From Buckner and Garcia's sixth release, Pacman Fever (1982) From TV Tropes: While it lacks the pop culture legacy of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, Defender, the first game created by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar (and the second video game by Williams Electronics), is one of the most popular and most relevant video games of the arcade era. The game's premise is simple: Defend a planet, and its 10 humanoid inhabitants, from abduction by hostile alien spaceships. The difficulty is in the implementation: Defender presents the player with a dizzying array of controls. The player's ship is controlled with an up-down stick, a thrust button, a fire button, a reverse button to change direction, a smart bomb button that kills all enemies on screen, and an Asteroids-style hyperspace button. And you have to keep your eye on a scanner that tracks out-of-range enemies. When the game debuted at the AMOA (Amusement Machine Operators of America) trade show in 1980 – which it almost didn't, due to the ROMs being loaded the wrong way – visitors were afraid to go near its complex control panel. Observers decreed that Defender would fail in the arcades. These same observers thought Pac-Man was also doomed to failure for being too repetitive. (The critics' darling? Rally-X.) But Defender's revolutionary side scrolling, cutting-edge 16-color graphics, bold cabinet, fast action, and strong sci-fi storyline compelled arcade patrons to try their hand at its intimidating control panel. Gamers eventually warmed to the difficult controls, and achieved scores the game's creators didn't think were humanly possible. Why is Defender historically relevant? Its success proved that even casual gamers could handle complexity. Without Defender, it would have been risky for a company to release an arcade game that challenged the player to manage a joystick and six buttons... which didn't happen again until the first Street Fighter game in 1987. The game also received an esoteric sequel, Stargate (AKA Defender II nowadays), a Pinball Spinoff, a Spiritual Successor called Strike Force, a Jaguar remake titled Defender 2000, as well as a 3-D re-imagining from the early 2000's.
