Description
Xenophobe is a 1987 arcade game developed and published by Bally Midway. Starbases, moons, ships, and space cities are infested with aliens, and the players have to kill the aliens before each is completely overrun. The screen is split into three horizontally-scrolling windows, one for each of up to three players, yet all players are in the same game world. It is one of the few arcade games made in the 1980s to not have a demonstration of the gameplay. This game was unusual in that it split the single monitor into three separate horizontal sections, one for each player. This allows the players to cooperate, but also allows the separate players to wander around freely, a feature not found on most cooperative multiplayer games. With most games that allowed multiple players at once, all players were bound by the edges of the screen (that is, all the players had to be in the same general area on the screen, so it could contain them all). Because the game features such high resolution for its time, the split screen did not detract from the game's graphic appeal.

Ports 1987's arcade version of Xenophobe was ported to many home systems. Beginning in 1988, it was ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64, Lynx, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). A port for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, similar to the Atari 7800 version, was developed for Atari Corp. in 1989, but was not published.

Atari published Xenophobe for its systems (the 7800 and XE versions were developed by BlueSky Software, and the Lynx version was developed by Epyx) while Sunsoft ported it to the NES. The Commodore 64 port was done by Microplay.

In 2004 Xenophobe was included in Midway's Arcade Treasures 2 for the PS2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube. In 2005, Xenophobe was included in Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play on the PSP. In 2012, it was included in Midway Arcade Origins for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

amstrad - c64 - spectrum x2 nes - atari lynx - amiga - arcade

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