Do you remember Bigfoot Bonkers? Me neither. The little I have been able to dig up on this game comes from the all mighty Wikipedia:
Bigfoot Bonkers is an 2-player maze arcade game released by Meadows Games in 1976. Players move their blocks across the screen to create walls to try and surround their opponents and force them to crash into the walls or any block or obstacle like a ‘foot’. This type of game appeared in many variants on many computers and consoles over the years, and was popular on mobile phones like Nokia many years later as one of the default games called “Snake”.
I wonder why they chose the image of the foot to be the obstacle? Whatever the reason, sign me up. I love Snake in all its many forms. Especially the Tron lightcycle version. Maybe, just maybe it was Bigfoot Bonkers in some seventies arcade that inspires the folks working on TRON to include the lightcycle duel.
As always a huge thanks to the Arcade Flyer Archive for the scanned flyer you see posted above.
Want to see Bigfoot Bonkers in action? Check out this wonderful gameplay and tech overview video on YouTube.
Watch Bigfoot Bonkers in Action
VicSage
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Seeing this early arcade flyer reminds me why Tron (the movie and arcade game) so perfectly depicted the nascent gaming culture as it then stood, at the doorstep of the 80s.
All represented were games like Breakout and Pong (the MCP tower), Space Invaders and the like (Spiders level), Bigfoot Bonkers and Surround (lightcycles), Combat and other tank games (Tank level and Recognizers) and others I might’ve missed.
Heck, even the guards looked like Berserk robots.
The more I watched that movie, the more I recognized the video game world I was immersed in (then and now).