Zaxxon review: the shadow that told you how high you were

A small plane flies diagonally up the screen into a fortress seen from an angle. There are walls with gaps in them, gun turrets, fuel tanks, and a robot waiting at the end. You hold a stick that looks like it came out of a cockpit. And the only way to know how high you are is to watch a little shadow slide along the floor below you.

Height is the whole problem

Zaxxon was one of the first games to use axonometric projection, the tilted view that fakes a third dimension. That view gave the ship something no arcade ship had before, a height. The walls at the entrance of each fortress have openings, and the ship must be at the right altitude to pass through. Your shadow on the ground tells you where you are. An altimeter backs it up.

That is thrilling and it is hard. The angle that makes Zaxxon beautiful also makes it tricky to read, and most first games end against a wall you were sure you were above.

Zaxxon asked you to trust a shadow, and the shadow was usually right.

Out in space, the shadow disappears

Then the fortress ends and you fly into open space, and there is nothing for the ship to cast a shadow on. Your best tool is gone, right when enemy planes show up. It is a sly bit of design, a game teaching you a skill and then taking the crutch away to see if you really learned it.

Fuel adds pressure. You replenish it by blowing up fuel tanks, so you cannot just hide at a safe altitude. You have to dip down into the danger to keep flying.

The stick in your hand

The cabinet used an aircraft-type stick with a molded hand grip, and pushing forward made the ship dive, the way a real plane does. Because that was not how most kids thought a joystick should work, the cabinets had illustrations around the stick to show what each direction did. You can picture every first-timer reading them, pulling back, and flying straight into a wall anyway.

What it meant back then

Zaxxon was the first arcade game to be advertised on television, and in American living rooms that was a big deal. A kid would see it during a cartoon break and then go hunting for it at the mall. It arrived in North America that spring and reached the top of the monthly US RePlay charts in June 1982, which meant by summer it was in the pizza place, at the bowling alley, and in the arcade where your older cousin worked. It looked like the future, and everyone lined up with their quarters to fly into it.

Playing it today

The view is still striking, and the challenge is still real. Take it slowly, watch the shadow, and learn each fortress wall by wall. It is less forgiving than its looks suggest, but when it clicks, you feel the thing it was built to give you, which is the sense of actually flying.