Battle Zone!

There’s a Facebook quiz going around in which participants are asked to name a variety of 1980s arcade video games.

Steve and I both scored 100%.

But the quiz doesn’t include one of my all-time favorites – Battle Zone.

It was a lo-res tank combat game that Steve and Sean and I mastered to a degree that one or another of us owned the top scores on every machine we played.

The trick to defeating enemy tanks is not to try to evade them, but ram them from any angle other than head-on, then shoot them point blank. Once you got that technique down, all you had to do was survive as many buzz bomb attacks as possible.

It was funky and clunky, but I loved it and invested a lot of quarters perfecting my technique.