Darius

Darius is the shooter that decided the screen should be wider. Taito built it on a triple-monitor cabinet - nearly three metres across - and filled that width with the largest bosses anyone had put on a screen at the time.

The bosses are all sea creatures: armoured fish, giant crabs, squid-shaped warships, rendered in silver and blue on a scale nothing else in 1986 attempted. The other structural idea is branching - the game divides into a tree of zones rather than a single line, and beating a boss offers you a choice of two paths forward, which means two players can genuinely play two different games. The power-up system is a colour-coded crystal: red for missiles, blue for shield and speed, green for air-to-air weapons, and collecting the same colour repeatedly upgrades it. There is no traditional health - a single hit destroys your ship and you restart with a stock - so the wide screen is also a defensive tool. It spawned one of the longest-running shooter series in Japan.

• ▸Triple-monitor cabinet - nearly three metres of screen width
• ▸Bosses modelled on armoured sea creatures
• ▸A branching zone tree rather than a single linear route
• ▸Colour-coded crystal power-ups with repeat upgrades