Scramble

In 1981 Konami released Scramble into arcade halls, a title now considered one of the cornerstones of the horizontal shoot 'em up genre. The player pilots a fighter flying across six distinct sections of the course – from caves through mountains to an enemy base – and must shoot down enemy aircraft, missiles, and ground targets, while the terrain changes significantly from section to section, placing different demands on the flight.

The key innovation was the combination of automatic scrolling with the need to manage fuel: the player had to continuously destroy enemy fuel tanks to top up the dwindling supply, or else the fighter would crash regardless of how many lives remained. This element, together with the distinct look of each section of the course, gave the game a structure no similar title had offered before, forcing the player to plan ahead rather than simply react to whatever appeared on screen.

Scramble became a commercial success, and its influence can be seen in numerous later series, including Konami's own subsequent work in the horizontal space-shooter genre, where the motif of scrolling terrain and dwindling fuel appeared again and again. In the history of arcade machines it is remembered as one of the first titles to combine a scrolling battlefield with deliberate resource management, inspiring an entire wave of similarly conceived games from competing manufacturers worldwide, who further developed the motif of advancing terrain paired with dwindling fuel.

Why play it: It's one of the first titles to combine automatic scrolling with the need to watch your fuel, founding its own subgenre in the process.