Radar Scope

Radar Scope is a 1980 shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Nintendo for arcades. The player controls the Sonic Spaceport starship, which must wipe out formations of an enemy race known as the Gamma Raiders before they destroy the player's space station. The gameplay is similar to Space Invaders and Galaxian, albeit viewed from a three-dimensional perspective. Radar Scope was a commercial failure, and created a financial crisis for the subsidiary Nintendo of America. Its president, Minoru Arakawa, pleaded for his father-in-law, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, to send him a new game that could convert and salvage thousands of unsold Radar Scope machines, leading to the creation of Donkey Kong. Radar Scope is one of the first video game projects for artist Shigeru Miyamoto and composer Hirokazu Tanaka. Retrospectively, critics have praised Radar Scope for its gameplay and design being a unique iteration upon the Space Invaders template. One critic labeled it one of Nintendo's most important games because its commercial failure inadvertently led to the creation of Nintendo's mascot character and helped pave the way for the company's entry into the console video game market.