With the public demanding new, more elaborate games, developers and manufacturers needed content that stood out from the competition and kept players feeding quarters into the machines. This allowed game markers the freedom to explore and experiment with new ideas, designs, and concepts. The result was 1981, one of the most innovative and prosperous years in video arcades, spawning major hit games the likes of which no one had ever seen before. These are the Best Arcade Games of 1981! With dazzling graphics, fast-paced action, and frenetic gameplay, Galaga takes you through wave after wave of insect-like alien swarms that you blast your way through as they come in a variety of different formations. On the surface, Ms. Pac-Man may have looked like a clone of her male predecessor only with lipstick and a bow, but there are quite a few differences between the two. Ms. Pac-Man has more maze variations, moving fruit that runs around the maze, two warp tunnels, different ghost behaviors and new cinematics between levels that reveal the romance of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man as they run and chase Ghost Monsters. When Namco found out about all the unauthorized Pac-Man variations Midway was putting out, they canceled their license and retained the rights to all the games. Because Ms. Pac-Man was so popular, Namco started manufacturing the game themselves.   The game consists of a single screen with a countdown bar as players try to get their frog into one of the five available homes though a busy freeway and across a hazardous lake, all while trying not to get splattered, fall into the water or gobbled up by predators. Players take control of a mouse and like Pac-Man the goal is to eat, but the dots in the maze have been replaced by pieces of cheese, the ghosts are now cats, and the power pellets are dog bones which temporarily turn the mouse into a dog who can take down the cats. A couple of unique additions that they added are doors that open and close, constantly changing the maze paths, and an enemy hawk who can fly across the maze and defeat the player regardless if they are in mouse or dog form. The player ship can fire missiles straight ahead or drop bombs, with the game often requiring you to fly low to the cavernous surface. Touching the surface of the planet, hitting one of the enemy structures or ships, or getting blasted by enemy fire will cause you to lose a life. The game was so well received that developer and manufacturer Konami made another version, replacing the ship with a helicopter and increasing the difficulty, releasing the game under the title Super Cobra. One of the unique elements of the game was the multiplayer feature. In two-player mode, the players can blast each other as well as the monsters. The levels are broken down as…

Astro Battles: A straight-up Space Invaders rip-off, almost identical in gameplay.Laser Blast: A Galaga rip-off that features near-exact gameplay.Galaxians: Basically a Galaxian rip-off, being so bold as to use the game they cloned as the name of the level.Space Warp: A bit more unique than the other levels. Space Warp uses diagonal lines forming from the center of the screen out to the edges to give the player the feeling of moving though a space warp as enemy ships fly out at them from the center of the warp zone.Flag Ship: This serves as the boss battle of the game. The set-up is the same as the Astro Battles level, only your fighting it out with one major mothership instead of smaller enemy crafts.

The gameplay ended up being far more popular than the original as it had been fine-tuned to make it easier to control and the maze-like tracks were more expansive.