Popular games published by company Midway

01.02.1981

New Rally-X is a maze and driving arcade game that was released by Namco in 1981. It runs on similar hardware to that of its predecessor, and as its name suggests, it is a revised version of that title, which was released in the previous year. The only differences are that it has slightly enhanced graphics, easier gameplay, a new soundtrack, and a "Lucky Flag" (with the letter "L") that gives the player extra points for remaining fuel when collected, after which the round will continue if there are still flags remaining. The mazes are mostly identical, with some of the blocks from Rally-X changed into roads to reduce dead ends, and some different flag (and rock) locations. This title was manufactured in greater numbers and was much more popular in Japan than its predecessor.

31.10.1991

As the title states, this is the home conversion of the arcade rail-shooter based on the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Up to two players shoot through future and present levels as robotic killers reprogrammed to serve the human resistance. Both players wield a machine gun with infinite ammo that lowers its firing rate (overheats) as it is continuously fired. A secondary weapon (missile launchers in the future, shotguns in the present) has limited ammo but deals heavy damage. Powerups inside the game world include secondary weapon ammo and coolant for the machine guns, and are shot to be collected. T2: The Arcade Game features seven levels based on specific scenes or general concepts in the film. The first four levels act as a prelude, as the player guns down waves of metal Terminators across a post-apocalyptic Battlefield, a besieged Human Hideout, and through the security checkpoints of the enemy supercomputer SkyNet. After destroying the computer, players travel back in time to protect John and Sarah Connor, while also destroying every scrap of SkyNet research at the headquarters of its manufacturer. From there, players must fend off the indestructible T-1000 until the final showdown in the Steel Mill. Assets from the movie are used when possible, such as voice clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and close-up digital stills of Robert Patrick for the final battle against the T-1000. The Genesis and SNES versions also support lightguns (the Menacer and Super Scope, respectively).

19.02.2004

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a direct continuation of Shadow Hearts; Its story starts a year and a half after the first one in the midst of World War I. It focuses on Karin Koenig, a lieutenant in the German Army who assists in the exorcism of a man able to turn into demons, Yuri Volte Hyuga. However, after learning of Yuri's caring nature, Karin goes on a quest with him to save him from a spell inside him and are drawn into a conflict involving demons of demonolatry.

02.06.1993

NBA Jam is a basketball arcade game published and developed by Midway in 1993. It is the first entry in the NBA Jam series. The main designer and programmer for this game was Mark Turmell. Midway had previously released such sports games as Arch Rivals in 1989, High Impact in 1990, and Super High Impact in 1991. The gameplay of NBA Jam is based on Arch Rivals, another 2-on-2 basketball video game. However, it was the release of NBA Jam that brought mainstream success to the genre. The game became exceptionally popular, and generated a significant amount of money for arcades after its release, creating revenue of $1 billion in quarters. In early 1994, the Amusement & Music Operators Association reported that NBA Jam had become the highest-earning arcade game of all time. The release of NBA Jam gave rise to a new genre of sports games which were based around fast, action-packed gameplay and exaggerated realism, a formula which Midway would also later apply to the sports of football (NFL Blitz), and hockey (2 on 2 Open Ice Challenge).

15.09.1979

Galaxian is a shooter arcade game developed by Namco in 1979. It was released by Namco in Japan and a few months later by Midway Games in North America. The game was developed to compete with Taito Corporation's Space Invaders, released a year earlier, and featured a similar space theme. The player controls a space ship in the bottom part of the screen and shoots at enemies descending from the top of the screen. The game was received very well by the public and has continued to be a game with a competitive community to this day. It was followed by a successful sequel called Galaga in 1981 and two less known sequels called Gaplus in 1984 and Galaga '88 in 1987. Galaxian was one of the most popular games in the golden age of arcade video games.

01.11.1993

Mortal Kombat II is a fighting game originally developed by Midway for arcades in 1993. It serves as the second main installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise and follows the success of its predecessor by enhancing the gameplay and further developing the original game's mythos. Mortal Kombat II introduces more varied finishing moves and several iconic characters, such as Kitana, Mileena, Kung Lao, the hidden character Noob Saibot, and the series' recurring villain, Shao Kahn.

01.01.1996

Killer Instinct 2 follows on from the plot line that the previous installment ended with. Eyedol's death at the hands of Orchid accidentally sets off a time warp, transporting some of the combatants back in time and allowing the Demon Lord Gargos to escape from Limbo. Now, trapped 2000 years in the past, the warriors that survived Killer Instinct, along with several new faces, fight for the right to face Gargos in combat, but Chief Thunder, Cinder and Riptor did not return. Each character that survived the journey from the first game has a corresponding background story, while new characters on this installment are native inhabitants of this past time period. Some fighters, like T.J. Combo who survives from the original, just want to get home. Others, like new character Tusk, want to bring an end to Gargos and his reign of evil. This time there is no tournament or prize money, just a fight to the finish with the fate of the future hanging in the balance.

28.10.1994

Killer Instinct is a fighting game developed by Rare and published by Midway and Nintendo. It was released as an arcade game in the fall of 1994 and, the following year, ported to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and the Game Boy. The game's plot involves an all-powerful corporation organising a fighting tournament. The story was adapted in a limited comic book series published under the short-lived Acclaim Comics imprint. Killer Instinct features several gameplay elements unique to fighting games of the time. Instead of fighting enemies in best-of-three rounds bouts, each player has two life bars. The player that depletes the other player's life bars first wins the match. The game also introduced "auto-doubles", a feature which allows players to press a certain sequence of buttons to make characters automatically perform combos on opponents. Also featured in the game are "combo breakers", special defensive moves that can interrupt combos.

07.09.2007

John Woo Presents Stranglehold stars martial arts star Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila, a detective in Hong Kong's police force who is traveling the globe in search of his kidnapped daughter. The game features a single-player story mode in which players take the role of Tequila and fight their way through cities such as Hong Kong and Chicago to locate the missing child who is held captive by mafia members and gangsters. Players will have the opportunity to earn style points by performing such moves as running up banisters while shooting and when enough points are acquired gamers can execute moves that include the "Tequila Bomb" or enter "Tequila Time." "Tequila Time" is a sequence during a gunfight when enemies are slowed down while players maintain their speed, making it easier to hit enemy targets. Up to eight players can get involved in multiplayer action through the Internet, and the environments within the game are fully destructible and interactive.

09.10.2006

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon brags a roster of 62 characters and sees the return of classic ones from the original Mortal Kombat, such as Reptile, Shang Tsung and Goro. The enhanced Konquest mode (story/adventure mode) improves over the preceding versions, but has a shorter length. There are now 64 arenas (including revamped versions of classic environments) which each have their own tweaks, such as the ridiculous amount of stage fatalities (fatalities are a fancy way of killing your opponent, including classic techniques such as the "spine-rip" or "arm-break").

01.09.1981

The objective of Galaga is to score as many points as possible by destroying insect-like enemies. The player controls a starfighter that can move left and right along the bottom of the playfield. Enemies swarm in groups in a formation near the top of the screen, and then begin flying down toward the player, firing bombs at the fighter. The game ends when the player's last fighter is lost, either by colliding with an enemy or one of its bullets, or by being captured. Galaga introduces a number of new features over its predecessor, Galaxian. Among these is the ability to fire more than one bullet at a time, a count of the player's "hit/miss ratio" at the end of the game, and a bonus "Challenging Stage" that occurs every few levels, in which a series of enemies fly onto and out of the screen in set patterns without firing at the player's ship or trying to crash into it. These stages award a large point bonus if the player manages to destroy every enemy. Another gameplay feature new to Galaga is the ability for enemies to capture the player's fighter. While the player is in control of just one fighter, a "boss Galaga" (which takes two shots to kill) periodically attempts to capture the fighter using a tractor beam. If successful, the fighter joins the enemy formation. If the player has more lives remaining, play resumes with a new fighter. The captured fighter flies down with the enemy that captured it, firing upon the player just like normal enemies, and can be shot and destroyed. The player can free the fighter by destroying the boss Galaga while in flight, causing the captured fighter to link up with the player's current fighter, doubling his or her firepower but also making a target twice as large. Galaga has an exploitable bug that can cause the attackers to stop firing bullets at the player, due to a coding error. In addition, similar to the famous "Split-Screen bug" in Pac-Man, a bug exists in Galaga in which the game "rolls over" from Level 255 to Level 0. Depending on the difficulty setting of the machine, this can cause the game to stall, requiring that the machine be reset or power-cycled in order to start a new game.

25.04.2005

Area 51 is the only action-packed 1st person shooter set in the U.S. governments most secret and secure military facility. The U.S. Army has received a distress signal from Area 51 where a viral outbreak has just shut down the research facility and the automated quarantine procedures have locked all scientific and military personnel inside. A small Special Forces unit led Specialist Ethan Cole of HAZMAT (hazardous materials) Division is sent to investigate. As Cole, players will delve into five massive levels within the confines of Area 51, discover a mutagenic side effect of the virus that controls the minds of those infected, as well as an ancient alien colony buried beneath the facility. With a multitude of human and alien weapons, players must explore chilling conspiracies such as the extraterrestrial crash at Roswell and the faked lunar landing, in order to solve the enigmas of Area 51 before the viral mutagen is released and irrevocably mutates all life on earth.

16.04.1996

Hangtime was the third basketball game by the original development team behind the NBA Jam series. The title was changed due to the NBA Jam name being acquired by Acclaim Entertainment, the publisher of the games for the home market. Acclaim's NBA Jam Extreme was released the same year as Hangtime. Features introduced in Hangtime included character creation, alley oops and double dunks. A software update known as NBA Maximum Hangtime was released for the arcades later in the life cycle.

29.06.2007

TouchMaster is a video game created by Midway Games for the Nintendo DS. It supports Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and was released on June 25, 2007 in North America. A sequel, Touchmaster 2 (known as More Touchmaster in Europe), was released on November 3, 2008. Another sequel called TouchMaster 3 was released on October 27, 2009. Yet another sequel, Touchmaster: Connect (known as Touchmaster 4: Connect in Europe) , which allows players to post high scores to Facebook and Twitter, was released in 2010. Touchmaster tests the player's skills on the Nintendo DS with a variety of games and challenges. The games share the TouchMaster name with Midway's previous series of coin-operated touchscreen games.

02.08.1992

Mortal Kombat is a side-scrolling fighting game. Fighting is set as one-on-one combat, allowing each player to perform a variety of punches, kicks, and special moves in order to defeat their opponent. When the opponent faces their second round loss, the winner can perform a finishing move called a "Fatality" on the loser. The Fatality is a move unique to each fighter that graphically kills the loser in a blood-soaked finale.

12.11.2007

Modern day fears explode onto the streets of a small American town swarming with alien life. The government is desparate, struggling to contain secrets so terrible they can no longer be kept. You are Aeran Pierce, a Special Forces assassin thrown into one of the most explosive moments in American history. Everything hinges on your actions in BlackSite: Area 51.

26.06.1992

An on-rails light-gun shooter produced for the Arcade by Midway, based on the 1991 film of the same name. The home versions were titled "T2: The Arcade Game" to distance themselves from the LJN/Ocean side-scroller action game.

24.04.2006

Total Destruction features four game modes. The first is a campaign in which players work to progressively take out cities around the world. King of the City and King of the World are competitive modes where up to four players compete. In King of the City, players strive to rule a city by dominating the most districts. King of the World is a series of King of the City competitions across various cities. The fourth mode is a time trial where players must complete all the districts of a city within a time limit.

16.11.2002

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is the first Mortal Kombat outing on the next-gen systems. New to DA is a completely revamped fight engine. The graphics are in full 3D and feature somewhat interactive environments. Each character now has different fighting stances, allowing them to be in an offensive stance or a fatality stance. Returning from past games are all your favorite fighters, and a host of new ones. Johnny Cage, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Raiden, joined by such newcomers as Molloch and Quan Chi. Each character has their own specific fatalities.

01.11.1975

Old west theme shoot-out. Using simple graphics, two cowboys one on the left and one on the right move up down, left and right trying to get a clear shot avoiding cactus at the other.

31.03.1999

Players choose one of the three original monsters to rescue. The player then uses the characters in the part of the world where the rescue is held. They work as a collective to break buildings, eat people, and destroy cars and this creates competition among players. When a player (literally) unlocks George, Lizzie, or Ralph, then they become playable characters. Once all the monsters are rescued, aliens begin to invade the earth, leaving the monsters the only ones who can save the planet they just helped partially destroy. After fending off the invasion on Earth, the monsters rescue Myukus (a cyclops-like alien) from Area 51 before chasing the aliens through space, destroying the aliens' bases throughout the Solar System and eventually rampaging through their homeworld.

02.08.2005

Only a few thousand humans managed to escape from the Earth before its collapse in 2150 A.D. They spent the next few years on the terra forming of the red planet, developing new technologies and building up new civilisations. Somehow each of the three fractions "Eurasian Dynasty", "United Civilised States" and "Lunar Corporation" did this independently and separately from each other - but in the year 2160 something strange happens in this new world. Will the ED, UCS and LC join forces or continue their old war against each other? Besides the usual venues in the solar system, there are some strange looking locations: planets with moving and reflecting liquid surfaces. And beside the standard RTS - resources acquisition, base building and destruction of enemy bases, the year 2160 will have some adventure inspired tasks for the players.

09.09.1999

Ready 2 Rumble Boxing is a boxing game for the Dreamcast, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64 and it was released in 1999 by Midway. The success of the Dreamcast version led to it becoming one of the few Sega All Stars titles. Like Nintendo's Punch-Out!! series it features many characters with colorful personalities (i.e. Afro Thunder, Boris "The Bear" Knokimov, etc.); however, unlike the Punch-Out!! series, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing is in 3D, thus allowing for more control over your character in the ring, and also enables the players to choose whichever fighters they want. Throughout the fights in the game, there is a special RUMBLE meter which fills up, one letter at a time, until the word "RUMBLE" is spelled at the bottom of the screen. Letters can be obtained by successfully landing hard blows or taunting the opponent. Once the meter is full, the player can power himself up, enabling access to a special move called "Rumble Flurry", which might as well instantly knock the opposite player out cold. One unique graphic feature of the game is the gradual bruises gained by players as the fight progresses (like hematomas and swellings), present in all fifth-generation versions. While this is not necessarily a new feature to games (it had been implemented before in SNK's 1992 game Art of Fighting), it garnered much appraisal from reviewers, because of the added fun factor this element supply to the game

31.12.2000

There was a time, thousands of years ago when 'visitors' arrived on earth and chose humans for a great experiment. They gave humans the ability to learn in order to watch them evolve and expand their minds beyond their primitive means. Now the experiment is complete and the 'visitors' have returned to harvest their crop. At this moment, their great ships are arriving at major cities around the globe preparing to conquer and claim what is rightfully theirs... the human race. To stop the invasion you must complete 4 separate missions by defeating the invading aliens that are abducting and mutating humans, snatching monuments and creating havoc in the world. The fate of the plant is in your hands!