1984 saw early action games push into new territory, with Karateka from Jordan Mechner demonstrating that animation and storytelling could coexist in a fighting game, and Gauntlet laying groundwork for cooperative arcade dungeon-crawling. The Lords of Midnight offered sprawling fantasy strategy on 8-bit machines with an ambition that surprised the era. Over 1,100 titles from this year appear in the GameScrobbler catalogue.