Let's dig into 1982! I got games, games, games, and a little bit about music at the end 'cause I was into it then.
Lots of new companies founded this year and some important ones like EA, LLamasoft, Lucasfilm Games and Microprose just to name a few. I guess this was the video game bubble at its biggest before a rather big burst in '83, but I'll get to that.
Arcades
Zaxxon - Ooo, those isometric view graphics that made me think 3D had arrived in gaming. Do you know, I saw a board game of this at RetroCon a month back? It came out this year as well.
Ms. Pac-Man (apparently copyrighted in '81 but released Feb. '82. This is according to wikipedia. I don't have time to go deeper than that). A much improved Pac-Man and probably my favorite of them all, except maybe Pac-Man 256. Baby Pac-Man and Pac-Man Plus also later in the year by the same not-licensed indie dev. Officially, Super Pac-Man was the next NAMCO release this year. That's four Pac-Man games in one year! Plus, there was a board and card game too! That's six! Pac-Man fever indeed! (the song, Pac-Man Fever, was #9 on the charts this year too).
Dig Dug - I loved Dig Dug and still play it today.
Donkey Kong Jr. - Actually my favorite Donkey Kong game. Something about climbing ropes, I think. I was captivated by that.
Jungle Hunt - At first called Jungle King until a license dispute and it was changed. More vines to swing on is why I liked it, I think.
Q*bert - What a strange game but engaging. More of that isometric view creeping into games.
Time Pilot - This one has only grown on me more with age.
Joust, Moon Patrol, Robotron 2084, Burger Time, Front Line - I played all of these. Robotron has become a recent favorite, but I used to love Moon Patrol and Front Line best back in '82.
Home Consoles
Atari 2600 - Barnstorming, Pitfall!, Yars' Revenge, Pac-Man, and Chopper Command were the ones I played then. Demon Attack and Cosmic Ark by Imagic are games I've gotten into recently but didn't play back then. The Atari 5200 came out, but for whatever reason, I didn't even notice. I'm glad recent collections have included games from this system because I've never played it.
Intellivision - I played Frog Bog, Utopia, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and Space Spartans and B-17 Bomber with the Intellivoice synthesizer add-on at my neighbor's house. Shark! Shark! I discovered much later and now play regularly.
ColecoVision released this year and another neighbor of mine had one. So us kids went to his place and played it. We played Donkey Kong, DK Jr., Venture, and Zaxxon out that year. At the time the best home console was the one that could render the arcade games closest to their originals and ColecoVision did that. I was wowed by how close ColecoVision's Donkey Kong and Zaxxon matched the arcade versions. My favorite was always Venture though. I always dug the fantasy games.
PC (and by PC I also mean Apple, TI-99, Commodore 64 - out this year btw - , etc.)
I didn't really play any PC games this year, but I've recently been interested in Choplifter 'cause it was mentioned in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October book I read not too long ago.
Later on I would play Wizardry II, in '84 or so.
Board/Card Games
Fighting Fantasy, a game-book experience came out. Like choose-your-own-adventures books but with DnD elements. I am really interested in this right now but didn't know of it back then. I hear they're being rereleased. Also, I have the DS game based on it I need to play. It's surprisingly valuable these days but it got pretty bad reviews. I must've picked it up in a bargain bin years ago.
G.I. Anvil of Victory, the third and last Squad Leader expansion came out. I used to own this but I only have the base game today. It would be expensive to get the expansions again - $100+ each.
Music
As a bonus, I thought I'd talk a bit about music because this was the year CD players started appearing in my area. Previously (maybe starting in '79 or '80) I had been collecting stereo equipment. Yes, back then, no streaming, no portable blue-tooth speakers, just lots of bulky console-like electronics hooked up to speakers by wires to play your tunes as loud and as clear as possible. It included an amplifier, turn table for vinyl, cassette player/recorder and a bulky pair of speaker cabinets. I even got a graphic equalizer eventually. It looked a little bit like this below.
I did a lot of lawns to afford this stuff. I loved playing records and making mix tapes. I'd ride my bike to the record stores for used records (some places I still go to today). I think I spent more time at this than video games. When CD players came out, I began buying my favorite vinyl records on CD, sometimes as imports as that was all that was available. I remember arguing a bit with my best friend on who would get the only imported copy the store had of an album we liked on CD.
How this relates to video games is only in that today my electronics are video game consoles and back then it was stereo equipment.
Next time, the obvious, 1983.
1982 was an awesome year for arcade games!
When I was a kid, I took a big roll of my dad's dot matrix printer paper and stretched it out from the front door to the back door and drew Zaxxon maps on one side and a Xevious map on the other. Then I took my toy spaceships and played pretend Zaxxon and Xevious. I got in a little bit of trouble for using up so much paper, but I think my parents were still impressed I was able to entertain myself for a whole day.
I was at the perfect age to soak up all the Pac-Man games and merchandise. If you look at it that way, you can understand why I still like Pac-Man so much.
There were a few games on your list that could tear me away from Pac-Man for a short bit, though. These included Q*bert, Dig Dug, Pengo, and BurgerTime. After I first played BurgerTime I went home and cut out a chef's hat and a pepper shaker out of paper and played pretend BurgerTime around the house! I also loved Time Pilot and Joust.
I never saw Jungle KIng, but I saw Jungle Hunt everywhere!
When I first saw Donkey Kong Jr., I thought it was a Donkey Kong game for little kids and was easier. I was wrong. Still a good game, though.
My cousins had an Intellivision and I swear I played Frog Bog with one of my cousins for what seemed like hours.
I played Choplifter on my Apple ][+ but I had no idea what I was doing as a kid.
That's a cool story! I guess I was a little bit older at the time. I was writing up DnD campaigns.
I wish DK jr was easy too.
I have arcade memories all the way up to the late 80s but none after that.
I wasn't even born at this point, but your speaker set up was a lot like my parents' a little later into the 80s. I used to love putting records on in the living room, it sounded great.
My first stereo was my parent's as well, an even older setup from the 70s without a cassette player, just an integrated turntable/receiver. You could stack multiple vinyl records on the center spindle and watch them drop after each record finished playing. Some fun for us kids.