RANKED: TOP 10 MIDWAY ARCADE GAMES

With the review for Midway Arcade Origins published recently on this blog, I thought it would be nice to run down the best of Midway’s arcade collection. This will include titles from Atari Games, which Midway acquired back in the late 90s. I thought WB’s definition of what was considered a classic was a bit off, so here are the top 10 games from Midway’s (and Atari Games) history!

10: Road Blasters - This game is pretty straight-forward, you drive and shoot things. Atari’s arcade shooter took some design cues from Sega’s Outrun, and decided that it might be more fun to shoot cars and gun turrets while racing. The idea worked. The game has appeared in various arcade compilations, as well as the NES and Sega Genesis.

9 and 8: NFL Blitz and NBA Jam – There’s probably little-to-no possibility that these games will end up in a collection since EA somehow got the rights to both franchises. But Midway proved that they could make sports games fast and accessible through these two franchises. While realism was thrown out the window, these sports franchises were always a constant draw in arcades, and translated very well as multiplayer console games.

7: KLAX - In 1989, Atari was looking for something in the vein of Tetris for the arcade. What they came up was KLAX, a puzzle game where colored tiles descend down a conveyor belt, and must be matched three in a row, a-la tic-tac-toe. For an arcade game, this translated fairly well to home consoles back in the day, since puzzle games held a decent amount of replay value.

6: STUN Runner - Another Atari game from the late 80s, STUN Runner was early to push 3-D polygonal graphics. While most stages existed in tunnels, STUN Runner was still an impressive game for the time, and was a much faster paced game than Hard Drivin’, not to mention more fun and accessible.

5: Cruisn’ USA - This was a joint venture between Midway and Nintendo back in 1994. Cruisn’ USA is more or less a take on Sega’s Outrun series, where players drive from San Francisco to Washington DC. This was one of the earliest titles that was developed for the then Ultra 64 (which became the Nintendo 64), except when the game finally hit the console nearly six months after the console’s launch, it wasn’t as close to the arcade version as everyone thought it would be. So while the console version was mediocre, the arcade version was still pretty fun.

4: Mortal Kombat II – While the first game in the series got the franchise rolling, it was the sequel that made the franchise what it is today. The gore was over-the-top, the character roster was expanded, and the visual quality improved greatly. There were also new finishing moves to pull off besides fatalities (like friendship and babality moves), so arcade gamers have much more content to try and unlock compared to the previous installment. While the third installment adds even more content, it seems like the series was beginning to run out of steam, at least until the franchise made the leap to 3-D in the fourth installment.

3: Hydro Thunder – Hydro Thunder was Midway at its best when it came to arcade racing games. The courses were fairly large and exaggerated, but the loud and bombastic feel of it all is what made the game so fun. Sure, it was incredibly difficult to win a race (even in the N64 and Dreamcast ports), but the game was more about just making it from the beginning to the end of a race. This was followed by Arctic Thunder, which was sort of like a combination of Hydro Thunder and EA’s Sled Storm, except not that great.

2: San Francisco Rush – SF Rush was developed by Atari Games, but judging by how it plays, you would swear it was more of a Midway developed title. Rush was a great arcade racer that let you tear through the hilly terrain of San Francisco, with no real sense of gravity (seriously, cars floated through the air when you hit a jump). Again, this is a game that you don’t play for its sense of realism. The cars handle about as well as my Buick with broken power steering, and explode like a Ford Pinto full of C4 when you hit a wall. The N64 port was virtually identical to the arcade version, which was thanks to Atari actually developing that home version of the game (the less said about the PlayStation version, the better).

1: San Francisco Rush 2049 – Rush 2049 took everything that was fun about the original Rush, and threw it into a futuristic version of San Francisco. The game was (and still is) incredibly colorful and vibrant, and Atari Games had a great sense of art direction when it came to the creation of a futuristic San Francisco. Even though we’re looking at the arcade games from Midway, it’s hard to ignore the Dreamcast port of the game, which actually took a game, made for arcades and added more content to make it a more complete experience. It’s rare that a console version surpasses the arcade one, but the Dreamcast version of 2049 managed to pull it off.