18 Holes Pro Golf, also known as Tournament Pro Golf, is one of the arcade industry's earliest attempts to fit golf onto a board: the player picks a club, controls a bar that rises and falls to set shot power, and the machine reads hazards like bunkers, water, and rough. Data East released it in 1981 on its DECO Cassette system, back when the visual vocabulary of arcade sports was still being invented. Today it survives as an archaeological piece: the controls are crude compared to what came later, but for anyone tracing the genealogy of golf video games, it's the required starting point before the more sophisticated versions of the late 80s and 90s.

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