Kick

Kick (also known as Kickman) is an arcade game which was released by Midway Games in 1981; it was the first of only two games to run on their MCR-1 hardware (two Zilog Z80s running at 2.496 and 2 MHz, with two General Instrument AY-3-8910s running at 2 MHz for sound). The player must use a rotary controller, to direct a unicycle-riding clown left and right across the bottom of the screen, trying to catch balloons on his head and pop them with his hat - and if he should miss one, there is a single button you must press to make him kick the balloon back into the air in order to try and catch it again (if he does not, he will get knocked off his unicycle and lose a life). There are three different types of balloons: yellow (5 points), red (10 points) and blue (15 points), and the clown can have a maximum of eight on his head for any time; Namco's signature character, who had previously been licensed to Midway, is also depicted as a type of creature rather than an individual for the first time in this game along with his four ghostly enemies, the latter of whom can also be caught by the clown for 25 extra points apiece. When a Pac-Man lands on a stack of balloons, or ghosts, he will eat them all for their respective point values - and it is also worth noting that for bonus rounds, bombs cannot be caught.