The Game: The eyes have it, and you apparently want it. You’re also an eye – that’s right, a perfectly normal disembodied eye, wearing a little Oktoberfest hat, wandering through a maze, and shooting at stuff. You’re basically trying to shoot everything on sight. You see, the maze is filled with tiny objects, and you must shoot them all (running over them won’t cut it). The maze is also filled with a number of equally disembodied-and-yet-armed eyes who are out to get you. Clearing the maze of objects advances you to the next level, but you may only get a brief look at it since the eyes are even faster and more aggressive. Rock-Ola [under license from Digitrex Techstar], 1982
Memories: A bizarre little game among the glut of Pac-Man imitators, Eyes is an obscure little number that falls between the cracks of video game history by being neither particularly outstanding or awful…just strange. In a world where a game about a mobile yellow mouth is king, I don’t think anyone was looking for anything that they could take literally, but Eyes was simply odd.
My own memories of Eyes are of one machine – the only Eyes coin-op I ever saw. It was at the game room at Gaston’s fishing resort on the White River in Arkansas, also the only place I ever encountered Rock-Ola’s Fantasy and Warp Warp. Oddly enough, that game room had a couple of pinball tables and a Rock-Ola jukebox. If you think you sense a theme developing, you may be onto something. As this was during the infamous trip on which my mother threw what seemed like gobs of money at having me get to the end of Fantasy, I was in there with these machines for plenty of time, and I distinctly remember playing Eyes even less than Warp Warp. Frankly, the only thing that got less play than Eyes was the pair of pinball machines there.
It probably goes without saying that no home version of Eyes was made, nor has it appeared on any retro compilations for newer hardware. Maybe the Eyes didn’t have it after all.
