Vanguard

The year 1981 brought to arcade machines a title that pushed the shooter genre a step further – Vanguard from the Japanese studio SNK. Unlike the statically anchored shooters common at the time, it offered a game scrolling gradually in four directions: up, down, left, and right, depending on which part of the tunnel the player's ship was currently passing through. This concept of multidirectional scrolling was a novelty at the time of its release and influenced a number of later titles that built on the idea of flying through a changing environment instead of a fixed canvas always displayed in a single direction.

The player piloted a spaceship traveling through a series of differently styled zones – from starry space through cave tunnels to the enemy base – and had to face waves of enemies and fixed obstacles that required precise trajectory judgment. The ship had firing in four directions available, which set the game apart from contemporary shooters limited to a single firing direction, and the variable scrolling speed kept up the tension throughout the flight. At the end of each zone, a differently designed combat section awaited, preventing the player from settling into complacency and mechanically repeating the same approach.

Vanguard became one of the formative titles of the nascent scrolling shooter genre, and its influence is evident in later works by SNK and competing studios alike, which borrowed the principle of variable movement direction as well as the emphasis on recognizing recurring enemy patterns. Even more than forty years later, it remains a game that shows how the arcade industry experimented with space and movement in the early 1980s.

Why play it: Because it's one of the founding titles of multidirectional scrolling shooters that shaped the entire genre.