1942 is the vertical shoot-'em-up Capcom released in 1984, set on the Pacific front: a P-38 Lightning fighter cuts through waves of Japanese planes, complete with the classic loop that leaves the player briefly invulnerable. Its simple design — dodge, shoot, collect power-ups — made it a genre reference and the seed of a long-running "19XX" saga that Capcom kept alive for more than a decade.
Like so many hits of the era, 1942 jumped from arcades to home computers through conversions that brought it into homes that would never set foot in an arcade. Today it holds up as a piece of playable archaeology: the pacing is rough compared to what followed, but the DNA of every vertical shooter that came after is right there.
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