Rip Off

Rip Off is a game that was ahead of its time in something taken for granted today – genuine two-player cooperation. A pile of fuel canisters sits in the middle of the screen, and enemy ships fly in from the edges trying to drag them away. The goal isn't to survive or rack up points for kills, but to defend your property. Once the last canister is gone, the game is over. The opponents don't behave like mindless targets: some head straight for the loot, others hold back and shoot, others try to circle around behind the player. Once someone grabs a canister and heads for the edge with it, you have to chase them down and destroy them before they escape.

With two players, the game turns into something quite different from a score-chasing duel. Both ships are on the same side, share the same canisters, and have to coordinate who guards the center and who goes on the chase. Friendly fire doesn't kill, so there's plenty of room for chaos, and a match tends to come with constant shouting across the room. The Vectrex conversion of the Cinematronics arcade original is visually spotless: the ships are thin triangular outlines, the momentum of movement is finely balanced, and everything plays out on a black field free of any distracting detail.

At the time it was one of the most praised titles in the whole library, precisely because of the cooperation, which wasn't at all common in 1982. Its influence can be traced through the whole line of cooperative arcade games built around jointly defending a single spot. Today Rip Off holds up extremely well – the rules explain themselves in half a minute, a match lasts a few minutes, and the urge to play just one more is strong. On its own it's a decent game; with two people it's one of the best reasons to turn on a Vectrex at all. Solo play has a different flavor: without a partner, the player must constantly decide whether to defend the pile or chase down the thief, and doing both at once simply isn't possible. It's exactly that tension that gives the sense the game is thinking, even though there are barely a few dozen lines on screen.