Radar Scope

Radar Scope is a 1980 arcade shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Nintendo, through its Nintendo R&D2 development team. In the game, players control the Sonic Spaceport starship and must destroy formations of an attacking enemy race called the Gamma Raiders, defending a space station using a three dimensional perspective similar in style to Space Invaders and Galaxian. Composer Hirokazu Tanaka and artist Shigeru Miyamoto both contributed to the project, though the exact extent of Miyamoto's role is still debated by historians of the medium. Radar Scope was a commercial failure on release, with only around one thousand of the three thousand manufactured cabinets sold, leaving Nintendo of America with a large unsold inventory and a serious financial crisis. That crisis directly prompted Nintendo to seek a conversion kit design for the unsold cabinets, work that led to the creation of Donkey Kong in 1981, the breakout international hit that established Mario as a character and set Nintendo on the path toward becoming a dominant force in the video game industry.