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These retro games were inspired by 1980s Australia

  • PRG

The decade that brought us the Rubik’s cube and rollerblading also saw various aspects of Australian culture brought to a global audience. Scott and Charlene’s romance in Neighbours was a stairway to stardom for Kylee Minogue and Jason Donovan, while Paul Hogan did his best to confirm every Aussie stereotype the world had ever heard in Crocodile Dundee.

Almost 40 years later, Neighbours is still going strong, but the rest are very much of their time. Fortunately, we can relive those fantastic memories of 1980s Australia through the lens of retro gaming.

Racing with the stars on Ramsay Street

By 1991, the stars who had made Neighbours a pop culture phenomenon like Kylee, Jason, Craig McLachlan and Guy Pearce had all moved on, and fans were already feeling nostalgic for the “classic” show of the 1980s.

Along came the Neighbours video game right on cue, initially for the Amiga platform bust soon ported to Atari, Commodore and ZX Spectrum. Ostensibly a racing game, developers Impulze clearly took some inspiration from Paperboy as you control Scott on his skateboard along a side scroller and avoid typical Ramsay Street hazards such as wayward kangaroos and emus.

There are three course to choose from of varying difficulty as you take on other computer-controlled characters from the show.

Rubiks cube remembered with a retro casino pokie

The Rubik’s cube was one of those crazes that burned very bright in the early 1980s but fell out of fashion just as fast. Except, that is, in Australia, where it has never been quite forgotten thanks to the passion of cube experts like Feliks Zemdegs from Melbourne.  His almost supernatural skills have been a big part of the puzzle’s recent resurgence in Australia. But we think it is partially down to a retro game developer, too.

Now if there is one type of game Australians like even more than a retro cube puzzle, it’s a pokie. Known as slot games to the rest of the world, Australians wager more per person per year on pokies than any other nationality. Over recent years, Australian internet pokies have become as popular as the mechanical games you find in Australian casinos, bars and cafes. Combining a Rubik’s Cube with a pokie is an act of Aussie marketing genius, and that’s exactly what Ash Gaming has done.

Rubik’s Riches uses the basic gameplay elements of a conventional slot game (or pokie) but instead of the usual fruit or card symbols, it reveals the colored squares of a Rubik’s cube. Win by matching colors in a line, and get a bonus for completing faces of the cube. It’s good fun, and if you’re a regular at the slots, this one is something a bit out of the ordinary.

Aussie Games took inspiration from Mick Dundee

From ET to Ghostbusters to RoboCop, it was practically obligatory that every 1980s movie blockbuster would be hastily followed by some 8-bit masterpiece for the Commodore, Atari, Amstrad et al. For whatever reason, one of the biggest movies of 1986 missed out.

Crocodile Dundee was only pipped to the number one spot by Top Gun – a title that spawned more than enough games to make up for any shortfall elsewhere. Nevertheless, Aussie gaming legends Beam Software, the studio that brought us Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future and Shadowrun were quick to take up the gauntlet.

Aussie Games is a surreal rip-off of the classic California Games, and it features every Australian cliché you can think of. It’s safe to say that even an Australian developer wouldn’t get away with this in 2023, but it is so over-the-top ridiculous that it is also hard to see anyone feeling genuinely offended. You get a sense that the designers had a whale of a time creating it and trying to be as ludicrous as possible.

For example, the targets in the skeet shooting game are beer cans fired from the bed of a moving ute, and the winner is whoever scores highest on the Aussie Meter after completion of all the events.

Back to Ramsey Street

Finally, a real curio. Once again it was released in 1991 and once again, it took players back to the Neighbours set of the 1980s. The Neighbours adventure game by VideoBionics is a first-person point and click that uses real stills from the TV show that allow you to interact with objects and characters.

The object is to find enough evidence to get the show’s pantomime villain Paul Robinson arrested. The game was released for Amiga but lack of interest meant it was not ported to other 80s computers.

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