...And All I Got Were These Lousy Points Quiz

Answer: Pac-man

"Pac-man" was introduced by Namco and was first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. One of the most famous arcade games of all time, the game abruptly ends on the 256th level after a bug causes a "kill screen" that is impossible to pass. To score a perfect game in "Pac-man", one must eat each dot, fruit, monster, and energizer dot on every level without losing a single life, and collect every possible point on the final level.

It took 19 years after the game's release before Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard confirmed that Billy Mitchell successfully completed a perfect game on July 3, 1999.

Answer: Space Invaders

"Space Invaders" was ranked by "The Guinness World Records" in 2008 as the top arcade game; allegedly, in the year of its release, Japan suffered a shortage of 100-yen coins because they were all being thrown into arcade machines. Like most shoot-em-up games, "Space Invaders" features a player spaceship that fires a laser cannon at a swarm of enemy spaceships.

The invaders oscillate back and forth, making it difficult to hit them. A few protective barriers can shelter the player for a while, but they are destroyed by enemy fire quickly. Each progressive level is more difficult. Hayes' seemingly insurmountable score in June 2003 epitomizes the game's endurance through the years and its strong fan base.

Answer: Centipede

The premise of "Centipede" is simple: the title figure descends toward the humanoid shooter, who must fire at the bug before it reaches the bottom of the screen. Mushrooms scattered around the screen both impede the progress of bullets and allow the centipede to move downward more quickly. Scorpions kill the shooter if they contact each other and remove some of the mushrooms from play. Each time the centipede is hit, it splinters into two separate bugs.

While Jim Schneider's marathon score is highly impressive, it wasn't done under "tournament conditions", so Donald Hayes' world record of 7,111,111 points, which occurred four years earlier, was given more credit.

Answer: Minesweeper

"Minesweeper" is a simple program that comes pre-installed with many operating systems today. The idea is that a large quantity of mines are scattered randomly around a rectangular grid so that approximately 1/4 of the squares hold mines. If you click on a square that doesn't hold a mine, then the square reveals how many mines adjoin it, a number between 0 and 8. If you click on a square that does have a mine, it's game over. Right-clicking flags a square to have a mine: once you have successfully flagged or clicked on every square on the grid, you win. JK Rowling could manage to win the game in 99 seconds.

In February 2010, a man from Germany beat her record by nearly half a minute, winning "Minesweeper" in 74 seconds.

Answer: Donkey Kong

"The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" was released in 2007 and related the feud and competition between Wiebe and Mitchell to set the world record in "Donkey Kong". The documentary received strong critical reviews but only inflamed the rivalry between the two men, which seesawed back and forth for years after the movie was released. "Donkey Kong" was created by Shigeru Miyamoto in 1981.

The premise? Guide the player from the bottom of the screen up a series of ladders while avoiding the barrels thrown by the title character at the top of the screen.

The game is incredibly difficult to master, and Wiebe attributed his success in achieving unthinkable scores to memorizing patterns in which the barrels fall.

Answer: Frogger

Laffaye succeeded in breaking a fake record from a 1998 episode of "Seinfeld", in which a man obsessively competed to break his record on a "Frogger" machine until setting a personal record at 860,630 points. "Frogger" itself was developed in 1981 by Konami, and it was a novel idea in an era of mainly space-related shooter games. Each frame consists of two parts: at the bottom half of the screen, players have to move the frog through traffic without getting hit by cars.

At the top half, the frog must jump from turtles to logs without falling into the water, jumping onto a snake, or remaining too long on a moving animal.

In 2005, Twin Galaxies offered a reward to anyone who could top Costanza's fictional score, but no one succeeded until Laffaye's exploit on Christmas Eve, 2009.

Answer: Asteroids

"Asteroids" is one of the oldest video games created, released in 1979 by Atari. The goal is to shoot at the asteroids and flying saucers that periodically appear on the screen without being hit by them or their missiles. Despite several game bugs, "Asteroids" became one of the most popular video games of the era, combining simple graphics with a plain soundtrack to produce an enduring, entertaining arcade game.

When Scott Safran set a record in 1982 after playing nearly twenty hours straight, it was largely insignificant.

However, his achievement was recognized posthumously in 2002 by the Twin Galaxies' Arcade Scoreboard.

Answer: Tetris

"Tetris" was designed by Russian Alexey Pazhitnov in 1984. The game's name comes from the Greek for "four", because the playing pieces all contain four unit squares, arranged into straight lines, 2*2 squares, L-shapes, or T-shapes. In the game, players arrange the playing pieces and stack them in order to completely fill one row of the game space; when that happens, the row disappears. Inefficient stacking causes the stack to move up quickly, giving players less time to respond and making it harder to survive. The player loses once the stack reaches the top of the screen.

"Tetris" was proven by Dr. Richard Haier in 2009 to increase brain activity and overall cognitive function in players. A team from Oxford University concluded in January 2009 that "Tetris" reduces the number of flashbacks to traumatic scenes in volunteers, making it an unlikely therapy for sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, don't get addicted yet: the so-called "Tetris Effect" is often reported, in which players of the game begin to mentally see falling tiles even when they are not playing the game.

Answer: Pinball

Pinball probably evolved both from lawn bowl games and the table game of Bagatelle. British inventor Montague Redgrave created classic pinball in 1869 by using a plunger to launch the ball into game play, replacing ball with a smaller marble, and making the entire frame smaller. Today, pinball is often played on specific, often themed, pinball machines, but the "Space Cadet" version is most popular with computer users.

The many variations of pinball make it difficult to describe the rules of the game, but almost every pinball machine uses two paddles, often controlled by buttons, to keep the ball from falling off the screen and out of play.

Answer: Iron Man

The Iron Man competition was held in July 1985 and attracted several contestants. The first to lose was a Japanese tourist; the unofficial winner was James Vollandt, who played the game "Joust" for more than 67 hours. He resorted to unhealthy techniques to keep himself awake after the rest of his competition faltered, but he still only made it 2/3 of the way to the 10,000 dollar prize after the game malfunctioned.