinating, and hugely satisfying. They can be maddeningly addictive too. And as the source code is freely available, anyone can pick up, modify, and expand upon the games.

We only advocate open source games here. And we give preference to games that run on multiple operating systems. We’ve excluded many excellent arcade games simply because there are too many good titles to cover in a single article. But the ones covered below are a good start to this particular genre.

ARCADE STYLE GAMES OpenTyrian Port of the DOS shoot-em-up Tyrian SuperTuxKart 3D open-source arcade racer with a variety characters, tracks, and modes Armagetron Advanced Tron Clone in 3D StepMania Rhythm video game and engine Chromium B.S.U. Fast paced, arcade-style, top-scrolling space shooter Kobo Deluxe Enhanced Version of Akira Higuchi’s game XKobo LBreakOut2 Similar to the classic games, Breakout and XBoing OpenLieroX Worms shoot-em-up clone with network support Powermanga Fight more than 60 Different Types of Enemies Project: Starfighter Classic 2D shoot 'em up

Games are not listed by any sort of ranking. They are all worth downloading and free in every sense.

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