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Item came exactly as described and shipping from seller was Ultra fast! Would do business with seller again! Thank You :)
RighteousBlaze· September 2026
BoughtNinja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge
Vanguard
- $22.99
- Regular price
-
$27.99 - Sale price
- $22.99
- Unit price
- per
Box, manual and game — all original, all in the photos. Game condition guide →
Ships in 1–2 business days·Tracking on every order·Signature required on orders $250+
Item Condition
Complete in box: the cartridge, the manual and the box, all original; anything beyond that is included only if you can see it in the photos. For the specifics, look to the photos — they're of this exact item. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.
Item Description
Vanguard was one of the most ambitious shooters of the early 1980s, and it still feels restless in the best way. Instead of locking you into a single scrolling direction, the 1981 arcade game from TOSE and SNK, released in North America by Centuri, sends your ship through a long tunnel whose zones scroll horizontally in one stretch and vertically in the next, each with its own enemies and hazards.
Its signature idea is four-way fire. Your ship can shoot ahead, above, below and behind, which turns every screen into a juggling act as enemies close in from different sides. Fuel drains constantly and is restored by destroying enemies, so hanging back is never an option, and energy pods grant a few seconds of invincibility to plow straight through anything in your way.
Each tunnel strings together distinct zones, among them the Mountain, Rainbow, Styx, Stripe and Bleak Zones, before the City of Mystery, where the creature Gond waits behind rotating barriers. Timing your shots through those barriers is the final test, and bringing him down sends you back to the start at a higher difficulty. Every direction you fire is also a direction you fly, so a careless burst can steer you straight into a wall, a strange little risk-and-reward wrinkle typical of the game's personality.
Atari's 5200 conversion was part of the system's early wave of arcade ports, the kind of release that earned the 5200 its reputation as an arcade machine for the living room. It is a fuller take on the coin-op than the simpler Atari 2600 cartridge, which makes it the Atari home version of Vanguard to seek out, and a fascinating stop for shooter fans tracing the genre back to a game that experimented with multi-directional scrolling and shooting years before those ideas became standard.
Fast factsgame data via IGDB
- Released
- 1981
- Publisher
- Atari
- Developer
- Tose
- Players
- Single player, Multiplayer
About the game
Vanguard is a shoot 'em up game which leads the player through five different zones to the City of Mystery where the creature Gond awaits him which he has to kill. The five zones run horizontally as well as vertically and are filled with different enemies for each zone. Being hit by an enemy, a projectile or the walls results in losing a life. There are, however, collectable items which grant the player a short time of invincibility. Shooting differs somewhat from other shoot 'em ups: The player's ship is able to fire in all four directions depending on the direction the player steers his ship. However, in doing so, the ship flies in that direrction as well which may result in crashing into an obstacle. The ship is constantly running out of fuel which can be replenished by killing enemies. After defeating Gond the game starts anew on a higher difficulty level.
Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.Watch gameplayVanguard on Atari 5200
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Atari 5200
Vanguard
$22.99
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Atari 5200
Vanguard
$22.99
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