Over 30 Centuri Arcade Games In Under 17 Minutes

[@retrojoe85]

Phoenix and Vanguard are still among my top choices when it comes to play some of the best arcade pioneers! ♥

[@shotgunl]

Phoenix is obviously my favorite of this bunch, since it's usually my favorite arcade game of all time (sometimes I'm in a real Mortal Kombat mood, and MK2 takes the top spot...but usually I go with Phoenix as my favorite). It was the first arcade machine I ever played, with dad getting that used, slightly-cracked glass-top cocktail cabinet in tail-end of '82 just a couple of months before I was born. Played a lot of it and 2600 port for years. He still has it, sitting there in the garage at the house we moved to in '91. It had been working fine for years, but sadly he said at christmas that it quit turning on a couple weeks before then. I didn't get a chance to look at it, but I really need to get back down there and see if I can fix it for him. Anyway...Phoenix is one of the best fixed-screen shooters of the era, and I love it. Of the other Centuri-distributed games I've played, Konami's Hyper Sports is probably my favorite followed, in order, by Track&Field (and I only had access to a Track&Field machine in the 80s which my friend Matt and I played incessantly in this foyer connecting a restaurant/bar down from my grandparent's, and I didn't play Hyper Sports until MAME, probably around '98-'99?), Circus Charlie, Vanguard, Pleiades, Gyruss, Time Pilot, and then Guzzler. I don't know why, but I've never really checked out any other arcade game they distributed (though I've played Loco-motion on the Intellivision, and I'm pretty sure I've briefly played an SG-1000 port of that Mikie game) or ones they designed. I think I'll have to check out Eagle, Tunnel Hunt, and Route-16 at the very least, since those looked interesting. Probably should check them all out at some point, if possible.

[@errollleggo447]

Quite a few classics in there from my youth.

[@f.k.b.16]

Vector graphics always impress me. I'm surprised no one made a game with a mixture of sprites and vector effects.

[@thelairdslair]

The problem would have been a monitor that could do both. Or I suppose you could fake the vectors on a standard CRT.

[@f.k.b.16]

@@thelairdslair I had not even given the monitor a second thought. I assumed they all used the same. Great point!

[@10p6]

Well Gyrus is good. As for Tunnel Hunt inspiring Mr Minter, oh wait, that was developed by Atari. We're good.

[@dreamcaster4754]

Aside from the Konami stuff it's clear that Phoenix was their crowning achievement. Not much else of note.

[@IsaacKuo]

Lots of classics ... some interesting forgotten titles ... mostly licensed from Konami and future Tecmo. I think Aztarac was developed in house, and it's pretty interesting as a wireframe vector graphics game with unusual turreted tank shoot-and-move in different directions capability. I do wonder about D-Day, though ... we're a gun emplacement shooting at ships and tanks storming the beach. Are we the baddies?

[@thelairdslair]

You've reminded me of the Mitchell & Webb sketch with that last line, are you familiar with it?

[@IsaacKuo]

@@thelairdslair I've never seen the whole sketch, just the meme screenshot of that line.

[@thelairdslair]

You should watch it, it's very funny!

[@homeschooladventure5687]

Allied Leisure was a separate gaming company in the 70s. Centuri bought out their assets, becoming a new gaming firm of their own. This video should have started with games from 1980. I've owned a handful of Centuri games, Phoenix being my favorite with Time Pilot a close 2nd. Although, I miss my Vanguard!

[@Avo7bProject]

I remember a country gas station down the road from me in the early 1980s cleaned out a storage room on the side and opened an arcade. They probably had a short budget to work with, none of the games there were top tier. But they hard TARG which already looked a few years stale-in-the-tooth for 1982-ish. Centuri deserved credit for coming up with a few classics like Phoenix and Gyruss, but so many of their maze-like games were meh.

[@kenwheeler3637]

That was a very interesting assortment. I'm familiar with most of them but there's a few I've never come across. Going to have to fire them up in MAME.

[@bradleymcavoy3432]

Gyruss is easily in my top 10 of all Time! 😎(Plus has one of the Greatest Arcade Soundtracks of all Time! 🤩)

[@artrock101]

I grew up thinking the game Eagle was called Centuri...