Bega's Battle

About

Bega's Battle is an arcade shooter from 1983 that crams live-action footage into a robot vs. aliens showdown. Players pilot a cyborg named Bega through five stages of shooting galleries, battling the Varga forces and rescuing trapped allies. The game layers pixelated sprites onto pre-recorded film clips from the movie Harmagedon, creating a wonky but functional hybrid of action and cheesy sci-fi. Between stages, short full-motion videos push the plot forward, a technique years ahead of its time. What sticks is the game’s unorthodox storytelling setup and its role as a rare early experiment in video game narratives. Unlike most laserdisc titles, it features a branching structure where choices influence outcomes, though many players never saw the deeper paths due to the game’s difficulty. Most copies were later repurposed into a different title during a 1980s arcade conversion scheme, making surviving machines rare. Steve Harris, later founder of Electronic Gaming Monthly, set the Twin Galaxies world record in just over an hour in 1983, a mark that still stands today.