According to the Wikipedia’s list of all transformers games ever made, the first one is simply called ‘The Transformers’ originally released in 1985 for Spectrum and Commodore 64, made by Ocean Software – a Manchester based company that doesn’t exist anymore.
So let’s see how it went for ‘The Transformers’ 1985 game, how it looked like and what was the gameplay about.
Simple search in YouTube for the therm ‘The transformers 1985 game ocean games’ pops up with the following result. As you can see graphics looks terrible, exactly as it should be at that time, not to mention ear-tearing metallic sound effects.
The Transformers Video Game – Commodore 64 (1985) – YouTube video
As you can see, the first game about Transformers was a typical 8-bit platofrmer arcade. Barely recognizable sprite character runs around shooting at enemies, trying to keep strength,shield and firepower at maximum. The very first game obviously utilizes the concept of transformation as much as possible: your robot can walk or run, drive as a car or even fly.
And here’s the longplay version where you can also see the very beginning of the game. The game just keeps looping, and everything remains the same on higher levels, except that it only gets harder and harder until you die. Basically that was the idea, those first arcades are meant to be hard and eat your coins on arcade machines.
