Moon Patrol

Moon Patrol is a classic of the golden age of arcade halls from studio Irem, which in 1982 combined elements of a platformer and a shooter into one brisk package. The player controls a lunar rover moving from left to right across uneven terrain dotted with craters and planted mines, over which it must jump at just the right moment. At the same time, it's necessary to fend off UFOs and enemy vehicles attacking from both the air and the ground, so the game demands constant division of attention between jumping and shooting, all at a pace that keeps accelerating as the game progresses.

A key innovation of the game was the use of multi-layered parallax background scrolling – the mountains and starry sky in the background moved slower than the foreground, creating an impression of depth that was an absolute novelty on arcade machines in 1982, one that many other titles would borrow in the following years. The buggy also has two weapons at once: a cannon firing forward at ground targets, and a second aimed diagonally upward at aerial enemies, which set the game apart from the simple shooting schemes of the time and forced the player to constantly assess where the immediate threat was coming from.

Moon Patrol quickly became one of Irem's most successful titles and was ported to a number of home computers and consoles, from the Atari 2600 to the Commodore 64, though the quality of individual ports varied quite a bit depending on the platform's power. Its recipe of combining platforming movement with shooting later inspired an entire generation of side-scrolling games and still appears today in references from independent developers paying homage to the aesthetic of the early eighties.

Why play it: Moon Patrol shows how elegantly jumping over obstacles can be combined with shooting on multiple fronts, in a game that was among the first to use parallax scrolling for a sense of depth.