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Video Game: Tempest

You're at the top of a long tube. Lots of colorful things are crawling up the tube at you, and shooting things at you. When you shoot them all, you go whizzing down the tube... to yet another tube.

We could make up some kind of Back Story for this... but we won't^note. It's a Shoot 'em Up, and fun enough that it doesn't need any excuse. Besides, we're Atari, and this is The Golden Age of Video Games; we know you're going to keep feeding quarters into anything with our logo on it, story or no. Go nuts, guys! This video game was released in 1980.

Not to be confused with William Shakespeare's The Tempest, which is a Third Person "Romance" about a long-lost genius, his beautiful daughter, and the fell things that are discovered in their seeming paradise when a foreign ship crashes there...

For the Urban Legend version, see Polybius.

Tempest provides examples of:

Color-Coded Characters: As you start out, your player is yellow, the playfield's blue, the spikes are green and the enemies are red & purple. Everything changes colors after the cycle of 16 playfields resets, however.
Everything Trying to Kill You
Excuse Plot: It's an old-school arcade game. What did you expect?
Kaizo Trap: Sort of. As you zoom through the end of a stage to the next, if you hit a green spike you will die. The first few levels with spikes at least give you a brief "Avoid Spikes" warning.
Shoot 'em Up
Vector Game
What Could Have Been: Tempest was originally a game called Vortex. Instead of the player moving, the playfield moved and the gameplay was modeled on Space Invaders. This was scrapped due to motion sickness; in turn, this fact might have inspired the Polybius legend.