Battle City

Having been made even before Super Mario Bros., Battle City is a lesson in immediacy: You have an overhead maze, you're a tank with a D-pad and a fire button, destroy all enemies. That's all there is to it. It also has a co-op mode, so invite a buddy! It is an evolution of the formula Namco had provided in the earlier(and much clumsier) Tank Battalion.

Adding colourful dressing is the catchy power-up system that Hudson Soft would take note of when making their Bomberman games: You have many seemingly generic staples like temporary invincibility, shields for your base, weapon upgrades and similar, whose inclusion adds a whole different dimension in prioritising chasing tanks and defending the base. Unlike other maze-based tank games, in Battle City, the walls in the mazes can be varied, giving both destructible and indestructible walls, as well as other smart obstacles such as bushes that obscure your view of the enemy tanks, or slippery ice. Although this variety of terrain seems very banal to today's standards, I'd reckon that any additional terrain complexities would just be a detrement to the game.

Namco's Battle City never had an official release in America or Europe, which is quite baffling. Even so, lots of people have had a taste of it thanks to the dutiful initiative of many Chinese bootleggers and Famiclones, possibly without ever knowing it. That's why Battle City managed to become a sleeper hit in Eastern Europe, where it is best known under the title 'Tank 1990'.