This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do on forgotten gems of the arcade Golden Age, or roughly the period between 1979 and 1983.

Kaos (1981) might be hard to love at first. But if you’re not charmed by the electrocution animation that plays any time you touch the screen edges, I say you’re made of stone. You get zapped like a classic cartoon character — skeletal x-ray style — makes me laugh every time.

Kaos conjures images of cocaine-fueled coding sessions in the salad days of hackerdom. It’s heavy metal. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. It’s even a little bit punk rock (it’s a Lightning Bolt video waiting to happen).

You play what looks like a princess, though it could be a prince, or a sadistic clown, or a skull with hair wearing lipstick. You’re caught in a vertical maze of shifting platforms — this was one of the earliest types of platform games after Donkey Kong (1981), a setup that would be copied in the equally trippy Zookeeper (1982). Coins drop into the maze randomly and fall towards the bottom of the screen. If they make it down before you grab them, they turn into dragons, which hop around maniacally until they devour you or you kill them.

Killing them isn’t so easy. You have to get to the top of the screen and touch one of the eye-ball pyramids that look like a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas version of the masonic symbol on the American dollar. If you manage that, you’re immediately transformed into a bearded, sword-wielding king who can kill dragons for a while.

And oh, do the dragons fear you! Watching them squirm is seriously pure sadistic fun.

Besides the totally excellent primitivism of its graphics and sound, a number of things recommend Kaos, in my opinion. The first is that it’s a perfect circle of turnabout, more perfect even than Pac-Man (1980). At the top is your potential for transformation and transcendence. Until you transform, you’re vulnerable. In the middle is money. At the bottom is death for you and also the lurking transformational potential of money itself. If you don’t chase it, it turns on you. This scheme has a kind of formal purity that games don’t strive for anymore.

This leads to the second major thing that makes Kaos great. It’s an almost perfect distillation of frenetic, selfish 1980s America. Grab all the money you can, make yourself king of your own little world, and destroy your competitors — or eventually they will destroy you.  

For maximum effect, play this while watching Wall Street or American Psycho.