Monday, November 10, 2014

Entertainment of 1976: Barricade

Welcome one and all to Entertainment of 1976, dig? Yeah I am actually enjoying this week for just the love of fond memories and the like. This time around I felt the enjoyment of old school coin-operated arcade games. The wee hours wined away with a few glowing screens that amused and delighted many.  This is Barricade.

Scintillating graphics!













Ranging from 2 to 4 players, this maze arcade game was released by RamTek publishing in 1976 with a standard upright console, our game would pit players against one another to create walls or barriers to surround their opponents and forcing them to crash.

Made in black & white keeping costs down allowing RamTek publishing to mass produce consoles and allowing multiple arcades, roller rinks and movie theaters to place and rack up the quarter collection. This is a directional based video game of layering barriers and requires a bit of lateral thinking on how to defeat your fellow players does not offer retrials or one ups. Imagine the Nintendo Gamecube/PS2 era crowd are baffled at this point. With only one channel for sound or Mono if you prefer, this game emits an annoying sound that is slightly piercing to the ears.

A few bits of trivia on RamTek now. Since 1973 to 1979 fifteen different machines have been released with this trade name out and about. The other games around this time were: Trivia, Hit Me, Deluxe Baseball, Horoscope, Sea Battle, Clean Sweep, Wipe Out, Hockey, Soccer and Volly.

An alternative title to Barricade is also known as Brickyard due to the court case Gremlin Publishing's Blockade created first, With an agreement to rename Barricade, the game itself was actually physically less similar to Blockade and allowed them to create Barricade II in 1977.


Noika phones felt the need to resurrect this game as a default game and renamed it Snake.

Head-to-head competition!!!

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