Eliminator

Eliminator is the title of Gremlin Industries' last arcade game, released in 1981 and licensed to Sega for Japanese manufacture and distribution; it was also the only vector game they ever made, and ran on their distributing company's "G80 Vector" hardware (which they had previously released their own Space Fury on). It is a multi-directional shooter in which players must use four buttons to take control of ships (two to make them rotate left and right, and two more to make them fire and accelerate) as a large spheroid (the "Eliminator Base") flies randomly around the screen, killing everything it touches - and the players have to try and force each other (and various CPU-controlled "drones"), into it. When the "Eliminator" itself emerges from the base to attack the players' ships, it will attempt to kill them by flying into them or firing shots at them; it can be killed itself with a well-aimed shot down the tunnel of the base before it has even left it and it is also possible to destroy the base in the same way after the Eliminator has left it. The players can fire shots at the Eliminator, and each other in multiplayer mode - and these shots will not kill on impact, but will merely change the course of anything they hit, with a "push" proportional to their energy level. To speed up the action shots could be rapid-fired; however, only one shot from a player's ship could be on the screen at any time, and a long shot required more time for energy build-up. Every time an Eliminator Ship was killed a new one would materialize more quickly - and every time an Eliminator Base got destroyed, a new (and faster) one would materialize.