is a

run-and-gun shooter Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs ) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of charac ...

video game released by

Sega is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, r ...

for arcades in 1986. ''Quartet'' allows one to four players to guide a set of characters through a base taken over by an army of

robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...

. Players control either Joe (yellow), Mary (red), Lee (blue), or Edgar (green) across 32 unique side-scrolling levels. The object of the game is to advance through the level, fighting opponents that come out of portals in the walls, and eventually defeat a boss that carries the door key used to open the "exit door" for the level. The game was originally released for the arcades as a dedicated four-player cabinet similar to

Atari Games Atari Games Corporation, known as Midway Games West Inc. after 1999, was an American producer of Arcade game, arcade Video game, games. It was formed in 1985 when the coin-operated Arcade game, arcade game division of Atari, Inc. was transfered ...

' '' Gauntlet''. A 2-players version, titled ''Quartet 2'', was released by Sun Electronics, as a conversion kit. The game was ported to the Master System,

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

Amstrad CPC The Amstrad CPC (short for ''Colour Personal Computer'') is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Si ...

, and

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

Reception

In Japan, ''Game Machine'' listed ''Quartet'' on their May 1, 1986 issue as being the second most-successful upright/cockpit arcade unit of the month. In the United States, the game topped the ''

Play Meter ''Play Meter'' (initially ''Coin Industry Play Meter'') was an American trade magazine focusing on the coin-op amusement arcade industry, including jukebox and arcade game machines. It was founded in December 1974 by publisher and editor Ralph C. ...

'' arcade earnings chart in August 1986.

References

External links

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''Quartet''
at arcade-history.com 1986 video games Amstrad CPC games Arcade video games Commodore 64 games Sega arcade games Sega video games Master System games ZX Spectrum games Video games featuring female protagonists Video games developed in Japan {{Videogame-stub